Mar 15
Click for larger imageTat Wood Comments: Painted by Emsh during a Cortico-Thalamic Pause and with an introduction by Forrest J. Ackerman, just in case the cover-art didn’t make you run away fast enough.
Published 1964
You might remember this from here.
(Average: 7.47 out of 10)
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March 15th, 2018 at 10:54 am
Tattoos – Piercings – Head Orbiters
***Reasonable Prices***
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March 15th, 2018 at 11:10 am
With his head overcrowded, the aliens decided to try a new probe for the first time.
March 15th, 2018 at 11:18 am
♬ First gear, it’s all right
Second gear, my eyes light
Third gear, my tongue bite
Faster, it’s all right ♬
March 15th, 2018 at 2:12 pm
I like how the little spaceship is saying: “screw this, I’m out.”
Also, love the Emsh 🙂
March 15th, 2018 at 2:13 pm
This is actually a good depiction of how I feel after a week of SXSW interactive.
March 15th, 2018 at 2:17 pm
Poor woman’s about to get whacked by a bowling ball.
March 15th, 2018 at 6:16 pm
That guy really isn’t enjoying what’s happening to him, despite the woman’s promises that it would be painless.
This isn’t the first cover for this book we’ve had on here, as I recall. There was another one, a while back.
March 15th, 2018 at 8:14 pm
This is a painful enough cover, but I’m just glad it wasn’t for “The World of A-Null.”
March 15th, 2018 at 8:47 pm
Well, I’m going to hail a cab instead – to get away from that cover…
March 16th, 2018 at 7:51 am
Frank Gorshin suffers Excedrin Headache #295.
(Joke approximately the same age as this cover.)
March 19th, 2018 at 8:43 pm
Max Headroom on acid?
June 13th, 2021 at 8:05 pm
The cover is accurate – it makes as much sense as the text inside.
June 13th, 2021 at 11:13 pm
I know I’ve read this book (different cover), probably more than once, but I can’t recall a bit of it. It adds up to a null in my memory.
The background blobs make me think “intestinal villi”.
June 14th, 2021 at 4:19 am
What ARY said. What logic appears in Van Vogt stories is dream logic,[1] and “Null-A” is perhaps the most notorious example.[2] It was a settled habit of his to throw in almost at random ~800 word segments in which either a new complication appeared or a previous one was resolved (often in a way unrelated to anything that had gone before).
[1] Often literally: Vogt religiously wrote down what he remembered of his dreams every night, and his dreams often inspired stories or story elements.
[2] Inspiring “Cosmic Jerrybuilder” by Damon Knight, an early classic of the Angry Fan Letter genre.
June 14th, 2021 at 12:48 pm
He’s seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. He watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain… Time to die.
January 22nd, 2022 at 11:29 am
The more I study this cover art, the more certain I become that the artist intentionally made fun of Van Vogt’s nonsensical, paranoid story.
January 23rd, 2022 at 12:22 am
LSD was still legal back then.
I’m not saying Emsh did it, but he was very active in the fine art scene (both painting and film) in the 60s and 70s, so he’d probably heard lots of descriptions of trips and this book’s plot made just as much sense.
For all we know, he painted someone’s trip and then said “yeah, let’s reuse that for this cover.”
January 24th, 2022 at 4:35 am
You know how machine intelligences often have a bad reaction to illogic? (See, multiple Star Trek episodes.) Well, Brainiac was incautious enough to try reading this book…