{"id":131,"date":"2008-01-25T18:14:11","date_gmt":"2008-01-26T02:14:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/archives\/131"},"modified":"2008-01-25T18:14:11","modified_gmt":"2008-01-26T02:14:11","slug":"sf-book-covers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/archives\/131","title":{"rendered":"SF Book Covers"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve always liked the science fiction author Eric Frank Russell, who is best known for short stories like “Allamagoosa” and “And Then There Were None.” I happened across an old novel of his in a used book store, The Mindwarpers. It was OK, not great, but really struck me afterward was the cover.<\/p>\n

The novel is a near-future story set in the Cold War (thus making it today some sort of past near-future story–we need a name for those). All the characters are ordinary human beings. The only advanced technology in the story is a sort of brainwashing device–not mind control, just the insertion of some false memories. It’s barely a science fiction story at all; it would work just as well as a Robert Ludlum novel.<\/p>\n

Now look at the cover, which can of course be found on the web<\/a>. It’s some sort of space ship flying past a planet. It’s obvious that whoever painted the cover, and whoever decided to put that painting on this novel, never even read it.<\/p>\n

I don’t expect all that much from a science fiction publisher, but surely it’s not going overboard to expect them to actually read the book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve always liked the science fiction author Eric Frank Russell, who is best known for short stories like “Allamagoosa” and “And Then There Were None.” I happened across an old novel of his in a used book store, The Mindwarpers. It was OK, not great, but really struck me afterward was the cover. The novel […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.airs.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}