Nov 07
Click for larger image
Click for larger imageIt’s a Two-fer Tuesday – Titan’s Daughter Special
Good Show Sir Comments: a.k.a. The Incredible Shrinking Scientist!
Published 1961, 1963
- Thanks to Marge for sending one in!
(Average: 4.45 out of 10)
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It’s a Two-fer Tuesday – Titan’s Daughter Special
Good Show Sir Comments: a.k.a. The Incredible Shrinking Scientist!
Published 1961, 1963
(Average: 4.45 out of 10)Loading...
(9.25 out of 10) (9.18 out of 10) (9.01 out of 10) (8.97 out of 10) (8.93 out of 10) (8.93 out of 10) (8.93 out of 10) (8.92 out of 10) (8.88 out of 10) (8.88 out of 10)
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November 7th, 2017 at 9:45 am
I can only see two feet.
November 7th, 2017 at 11:21 am
Ah yes, the typical scientist, everywhere he goes he’s wearing a smock and carrying a steaming flask of chemicals.
November 7th, 2017 at 12:57 pm
Not very useful is she? She stands around posing and looking smug while they’re under attack from… sky puppets?!?
November 7th, 2017 at 1:06 pm
*sigh* this is what happens when you don’t convert metric to imperial correctly.
November 7th, 2017 at 1:40 pm
Are there more cover versions? Looks like you could build a flipcard animation scene.
November 7th, 2017 at 3:04 pm
1. “Hey, guys, we forgot the, the, the paaarrraaachuuuuutes . . . .”
2. (embiggened view) “Hmmmm, I wonder where that purple phallus came from? Wasn’t supposed to do that.”
November 7th, 2017 at 4:33 pm
Isn’t it nice how her body is conveniently either in shadow or obscured by her hair so we don’t see any of her naughty bits, thus making it look like she’s wearing a see-through black bodysuit or ill-fitting black pants?
November 7th, 2017 at 5:01 pm
@Anna T: the two images tell the story: If you’re nine feet tall it’s hard to get off-the-peg Brass Bikinis so the flying women in the first pic are a rather literal-minded version of Amazon delivering clothing by drone. But they are the wrong colour and they chafe so she goes on the rampage.
Quite why Professor Utonium is disco-dancing is another matter.
November 7th, 2017 at 5:40 pm
I’m just trying to figure out why the first beaker’s formula gave her a jaunty hip thrust and a smirk, but the second formula appears just to have given her a lurking, indigestion sort of look (and an accidental purple phallus).
November 7th, 2017 at 6:09 pm
Guys, that’s not a phallus.
Eeeeeewww!
November 7th, 2017 at 6:24 pm
You’d think with two tries, they’d have managed to get head–>body proportions within somewhat plausible limits at least once, but alas and alack.
@B. Chiclitz – You see jaunty hip thrust, I see drastic centaurean foreshortening. Potayto, potahto; tomayto, tomahto. Let’s call the whole thing off.
November 7th, 2017 at 6:28 pm
I’m guessing Titian’s Daughter would be a much better drawing.
November 7th, 2017 at 6:46 pm
@ Tor M—I was sort of trying to stay within the bounds of taste. Not sure why . . .
@Lillie A—fair enough, but at least we can agree on the smirk.
November 7th, 2017 at 7:34 pm
@B. Chiclitz – we sure can.
Inre #2: good sense got the better of me, and I clicked to embiggen. I think that scientist has a crouching capuchin monkey for a head. Not on his head; for a head. Curious.
November 7th, 2017 at 7:49 pm
@Lillie A—a capuchin monkey as painted by Francis Bacon.
November 7th, 2017 at 9:13 pm
I thought that by the early 1960s, the “scientist with a colored beaker” cliche had fallen out of fashion. But no.
What are the “super-science” tropes of today’s book covers? (Unnecessary wires and diodes? Are we still doing the “human in a vat” thing?)
November 7th, 2017 at 10:01 pm
@A.R.Yngve – I think we’ve moved past wires and diodes and into strings of ones and zeroes, though even that seems a little passé at this point.
I think we lost the human-in-a-vat race to the Soviets, and it’s kind of déclassé to bring up such an embarrassing subject in the West now, but I’m not positive.
I personally hope I never outgrow my association of labcoats and flasks of colored something with progress and hubris.
November 7th, 2017 at 10:57 pm
#2: “Looks like I picked the wrong week to be drinking random concoctions from around the lab!”
November 8th, 2017 at 1:30 am
@Lillie: You’re right. He’s got a monkey instead of a head. Maybe that’s why he shrunk — easier for the monkey to control a smaller body.
So in 2 years, after an extra dose, she got bigger and, er, something purple; he got smaller and his noggin replaced by a capuchin monkey. The flying people appear to have given up (or gone splat as BC predicted). Only the roused rabble in the background have remained. And there seem to be more of them, which almost makes sense. Who wouldn’t want to run those two out of town?
November 8th, 2017 at 7:28 am
Rocket packs: That’s not how they work!
November 8th, 2017 at 6:14 pm
Square-cube law: That’s not how any of this works!
November 14th, 2017 at 4:30 am
That looks like Tattoo and a blonde, female Mr. Rourke on the first cover.
January 6th, 2018 at 10:19 am
There actually is a brass bra (or something like it) version! See Goodreads–I can’t find a decent full-size image.
The reviews on line are uniformly meh. And as for the Titan’s Daughter herself: “It is symptomatic of Blish’s dryness here that the title character Sena Carlin, the young woman Titan who is the story’s most engaging person, spends most of the novel offstage.” (from a review on Troynovant.com). Pity.
January 7th, 2018 at 9:15 am
The brass bikini version by Rowena, 1981:
http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/f/f6/TTNSDTR1961B.jpg
It could be worse: there’s this nonsensical blob cover from 1966:
http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/f/f7/TTNSDGHTRH1966.jpg
January 7th, 2018 at 9:20 am
Plus a trippy 1965 British version those hacks at ISFDB don’t have, like wow
(scroll down):
https://bearalley.blogspot.com/2014/07/james-blish-cover-gallery-part-1.html
January 7th, 2018 at 4:14 pm
GSSxn: Wow indeed. Looking down that page I see a good few covers I own or have owned, me being a long-time Blish fan. Blish suffered no less than many other writers from awful covers. But there are some that show some sign that the artist actually read the book. I partiocularly like the Nova one for “Jack of Eagles”–even the freaky looking staircase thing is explicable in terms of an incident in the book, if you use a bit of imagination. But the all time champ has to be the Penguin cover for “The Day After Juddgment”. I think it’s gorgeous and really, really appropriate for the book.