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

[sraun]

It's lightning bugs.