Jan 10
Click for larger imageMonty Comments: Those colors.
Published 1995
(Average: 6.50 out of 10)
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Monty Comments: Those colors.
Published 1995
(Average: 6.50 out of 10)Loading...
(9.25 out of 10) (9.18 out of 10) (9.02 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) (8.89 out of 10) (8.88 out of 10)
Lastest Tweet
January 10th, 2019 at 8:30 am
Baen says “Let’s play Battleship!”
January 10th, 2019 at 12:30 pm
The Trump defense initiative against Kaiju nears completion.
January 10th, 2019 at 12:54 pm
Anyone else seeing robotic swimmers?
January 10th, 2019 at 1:34 pm
Monty is afraid to tell us how much was spent on this gem of a cover. Don’t be embarrassed, Monty, we’ve all been there, or Baen there! And this is a good investment—where else could you see an image of robot vulture spaceships engaged in a synchronized swimming event? Nowhere!
January 10th, 2019 at 2:21 pm
These mega-projects are surprisingly affordable when you buy second-hand from the Vogons.
January 10th, 2019 at 3:01 pm
Flying cranes built out of Lego pieces.
January 10th, 2019 at 3:11 pm
A well-placed cheese roll should foil this Evaporator Game.
January 10th, 2019 at 3:11 pm
I don’t want to alarm anyone, but if those window washers are actually Transformers, and they look like they could be, when they turn into robots and stand up I think we might have some community standards violations…
January 10th, 2019 at 4:16 pm
Manhattan is now safe from anything – except well-trained sopranos.
January 10th, 2019 at 10:09 pm
Marvel at the power of my COMPUTER GRAPHICS!!!
They’re trying waaay too hard with the title and author name, while the subtitle is a bit underwhelming…”it’s a hell of a town?” Is it meant to be positive? Negative? Jokey?
January 10th, 2019 at 10:25 pm
@Bruce A: allusive. I read it as riffing on ‘On The Town’. It took me decades to discover that ‘the Battery’s down’ wasn’t a reference to Sinatra’s hearing-aid.
January 10th, 2019 at 11:06 pm
@Tat Wood: ah, OK. It amuses me that a supposedly futuristic look at New York is referencing a seventy year old musical already fifty years old in 1995. I guess that line about the past not even being past is doubly true on Broadway.
(OTOH, Pohl himself was born in 1919, so I guess he’d find it more contemporary).
January 11th, 2019 at 7:01 am
Er… at least it’s not orange and there are no big guns or cleavage?
Praising with faint damns is the best we can do with this publisher.
The piece being lowered into place seems to have some perspective problems. At least I can’t make it fit in any way but Escheresque. Is it a hexagon or a box?
Is the dome there to protect people from the exploding letters in the sky? And you thought billboards were bad enough. How do they handle ventilation? NYC don’t smell so good even when exposed to the whole atmosphere.
@JuanPaul (3): That was my first thought. Robot scuba.
@Lillie (8): Ah. Yes. Ewww.
@Bruce (10): I also expect it’s mostly hand-arted in 1995.
@Tat (11): That was my thought, too. Although they couldn’t even get that right; the original lyric has “a” instead of “one”. If they were going for a Sinatra riff, why not quote “New York, New York”, which people knew at the time and they even still play in Times Square at midnight Jan. 1?
And where’s Orson the Cat? Still stuck in Doohan’s ear, or on the Space Station of Sleazy Symbolism?
January 11th, 2019 at 3:46 pm
David Mattingly is the godfather of cheap 90’s clipart. I refuse to believe it’s hand-done, at least not entirely. Look how plasticky and shaded it is simultaneously. Perhaps scanned and slathered with gradient effects.
@ B. Chiclitz: I am not shamed buying a Frederik Pohl book. The place priced by some flat formula anyway, the sticker was from a previous reselling.
January 11th, 2019 at 10:55 pm
@Monty—Forgive me if I wasn’t clear. Absolutely there’s no shame in buying a Pohl novel. Pohl is quite a good writer. No, the shame (and glory) of GSS accrues to the covers, not the books.
January 12th, 2019 at 8:36 pm
The tagline “It’s one hell of a town!” and the art are a bit… mismatched. You don’t get to see just what is so hellish about this city.
Could it be that…
A) The city’s baristas are on strike, so NOBODY gets a leaf pattern in their foam lattes;
B) The city was featured on the cover of WIRED Magazine, and the citizens now await the reversal of fortune that strikes anyone who gets on the cover of WIRED;
C) A flock of seagulls landed on the giant dome and are crapping on it;
D) The glass dome is slowly choking everyone inside it to death;
E) On Taco Tuesdays, the domed city suffers a terrible stink.
March 21st, 2019 at 9:19 pm
@Ynvge c)
A flock of seagulls ran so very far when shown this cover. They were hoping for a picture of you, something to remind them. They’ll have to spend their lives just wishing.
July 28th, 2022 at 6:14 am
Further evidence of exactly what sort of graphics power was available in 1995:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRLi0VWdNIg
David Mattingly was making these covers by the dozen with this software circa 1995.