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

[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.