Sunday, June 15, 2008

Like Many Of My Relationships, In Fact

Just came across this cover art for the upcoming German edition of Maelstrom. It is beautiful, but wrong.

The feel of the piece is great, don't get me wrong. Technically, it's terrific. It even evokes a couple of specific scenes from the very top of the tale. But I'm not quite sure where Lenie Clarke is. Perhaps she was eaten by that Alien V. Predator hybrid down in the lower left corner.

I'd assumed that the armor (complete with Gigeresque back spines) from the cover of Abgrund had been meant to portray Scanlon in his preshmesh outfit. I guess not. Can't be anybody inside this Malhstrom armor but Lenie, and she never overdressed for such occasions. There's a reason I called it a diveskin: she's a "slick back amphibian", remember, with occasional implants and implements protruding to break her lines. Basically I envision her as a black-spraypainted nude with a fetish for chrome piercings. (By the way, it would be a mistake to think you can infer anything about authorial taste in such matters from that description.)

Anyway, bottom line, it's the kind of cover that would catch my eye (in a good way) if I saw it in a bookstore. I would not be embarrassed to be seen carrying it on a subway (although I'd be even more not-embarrassed if a blurb or two should find its way onto all that fiery cloud cover by the release date). And it's light-years ahead of the abomination Tor* inflicted onto Blindsight's hardcover edition.

So this is not a complaint, not by any means. Just commentary.

*Speaking of Tor, I see that they too are releasing a new edition of Maelstrom here in N'Am. Two days before Christmas, in fact. It would have been nice if they could have, you know, told me. But hey, why start now?

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10 Comments:

Anonymous splittersturn said...

Chick in skin-tight outfit? You mean , like, let's see, this?

June 15, 2008 1:04 PM  
OpenID wolverian said...

I like the "I'm a dirty bandwith thief" image on the feed. :)

June 15, 2008 1:07 PM  
Blogger Peter Watts said...

That should disappear. It did for me, anyway. Try hitting refresh. Tell me if that doesn't work.

Lot of hotlinking lately. I've had to crack down.

June 15, 2008 1:45 PM  
Blogger Peter Watts said...

splittersturn said...

Chick in skin-tight outfit? You mean, like, let's see, this?

Ewww.

Although, isn't this Charlie's homage to Heinlein? In which case, it's at least fitting.

But no, I was imaging something more along these lines. Or even these, although diveskins most definitely do not come with cleavage.

June 15, 2008 1:51 PM  
Blogger Nicholas said...

I guess I never really knew how to picture the diveskins, just that no features would show through. (Although it was not so much a Bioshock-enemy-meets-atmosphere-dive-suit ). However, I like the cover.

The orange goo, is that Behemoth?

June 15, 2008 11:49 PM  
OpenID kgaughan said...

Peter, regarding the "I'm a dirty bandwidth thief" image, refreshing won't quite do the trick. I was confronted with it when I was viewing your feed through Bloglines, so what might *appear* to be somebody sponging bandwidth might not actually be. Any chance of you going through your server logs and whitelisting certain sites (such as Bloglines, Rojo, Google Reader, and other aggregators) where the hotlinking is legit?

June 16, 2008 7:04 AM  
Blogger Craig said...

I received the 'bandwidth thief' image through Google Reader.

June 16, 2008 9:06 AM  
Blogger oliverdyas said...

Whitelisting livejournal.com (204.9.177.18) would be good.

June 16, 2008 12:54 PM  
Blogger Peter Watts said...

Fine. Fine. Everybody's white-listed again. Just don't come crying to me when I have to shut down this site because of all the surplus bandwidth charges.

Oh, and nicholas, the orange motif isn't Βehemoth; it's just meant to evoke a general post-apocalyptic world-on-fire vibe. (Which is perfectly legit, since our heroes are napalming refugee camps pretty early in the story.)

June 16, 2008 4:38 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Semi off topic, but have you ever thought about releasing an alternate edition of Starfish with the original ending.

June 17, 2008 9:35 AM  

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