May 01
Click for full imageScott B’s Art Direction: For this cover I want a fantastical pink-purple-green eight-armed lobster-snake thing. But to bring it down to Earth I want you to paste in photographs of four human eyes. Because that won’t be incredibly creepy or anything.
Published 1969
(Average: 8.76 out of 10)
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May 1st, 2012 at 11:07 am
This sounds like a cue for a song! Alas, he has no mouth but he must sing. After the title track he could have offered us “Mama He’s Making Eyes at Me” or “You Need Hands”. But it was not to be.
May 1st, 2012 at 11:47 am
Hands are still green. Didn’t cook ’em thoroughly.
I feel like those are eyes clipped from an odalisque, but St. Google of the Internets isn’t helping me narrow down which one.
May 1st, 2012 at 11:49 am
So, is this “the finest science fiction novel” (a bold claim) or merely “the finest science fiction by Randall Garrett”?
May 1st, 2012 at 11:50 am
I like that we are told this is “the finest science-fiction novel”. Or do they mean “the finest science-fiction novel by Randall Garrett”? Because I find that a little easier to believe.
And I can’t make the plot out from the blurb. Is the shipwrecked alien initially winning or losing against the planet? Is the planet Earth?
Or are we building a superman to send to help a poor shipwrecked alien against the power of some other planet? Are we like ACME, with some alien doing the equivalent of a Looney Tunes character standing on a desert island and sending off an order form in a bottle?
So many questions! Almost distracting me from the art! Not quite working!!!
May 1st, 2012 at 11:51 am
Rachel J – great minds think alike (and post a few seconds apart)…
May 1st, 2012 at 12:02 pm
Snake-lobster thing s/he may be, but with the head shape of a fox. Judging from the creature’s (frontmost) right hand, s/he’s as fed up as we are.
May 1st, 2012 at 12:29 pm
I wonder if that is the alien… or earths superman! Those crazy geneticists!
May 1st, 2012 at 1:01 pm
It’s been Gutenberg’ed if anyone wants to see what the plot actually means: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24436
May 1st, 2012 at 1:26 pm
Thanks, Dave. I haven’t got as far as the actual plot, yet, but I can now bring the surprising news that the cover is an almost entirely accurate depiction of the opening scene:
“So he squatted there in his ship, a centipede-like thing about five feet
in length and a little less than eighteen inches in diameter, with eight
articulated limbs spaced in pairs along his body, each limb ending in a
five-fingered manipulatory organ that could be used equally well as hand
or foot. His head, which was long and snouted, displayed two pairs of
violet eyes that kept a constant watch on the indicators and screens of
the few instruments that were still functioning aboard the ship.”
May 1st, 2012 at 1:32 pm
I wonder if he can see for miles and miles….
May 1st, 2012 at 2:01 pm
Looks like this artist looked to Steve Ditko for inspiration.
May 1st, 2012 at 2:22 pm
The plot: alien crash-lands on Earth and eats lots of people. The police are baffled. Years pass. Eventually, a scientist deduces that the alien is a civilised being operating according to his own breathtakingly complex alien psychology– which basically consists of “being a complete and utter moron”. Armed with this knowledge, the genetically-engineered superman confronts the alien and wins its trust by pretending to be equally moronic. They live happily ever after. The End.
*Anything you can read, I can read faster* 😉
May 1st, 2012 at 2:40 pm
@Rachel: Accurate? Doubtful. Comprehensible? Possibly. I, for one, doubt space alien centipedes have bedroom eyes.
Thank you for the plot summary. So the follow to the titular fragment is, ‘…I can do with eight five-fingered manipulatory organs that could be used equally well as hand or foot.’
May 1st, 2012 at 2:40 pm
Oh, and I should have mentioned: he does have to box it first. *Very* important part of negotiating with alien lifeforms.
May 1st, 2012 at 2:42 pm
@Rachel: one other question. There seems to be a fart at the top of the cover. Are there such things to be found inside as well?
May 1st, 2012 at 2:50 pm
@DSWBT. I *believe* that is meant to be some kind of leakage from from the alien’s ship. Though it could be anything, really.
May 1st, 2012 at 5:25 pm
The earlier editions (under the pen name Langart) had debatably better art.
A couple of wee photos from around the net:
http://cd.pbsstatic.com/l/07/0007/9781434430007.jpg
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/31v2ZQT08kL._SL500_AA300_.jpg
May 1st, 2012 at 6:59 pm
Is that a popcorn floor?
May 1st, 2012 at 9:47 pm
So he can hold eight objects at the same time… but he can’t paint a book cover to save his life.
May 1st, 2012 at 9:56 pm
Is that a giant slice of Swiss cheese on the left hand side?
May 2nd, 2012 at 8:20 am
Smith, I think it’s a control panel of some kind. Though it certainly *looks* like Swiss cheese.
And now, the question on everyone’s lips: is this indeed “the finest science fiction novel”?
On the whole, perhaps not. I’d say it’s fairly typical of mediocre sci-fi– that is, a rather silly, over-explained, would-be profound story drenched in technobabble and treated with *utmost seriousness* throughout– even in the alien-boxing scene. Quite entertaining, though.
May 2nd, 2012 at 4:46 pm
The only way the text could be better is if it were treated to a couple asterisks.
THE FINEST SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL*
*by Randall Garrett
May 3rd, 2012 at 6:25 am
The finest science fiction novel, with the finest science fiction cover painted using the finest hallucinogens money can buy.
(The publishers liked this one better than the other version, where the nude genetically-engineered superman is slicing off his skin and feeding it to a looming and unwound ouroboros-centipede-thing, comprised of interwoven decayed corpses, that blocks out the writhing fractal-patterned sky)
May 10th, 2012 at 11:11 am
I think the graphic artist simply mistook the title for the briefing.
Actually, at first I read “Anything you can do … to Randall Garrett” and thought it was part of a series …
May 25th, 2012 at 7:40 pm
Hey, isn’t this a Beatles album cover?
August 25th, 2012 at 6:11 am
This may need a nomination for the absolutely worst cover ever. Gaaaah!
June 30th, 2015 at 12:04 pm
“…, doctor?”
“I’m afraid I wouldn’t even know where to begin. The point of no return is in the distant past with these body modifications of yours. Do you even have a mouth?”
July 10th, 2015 at 4:00 am
“Trumpy, you can do magic things!”
December 17th, 2015 at 9:24 pm
The centipede is clearly dismayed at its fate, because, @anon, you’re right: it WAS human once, but then the aliens changed it into one of their own. And then it was placed on this cover.
January 5th, 2017 at 5:57 am
The tiny advert subtitle isn’t correct no matter what — it isn’t even Randall Garrett’s best novel written before 1969.
January 7th, 2017 at 6:43 am
perhaps ‘finest’ refers to the font size used in the text