Two covers

[james_davis_nicoll]

(With the permission of Eos, who sent me jpegs when I asked who did the cover on the second one)

Both are by Julie Bell. I never saw the first cover until Eos sent me the jpegs because I read the first book in manuscript.

What caught my eye with the second cover is that the artist has not only decided to show Dag's prosthesis, she put that arm on the side towards the viewer, not on the side away from the viewer. Quite often, even when the artist has read the book [1], somewhere along the line the choice is made to downplay elements of the characters that might not appeal to the hypothetical book store browser.

The title obscures it slightly but that's not a decision the artist would have made.

1: Often the mismatch of book and cover is not the artist's fault. I seem to recall one story where an artist read some irritated comments by Jack Vance about the cover on Vance's latest book, decided to make sure that the cover the artist was working on would be the most appropriate cover possible for the book it was intended for and produced something so fine that it was reassigned from the book it was intended for to the next Jack Vance book.

Comments

[kikibug13.livejournal.com]

Yes, they are lovely. By the way, I love the original merged version best of all.

[pauldrye.livejournal.com]

Is it just me, or does Dag look like Buffy's Xander?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

More Oz, at least around the lips.

[pauldrye.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, I dunno...

[liviapenn.livejournal.com]

To me the cover seems to resemble John Shea...

[dragovianknight.livejournal.com]

THAT'S who he was reminding me of!

[mzmadmike.livejournal.com]

More like Humperdinck, from The Princess Bride. (Don't hurt me. He does.)

The Baen cover for "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" featured Manny's prosthetic arm prominently.

In the case of my third contemp, it was set in Indonesia, and the characters on the cover are Caucasian. There wasn't time to fix it. Luckily, within the context of the book, it is explainable.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

My copy of IMPERIAL EARTH has a white guy on the cover. The fact that the lead isn't white is a plot point.

[mzmadmike.livejournal.com]

Remember Heinlein's "I Will Fear No Evil" where they gave away in blurb and cover that the character gets transplanted cross-gender?

[traviswells.livejournal.com]

Same thing also happened to the cover of Heinlein's "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls". White guy on the cover, non-white character.

[mzmadmike.livejournal.com]

And Juan Rico in Starship Troopers is a Filipino. Some covers/movies/animes have shown him as blond.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Lois had the original artwork at an event in town, I think it was at Dreamhaven, last summer or some such. Those two covers are the two halves of one painting; apparently when they split the book, they split the cover, too; right down the middle.

It looks pretty darned good in the original!

[pmrabble.livejournal.com]

She had it at the release signing. I now have a signed print of the original (non-split) hanging in my library.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Yes, release party/autographing was probably where I saw it also.

[boywhocantsayno.livejournal.com]

Splitting the painting was an interesting choice. The Legacy cover looks like his hand is emitting flames, whereas when the two are seen side by side, it's clearly not - he seems to be catching whatever it is that's being emitted on the Beguilement cover. (Gawds, that's a horribly constructed sentence - but not having read the books, I don't know what the painting is representing. It looks to me like the woman is casting a spell or something and he's catching the "magic particles".)

And is it just my monitor or my eyes, or is there a slight colour variation that's not there in the original version of the painting? Whatever she's throwing on the first cover looks green, but by the time he catches it, it's yellow. When I see them together they look like they're the same colour.

[dragovianknight.livejournal.com]

And to me, it looks like something is rising out of his hand, and she's reaching for/catching it.

I see the color variation too, btw.

[sraun]

It's lightning bugs.

[azhdragon.livejournal.com]

speaking of covers ...

Back in the Old days of FIDOnet, before the internet became really a common thing, there was what we called an echo, mainly for writers of SF. Think of it as being like a newsgroup.

One of the authors complained that their publisher had chosen cover art that had absolutely nothing to do with the story - the cover showed a large blue turtloid creature putting humans into a cage on its back. This spawned an acronym - FBT (Friggin' Blue Turtloids)- which became somewhat of a byword/injoke on the echo. IIRC, the author was John DeChancie.

When my co-author and I had our first book published, we went to a meeting with the publisher, which we were told was to discuss the potential cover designs. Instead when we walked in, we were handed the completed book. Fortunately the cover was one we could live with, but it did serve to bring back the memory of the FBT, and still serves as a reminder that very often the author of a book has little or no input on the cover design.

[carbonel]

Hi there. I remember the FIDOnet SF echo fondly. I was the moderator after DD-B. (Technically, I still am, but all that means is that I send the MODUPD message every six months to keep it alive for the few faithful.)

And yes, the FBT author was definitely John DeChancie. I recently (regretfully) got rid of my DUOE (dried up old eunuchs) badge.

[azhdragon.livejournal.com]

cool, I had no idea that the SF echo was alive still.

I regretfully closed my BBS in 1998, just before it would have turned 10 years old. At that time I was down to a handful of stalwart callers. Most of my best users had long since become points, and I maintained a dialup for them for a short time after the board itself closed.

We certainly had some good times, back in the Good Old Days :-)

[nwhyte]

Hmm. She looks older than she should be, and he looks too young!

[chromatomancer.livejournal.com]

I have a few artbooks by Julie Bell and Boris Vallejo. . .

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

Julie Bell basically learned the craft from Boris Vallejo, and Vallejo got his start on comic books. I suspect that got him into the practice of having the cover art not only have something to do with what was inside the book, but getting the character reasonably correct and recognizable. In this case, that would mean the prosthetic.

[eyelessgame.livejournal.com]

I think in the case of Bujold readers, they'd know that she tends to write crippled heroes. Bujold will sell well because she's got a nontrivial fan base...

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I wonder, if Bujold and Powers cowrote a book, would the protagonist be able to move under their own power at all?