No. No. Just… no.
What is he going to do to me with that gun? No. Oh god. no.
Discussion
- Hugo Award
Winner
- About Aidan Moher
- Bibliography
No. No. Just… no.
What is he going to do to me with that gun? No. Oh god. no.
Reek, reek. You love me, Reek.
Huh.
Ahahahaha! I love that the gun that they’ve got there is an E-11 Blaster from Star Wars (original is from a Sterling L2A3 sub-machine gun). BUT, what they’ve done is take the toy available in toy stores (which is missing a bunch of things, like the side magazine and round counter), blackened it up and put it there. You can still see the safety tip!
The bottom-half of that isn’t bad with the space ships, but why do the insist on going with these photo-realistic images for Erikson’s books?
mmm. Not a fan of the photo-realistic image. Uncanny valley ahoy.
How is this published by Tor?
@Joe — I feel like Irene’s playing a joke on us.
I mean, I know this is supposed to be a smarmy Star Trek satire, but, especially given the treatment/love that Tor gave to Redshirts, a very similar novel, it’s hard to imagine what sort of audience they think they’re going to attract with this cover.
Ahh, this is the cover for the UK edition of the book, published by Bantam, not Tor. I should’ve known that.
Source: http://thewertzone.blogspot.ca/2014/05/cover-art-for-steven-erikson-and-robert.html?spref=tw
That’s a relief. I saw Adam’s post after commenting. I still have no idea what the art department is thinking, but I’m just glad it isn’t Irene’s work.
gah.
Hey folks, Erikson here. This is the first view I’ve had of the cover. We’ll work on it (I promise). For the commenter who wants to liken this to Scalzi’s Redshirts (great fun, that novel, by the way), I assure you, it ain’t like that at all. Willful Child has been in the works for about ten years. When I first began it, I was thinking of writing an actual ST novel, but that universe proved too limiting for letting the shit fly the way I wanted it to. Instead, i came up with the homage to STOS, and this is that novel. When I envisioned the cover, I saw something out of the Fifties SF pulp style, with Captain Hadrian more akin to James Bond in his pose and expression. In other words: cheezy, but not so cheezy as to suggest anything cartoonish. I know, it’s a fine line, but I have faith in both Bantam UK and TOR.
Willful Child is only the first novel in the ongoing adventures of Captain Hadrian: my follow-up’s are already outlined (The Wrath of Betty and The Search for Spark). As the titles suggest, this is serious stuff we’re dealing with here. In fact, there’s a good chance that the adventures of Captain Hadrian of the Willful Child will offend everyone, without exception.
Anyway, if all goes well, we’ll pull away from any thematic or stylistic continuity with the Malazan series, and, as with The Kharkanas Trilogy, create something unique and perfectly suited to these novels. With that in mind, I’ll look in here on a regular basis and read your opinions, etc, and I trust Aidan will continue his talent for plucking advance releases of stuff like this (since, oddly enough, I’m usually the last to see it).
Cheers,
SE
Aiden, this cover is nothing to do with the UK publishers. This was commissioned by Irene at Tor so we are off the hook!
I stand doubly-corrected!
[…] the first shot at a cover for Steven Erikson’s upcoming science fiction novel, Willfull Child, was a bit of […]
[…] about the genre (not to mention his commentary on book covers are on point and amuses me to no end, case in point). I was pleasantly surprised to read then on his blog that he had decided to self-publish a few of […]