This is SF and fantasy art of a very polished nature. You will not find dirt or grittiness here. This is the perfect view of genre art. Two typical examples are the paintings that adorned Valerie Leith's books (The Company of Glass and The Riddled Knight) where the main female character is flawless.

This style of work portays the heroic side of the genre, the romantic imagining of fantasy with knights and royal courts, and imaculate spacecraft fresh out of spacedock.

That these are full painted pictures and not digitally manipulated images makes the perfection all the more impressive. Even with this smooth flawlessness in his work, Youll does not sacrifice detail - looking at Lords of the Sky (from the over of the Angus Wells book) and the tree bark is wonderfully real and the detail of the leaves implies long painstaking hours of work.

Youll's work reminds me in some ways of Darrell K. Sweet with the richness of detail but with the smooth finish of Boris Vallejo (although with more clothing on the subjects). These paintings would set the mood wonderfully well for the books they were featured on.

Standout pictures for me are Speaking in Tongues (featured on the book's cover), Rama Revealed, WOM Planet and the two pictures from K.W. Jeter's Bladerunner sequels (the two grittiest pictures in the book).

This volume itself is targeted heavily towards displaying the art more than the narrative. The paintings are given much more space than in other art books I have read recently and in this case it is definitely a good thing. Whereas in books like David A. Hardy's Hardyware the book told the history of a man with decades in the field, Youll is a newer artist and this is his first collection so we want to see his art and familiarise ourselves with it. In allowing this the compilers of this collection have the balance right.

This is an impressive collection from an impressive SF & fantasy artist.