Mar 21
Click for full imageGood Show Sir’s Art Direction: I need to get into their mindset. What does the public want to see on their book cover… public…. cover…. public… pubic…. GOT IT! Giant floating glowing crab! Maybe a dragon too, but that’s just a background thought!
Published 1990
(Average: 6.82 out of 10)
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March 21st, 2013 at 10:51 am
The author’s name is “Huge Cock”?? That can’t be right. Where are my reading glasses?
March 21st, 2013 at 11:16 am
‘Canoe, party of four, your table is ready. May I recommend the seafood special with a side of dragon?’
March 21st, 2013 at 11:28 am
“I wonder if you could help me, I was on my way to a Guy N. Smith book cover and I’m terribly lost.”
March 21st, 2013 at 11:48 am
Kilroy wazir?
Old crabby looks rather blue. The water must be very cold.
And that flying creature in the background – more than a passing resemblance to a Deathbird, methinks: http://subterraneanpress.com/store/product_detail/deathbird_stories_the_expanded_edition
March 21st, 2013 at 11:48 am
“It’s ok… the princess knows all the crab gang hand gestures.”
March 21st, 2013 at 11:48 am
THIS crab is not holding a weapon. Boo.
March 21st, 2013 at 12:40 pm
You think that crab is big? You should have seen it before it went for a dip in that cold stream.
March 21st, 2013 at 1:15 pm
RT @JohnGuyCollick: As funny as ever: Only the worst Sci-fi/Fantasy book covers:
http://t.co/VUEAV8lziv
March 21st, 2013 at 1:20 pm
RT @GoodShowSir: New Book Cover: The Wazir and the Witch http://t.co/sf696toaZ2
March 21st, 2013 at 1:59 pm
Long flowing, ground dragging robes and canoes are not a good combination. I think that is a normal sized crab amazed at finding figurines from a nativity set washed up on his riverbank.
March 21st, 2013 at 2:17 pm
Where’s Speaker-to-seafood when you need him?
I’ll just share this terrifying wiki-fact with you:
“Between 1986 and 1992 he wrote the ten-novel series The Chronicles of an Age of Darkness. Disappointing sales prevented the publication of further volumes (up to 60 were planned).”
And all of them “The W— and the W—”
so we got off lightly then?
March 21st, 2013 at 2:30 pm
Don’t forget the gigantic penis-substitute for the crab to dance around.
March 21st, 2013 at 2:39 pm
@Muttley:
Maybe he could write a novel about us called ‘The Website and the Weirdos’. 🙂
March 21st, 2013 at 3:48 pm
‘Giant crabs? Sure we got giant crabs. We got giant crabs up the wazir.’
March 21st, 2013 at 4:24 pm
“You should see the Chronicles of my OTHER Age of Darkness.”
(And I’m wondering why these Twitter RTs keep turning up in the comments here. It’s not as if they add anything to the ‘discussion’, and they only link back to this page.)
March 21st, 2013 at 4:49 pm
RT @GoodShowSir: New Book Cover: The Wazir and the Witch http://t.co/sf696toaZ2
March 21st, 2013 at 5:17 pm
“Hello. Tired of the sounds of dancing feet? Then listen to the sounds of dancing walking legs. Yes mothers, it’s time once again for Conrad Poohs and his Dancing Crab.”
@Muttley – It appears this author was batshit crazy, but a warped genius when seated at a word processor. I demand the cover of “The Walrus and the Wardog”.
March 21st, 2013 at 5:29 pm
@Muttley:
By the 60th he’d certainly have to be scraping the bottom of the barrel for appropriate “W” words to use. It might be a good thing that “The Walmart and the Weatherstripping” never saw the light of day.
March 21st, 2013 at 5:46 pm
Wazir a ‘wazir’?!?
March 21st, 2013 at 6:17 pm
@fred, goo goo g’joob. Alas it has neither walruses nor warwolves:
http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1187387012l/1720859.jpg
But it does have a dragon! It somehow reminds me of:
http://www.goodshowsir.co.uk/2012/07/the-second-experiment/
Book #61: “The Weedwhacker and the Wang-dang-doodle”
March 22nd, 2013 at 12:15 am
@ fred: http://www.muzboz.com/gallery/ThingsILike/WalrusWarwolfOldBook.jpg
For other versions we can check out the Amazon page: http://www.amazon.com/Hugh-Cook/e/B000APQUYA/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1
Either way THAT is NOT a walrus. So let’s hope it’s the ship was called “Walrus”.
March 22nd, 2013 at 10:52 am
@21: Oh well, but the second one has the magical words ‘China Miéville presents’ on the cover. From that moment on, anything goes.
March 22nd, 2013 at 5:39 pm
Book #62: THE WASCAL AND THE WABBIT.
March 28th, 2013 at 8:20 pm
Man, that crab’s got some sick dance moves yo!
April 13th, 2013 at 7:22 am
i only read four of the 10 books in this series but I do intend to read them all. The ones I read were very very good and obviously way ahead of their time. Authors like China Mieville and Scott Lynch have cited him as a major influence. The problem was that he was writing anti-tolkienesque and anti-howardesque fantasy at a time (the late 80s) when most of fantasy revolved around Eddings, Brooks and Fiest. I guess the grittiness, the black humour, the morally grey heroes and the sheer weirdness of his books couldn’t thrive in that environment.
See:
http://d1sc0r0b0t.blogspot.com/2009/09/hugh-cook-wordsmith-and-warrior.html
or China Mieville’s take:
http://paizo.com/paizo/blog/v5748dyo5lb27
May 10th, 2013 at 10:13 pm
The giant crab is actually one of the main characters of the book, being an ancient god-like entity who found himself sans body and was forced into picking a hermit crab in an emergency. Crabs grow as they age, and the size is a reflection of the many years he has been trapped in the crab.
The titular Walrus from the fourth novel is a pirate captain, and the Warwolf is the ship of his biggest pirate captain rival. The beast attacking the boat is, I think, a Neveresh – a genetically engineered beast created during a horrific global conflict.
Chronicles of an Age of Darkness was originally intended as a work of fiction much greater than a mere ten novels, but the author, Hugh Cook, suffered a brain tumor and, whilst he survived the operation, was not capable of continuing his work.
I read a sh*t-load of fantasy in my youth and in my mind Cook ranks among Tolkien and Moorcock as one of the great Fantasy writers. His writing style was, well, individual, but the imagination was immense and the humour wicked. My favourite moments from his series include an encounter with a Were-hamster, an escape from an underground cave-maze by peeing into a genuine cornucopia and using the resulting jet of urine to blast the way to freedom, and the curse of being unable to get drunk forced upon one of the heroes through the introduction into his body of genetically engineered symbiotic health-giving worms.
What makes these novels so interesting is that books are set on a post-apocalyptic, formerly hyper-tech world where (almost) everyone has forgotten about the ancient technology and had come to see the powers unleashed by their ancestors science as magic. There’s plenty of old tech lying around, some of which is very intelligent and some of which is rather malevolent. It also contains possibly the best non-human character in any novel; a Shabble – a child’s toy that could fly, glow brightly at will and would never break. It’s power came from the star it was linked too, but the designers had set it up so that Shabble would never run out of batteries by giving it a very slight positive gain on the link between it and the star. The result being that over the eons since the apocalypse, Shabble had developed the power to throw vast arcs of fire channeled directly from the heart of its star. Only it had been designed with the personality of a small child – a love of power combined with a dubious ethical code, extreme naivety and the attention span of a gnat. Shabble later becomes the leader of a very successful new religion involving the worship of cockroaches.
Terry Brooks or Stephen Donaldson would have killed for one tenth of the imagination found in a single chapter of one of these books.
March 24th, 2015 at 11:15 am
The Wazir and the Witch up the Wazoo
August 5th, 2015 at 5:18 pm
The lady in blue chiffon is holding something that terrifies the crab. Melted butter?
August 5th, 2015 at 5:47 pm
@Tat: depending on how it is held, I could be terrified of melted butter…
August 5th, 2015 at 8:16 pm
The blue crab IS the Lord of the Dance!
Ha-diddle-y-diddle-y-diddle-y-diddle…
January 18th, 2017 at 1:42 am
Analogies time. Witch:Wardrobe::Wazir:…water closet???