Feb 27
Benjamin Comments: “Listen, if this book sells more than 30 copies it’ll be a miracle. It’s done up in a strawberry-ice-cream-pink cover with a bright green toy rocket ship and some cheap plaster busts of LBJ and JFK and a coke bottle and a hamburger on the front — I showed it to a classroom full of gifted children up at the College of Marin and one kid said ‘That’s a toy book.'” – Richard A. Lupoff (Locus #159, 1974)
Published 1974
February 27th, 2013 at 10:05 am
…and that’s how little Johnny got expelled from kindergarten.
February 27th, 2013 at 10:07 am
The stuff nightmares are made off… those green block shelves are useless! Always falling over…
February 27th, 2013 at 10:22 am
Oliver Stone, finally sir, have you no shame?
February 27th, 2013 at 10:27 am
I can believe that someone thought this was a good idea. A green Thunderbird One is possibly part of an overall rebranding of Inernational Rescue to respond to environmental disasters using atomic bio-fuel or something. LBJ as The Joker makes as much sense as Cesar Romero or Heath Ledger. Ellison using the term ‘Sci Fi’, though; incontheevable
February 27th, 2013 at 12:32 pm
<<Ich bin grün und rosa!>>
–JFK, 1974
February 27th, 2013 at 1:10 pm
Ellison called this the finest? He obviously never saw this cover.
February 27th, 2013 at 2:01 pm
I find this cover extremely evocative…
of Pepto Bismal.
February 27th, 2013 at 3:41 pm
You will note Mr. Ellison does not refer to the author, the story, the idea, or any specific part that can be attributed to what is IN the book. He says the ” finest thing..” Maybe he is referring to that wondrously horrible conglomeration of..well, whatever, that is the cover. Maybe he is being sardonic and sarcastic, but since a blurb is just like a text message, it doesn’t come through? Or maybe he was really, really high. I don’t know.
Great thing about this cover is the image it gives me of an entire group of people gathered in a room preparing this. Artist, art director, photographer, a lackey and assorted flunkeys.
“Ooh, another green block! Yeah! Move the head over..”
“Too pink. No? We need…hey, yeah! Mushroom cloud! Oh yeah!”
“Hey,man, that’s my lunch…”
“Forget it! We need that burger and soda..no, to the right! Oh yeah baby! This…this is freakin’ gold!”
“But I got the munchies…”
“We all do! Shut up! Harlan Ellison will be here in an hour to give us a valuably vague quote. We gotta have this…hey, no, get the bong OUT of the picture.”
February 27th, 2013 at 4:03 pm
I suspect that Ellison was actually referring to the John Campbell Award for the Year’s Best Science Fiction Novel.
February 27th, 2013 at 4:32 pm
It’s a sci-fi novel about the 60’s. Let’s put some of that pop-art crap on the cover, paint it a psychedelic pink and we get whatever burned-out hippies that are still out there to buy it. Groovy.
February 27th, 2013 at 7:18 pm
Purple haired LBJ can has cheezburger.
February 27th, 2013 at 7:46 pm
Yes, I find the Ellison quote very suspicious. He tends to use “sci-fi” only if talking comedically or sarcastically for starters, but the “…” suggests that he might be taken out of context.
I’m reminded of when a film reviewer writes “This is far from the best film I’ve ever seen”, but the film poster selectively uses thequote “…the best film I’ve ever seen”.
Ellipses always make me… suspicious.
February 27th, 2013 at 8:58 pm
. . .
February 27th, 2013 at 9:18 pm
Someone should investigate Dead Stuff With Big Teeth. Some suspicious behaviour there…
And now I’m beginning to suspect myself…
February 27th, 2013 at 10:00 pm
And as paranoia spread through the GSS community, Barry N. Salzberg was heard to whisper,”No Harlan, THIS is the finest thing. Heh heh heh..”
February 27th, 2013 at 10:03 pm
Malzberg! Malzberg dammit! Eh crud. Need to learn to type with more than two fingets…
February 28th, 2013 at 8:31 am
This one should really have a FONT PROBLEMS tag. Look at the ugly way the text changes size after the comma that follows Malzberg’s name. I can just about live with the title font (but only because this is from 1974).
February 28th, 2013 at 10:52 am
@Phil, changes size and drops half a line to accommodate the G at the end of Malzberg.
Hmm… The next book Barry M wrote was ‘Galaxies’, which is sort of like Philip Roth contemplating writing a Science Fiction novel then realising that the publishers wouldn’t let anything good go out into the marketplace.
February 28th, 2013 at 5:03 pm
President Kennedy is being murdered again and again and again? Can someone just stop doing it? Once is enough!
February 28th, 2013 at 7:00 pm
@ Tom Noir:
Could this be a new flavor: Pepto Abysmal?
March 1st, 2013 at 2:24 pm
Bottom left corner appears to be Cornelius from “planet of the apes” hugging Caroline Munroe from “at the earths core”.
Also, i see the joker but where is batman?
March 2nd, 2013 at 5:49 pm
Call me paranoid, but I blame the Nixon administration for this cover. Somehow, G. Gordon Liddy was involved in trying to kill this book release…
March 4th, 2013 at 5:47 pm
The rocket ship (or missile) looks like it’s trying to hold it’s pee.
March 11th, 2013 at 8:23 pm
Oswald’s head has clearly been photoshopped onto Harlan Ellison’s (much narrower) shoulders. Don’t let the Pepto-Bismol distract you; this cover might just hold the key to the magic bullet theory (isn’t that a spray of magic bullets coming out from behind “Oswald’s” head?).
December 4th, 2013 at 10:52 pm
Only two more years until this cover comes true!!!
August 25th, 2015 at 4:02 pm
Four months and counting…
August 27th, 2015 at 2:38 am
I think “surreal still life” was a fad in SF covers at the time.
The apathetic Joker heads still get me, though.
January 1st, 2017 at 3:57 am
Only 6 hours left in the furthest-out bits of the US, and probably only a couple of hours more after that.
But why not JFK? Everyone ELSE has died in 2016.
September 7th, 2022 at 8:18 pm
Ha, I just now spotted who the quote was by. Dick Lupoff was a cool guy and a writing machine. Quiet and unassuming in public, but he had a keen eye for stupidity and (as you can see) didn’t suffer fools.