Oct 21
Click for full imageScott B’s Art Direction: OK, I want a triad of spiritual guru, alien Venus, and bull-man, linked by a strip of computer punch tape (futuristic!). Also, it must have a hummingbird-whale. I insist.
Published 1977
(Average: 8.31 out of 10)
Loading ...
Lastest Tweet
October 21st, 2011 at 11:16 am
‘He was the ultimate man-and …’ What’s a man-and?
October 21st, 2011 at 11:16 am
That hummingbirdwhale! Really, the whole scene is just waiting for a Bronzino foot to come crashing down and the De Souza brass theme to start up.
October 21st, 2011 at 11:56 am
Well, in Swedish, Danish and Norwegian “and” is a species of duck… so that dude must be an invincible duck-man.
Or just a confused, hallucinating loony…
October 21st, 2011 at 11:57 am
I, HOMELESS MENTAL PATIENT
October 21st, 2011 at 11:59 am
Thank goodness the cover text explicitly states this is a “science-fiction” novel… or hordes of New Age hippie types would’ve nabbed every copy in the bookstore!
October 21st, 2011 at 12:00 pm
When computer programmers go mental.
October 21st, 2011 at 12:40 pm
@Adam Roberts
De Souza? ITYM John Philip Souza? The Liberty Bell, perhaps?
@yngve – by 1977 the New Age Hippies were hip-deep in Bad Fantasy, sold in trilogies, and wouldn’t look at something this short.
However, from the look of it, the artist had been trying to sell this picture since the mid ’60′s.
October 21st, 2011 at 1:21 pm
Quite. Punched cards, futuristic? In 1977? Obsolete more like.
October 21st, 2011 at 1:43 pm
The two behind him are clearly annoyed that he looks so normal.
And its not a humming bird whale! It’s a distant whale with wings! I’m sure of it!
October 21st, 2011 at 2:02 pm
I, Weepin’ after an eyeful of that.
October 21st, 2011 at 2:06 pm
Eric and Julia Roberts on the same cover? Priceless.
October 21st, 2011 at 2:22 pm
So is his “weapon” strong body odor?
October 21st, 2011 at 5:22 pm
Muttley @7: you’re right, I meant Souza, not De Souza. In point of fact, I meant this.
October 21st, 2011 at 8:57 pm
Adam, you meant neither Souza nor De Souza. You meant Sousa. (It’s Sousa with an S not Souza with a Z, ’cause Sousa with an S goes sss not zzz.)
I think that bull-man with his large face and bull horns is hilarious. One of the best human-animal hybrids I’ve seen. None of that centaur nonsense where HALF a man is grafted onto MOST of a large grazing mammal.
October 21st, 2011 at 9:17 pm
And there’s me getting confused and thinking Apple were just waiting for Steve Jobs to die before getting into the arms trade….
October 21st, 2011 at 9:44 pm
The man-bull is ultimately derived from a Sumerian Lamassu, a protective deity with the face of a man left in honkin’ big statues all over Mesopotamia. I don’t know the source of the blue woman nursing the baby.
The sad thing is between color and atmosphere this is a not bad riff on early Renaissance realism, with some echo of alchemical symbolism. That figure, although kind of disturbingly 1970s, is really well-painted.
I think the artist knew his stuff. Can we blame the art director?
October 22nd, 2011 at 3:27 am
The more you know…!
October 22nd, 2011 at 6:31 am
He’s also The Most Interesting Man-Bull In The World.
October 22nd, 2011 at 10:04 am
So he’s not a man-bull or man-bull, he’s a lamassu. That makes it even more a hilarious: a lamassu without wings!
October 22nd, 2011 at 3:38 pm
This is the same artist who did the cover art for “Retief’s War,” also on this site:
http://www.goodshowsir.co.uk/2010/07/retiefs-war/
He also did the very strange art for “Dream Park,” the one with the warrior fighting, as someone put it, the big dragon with the strawberry for a tongue:
http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/a/a3/DREAMPK1981.jpg
October 22nd, 2011 at 9:47 pm
@Phil: Maybe the whale nicked ‘em?
October 24th, 2011 at 9:20 am
I, weapon, you, tool.
October 24th, 2011 at 6:51 pm
The scene looks like Jesus hanging out with some Greek mythos characters struggling to figure out this newfangled language of computers…You can see from the whale-bird’s smiling face that he’s thinking to himself “did anyone tell them that they have desktops now?”
October 25th, 2011 at 7:06 am
“And lo, the beast who had a face as a man said, ‘BLEAGH.’”
— The Book of the Revelation of Good Show Sir, chapter 4.
December 9th, 2011 at 2:07 am
If that book is the one I think it is, it deserves that cover. A more unreadable, nonsensical pile of dren I have never finished. Perhaps my mistake was reading it while sober.
August 10th, 2012 at 12:55 am
The book is pretty good sci-fi. A little sparse in characterization and probably too much narrative summary for today’s audience, but overall a unique and worthwhile work.
Those aren’t punchcards, those are strands of DNA. The whole point of the novel is that humans were nearly destroyed by an alien invasion that wrecked the Earth. In the resulting radioactive hell that Earth became, as well as across the ruins of humanity’s former stellar empire, new “forms” of humanity arose. These included the bull-men on the cover, who were raised for their meat and eaten by other forms of humans. There are other forms of humanity (though I don’t know where the blue lady comes in) which are enrolled in a breeding program to produce a “super-being”. Obviously it stretches the imagination to think that these different forms of humanity would still be able to interbreed and would not be classified as separate species, but it makes for an interesting story.
The best part about the book is when the super-human produced by the breeding program heads off to investigate the Vim, the race that had nearly destroyed mankind once and has suddenly returned (perhaps to finish the job). Finding out who the Vim are and why they’re so intent on conquering is a neat little mystery that the author came up with.
So yes, the cover is pretty funky, but the book itself is fairly strong on ideas, if not necessarily on execution. I would recommend it just for its breadth of imagination.