Oct 25
Click for full imageCorwin Comments: In the future, designer space suits are in style, asynchronous space ballet is an Olympic sport, and we’ve all lost our pinkies.
Published 2008
(Average: 8.12 out of 10)
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Corwin Comments: In the future, designer space suits are in style, asynchronous space ballet is an Olympic sport, and we’ve all lost our pinkies.
Published 2008
(Average: 8.12 out of 10)Loading...
(9.25 out of 10) (9.18 out of 10) (9.01 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) (8.88 out of 10) (8.88 out of 10)
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October 25th, 2010 at 9:54 am
Ah, Baen Books… you can always trust them to provide a cover rich with opportunity for laughs.
1. Finally, a novel that targets the underrepresented color-blind demographic!
2. Hey, what happened to his left foot?
3. “Stop that train to Arcturus, I gotta get on it!”
4. Jolting tension in the tradition of LATE BUS TO BETELGEUSE and HITCH-HIKING TO CYGNUS!
5. Lady Gaga is going to go bankrupt if she goes on spending money on her gigs like this.
6. That giant swelling dark shadow in the past? They are escaping Earth because Rush Limbaugh just swallowed it.
October 25th, 2010 at 11:32 am
It’s the space teletubies!
October 25th, 2010 at 12:12 pm
I hope that he has three fingers because he’s an alien and not because the artist was lazy.
October 25th, 2010 at 2:04 pm
Of course he is an alien! Even his space suit has poiny ears!
October 25th, 2010 at 2:04 pm
Definitely an alien. You can tell from his purple alien eyes and strange space-suit ear flaps.
Also, he appears to have had some sort of alien technology accident fall upon half of his left foot.
October 25th, 2010 at 2:34 pm
Slow Train to … SPACE DISCO!
October 25th, 2010 at 4:11 pm
Plot in brief: Terran colony slowship made up of a string of beads (each bead being a self-sufficient biome with its own culture, some of which no longer know they’re on a spaceship) passes through an inhabited system. I read the first few chapters on Dahak’s Orbit, it’s told through a combination of memos and historical documents for the human side, and the POV of one of the Arcturans who is sent out to investigate.
October 25th, 2010 at 6:17 pm
So the title might have been COSMIC SUPER-SCIENCE MEMORANDA, then?
October 25th, 2010 at 10:22 pm
ARY: Well, it’d be things like a brief outline of the colony project in general, and then moved onto stuff like, “Here’s this group of anti-tech luddites we’re glad to be rid of, we told ’em to get on the ship if they wanted to keep their religion” followed by the Arcturans meeting the luddites. Or “This group of gun nuts will probably kill themselves off before they reach an inhabitable planet, so here’s the safeguards in place to make sure they don’t blow up any of the other colonist groups” before the Arcturans run afoul of said gun nuts.
October 26th, 2010 at 1:24 pm
I’m liking the plot actually. Did you enjoy it, DvD?
October 26th, 2010 at 3:15 pm
“Pardon me boy is that the Arcturus choo-choo?”
December 16th, 2010 at 12:21 pm
“My preciousss ‘New York Times Best Selling Author’ ssspiky panel!”
March 7th, 2011 at 10:04 am
Michael Jackson never got to realize his final ambition: To be the first astronaut in a purple space-suit.
March 20th, 2011 at 8:48 pm
In space, no one can hear you prance.
June 23rd, 2011 at 7:35 am
Heh, fame at last:-) And it’s not even my worst or least accurate cover. A MANKIND WITCH wins that hands down. The Alien is supposed to be wearing an alien idea of a hi-viz space suit (which um, I didn’t see quite as a purple michael Jackson outfit), is supposed to have three fingers and a centrally place thumb. He’s supposed to be yellow-skinned. I am pretty sure he didn’t have pointy ears. Oh the memo bits are chapter-headers – 4-6 lines max, and the story per se is yes, about the Aliens dealing with a succession of space habitats with ‘misfits’ ranging from gun-nut survivalists to anti-tech religious pacifists, each due to be dropped off at a star system (humanity no longer colonises planets. It colonises space – star systems with space habitats). The funniest comment is AR Yngve’s Rush Limbaugh one. Next time maybe heesh should look up Eric Flint’s bio before commiting to print (Eric… is not exactly right wing. LOL). Nothing like a few preconcieved notions to prejudge a book by its cover, eh? I think the first few chapters are available for free on the Baen site. Maybe you should read them and judge on that?
June 23rd, 2011 at 9:34 am
WHAT! You mean… actually read a book?
Welcome to the Good Show Sir craziness. Where sarcasm rules all 😀
On second glance it does look like he’s playing with a “New York times, best-selling author” yo-yo!
June 23rd, 2011 at 10:03 am
All the best Aliens have those Yo-yos. They sell them at the Walmart on far, far side of the moon ;-). I really don’t mind having having the mickey taken out of the illustration. Goes with the turf. Um, I don’t love it much myself, though it must have been a royal cow to be asked illustrate.
Your actual reading of course, is like not excercising one’s ignorance when it needs walkies. So unfashionable ;-).
June 24th, 2011 at 11:08 pm
Start wearing purple wearing purple
Start wearing purple for me no ow
All your sanity and your wits will soon all vanish
I promise
Its just a
Matter of
Time
May 16th, 2015 at 12:01 am
I read this book because it appeared here. It was a pretty good read, actually. And yes, my copy came with this cover. (I showed it to a family member whose comment was “At least it isn’t a naked woman with a laser gun.” Touche)
Mr. Freer has already commented on the accuracy, or lack thereof, of the foreground alien. What really got to me though, was that a) this scene happens NOWHERE in the book, and, b) The authors were pretty thorough in their description of Howard, who I’m pretty sure is supposed to be the guy in the green spacesuit, however, he looks NOTHING like Howard. Or anybody else.
May 17th, 2015 at 7:57 am
I wonder who the puppeteer is.
May 12th, 2023 at 8:24 pm
Purple? Slowly making his way to Appolonia Kotero.
May 12th, 2023 at 8:51 pm
Having successfully sneaked up on the cover blurb, he made a grab for it but cut his glove open on the sharp points, leading to explosive decompression. Oh the embarrassment.
“Terran colony slowship made up of a string of beads (each bead being a self-sufficient biome with its own culture, some of which no longer know they’re on a spaceship)”
Flint was a fan of the Starlost? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Starlost )
May 12th, 2023 at 10:11 pm
It’s orange, purple, green, and nonsensical, with a fugly font and shuriken.
You know who it’s gotta be!
I don’t see a train or Arcturus, so AFAIK it’s merely… SLOW TO? I guess the spaceship on the right could be a train.
Is the person in purple (with lavender irises) even a human or just a humanoid? Might explain the missing pinkies. No surprise that they’re bug-eyed, what with floating around in space, seemingly has missed the train, and is about to puncture their suit on the shuriken.
@ARY (1): Feet are hard to draw, as we know…. that’s why both purple suit and green suit each only have one visible. Even space boots are asking too much.
@ARY (13): Wouldn’t that have been Prince, as @anon suggested?
@Bruce (22): “O the embarrassment. All die.” Heh.
Was anyone a fan of “The Starlost”? (Hark, the sound of Harlan ranting from beyond the grave) I mean, Keir Dullea is a good-looking guy even now; those eyes are still as blue. The novelization of the original script was pretty good IIRC.
As for Flint being left-wing, he sure only published with seriously right-wing presses, with work full of tons of boobs and guns. Pretty much Puppy chow. And was infamous for “editing” (i.e. rewriting) older, dead authors’ works… so I guess he shouldn’t mind if someone rewrites his stuff to actually be liberal.
But everyone in SF/F knows Dave Freer is a liar, bigly, and also has no idea what DNS addresses are, leading him to harass and set his mob of Dumb and Dumberer on a completely innocent guy, mistaking him for another innocent guy because he hated second guy’s wife for being… “woke” I guess?
Of course he never apologized to any of them for the (literal) stupid mistake, wherein he thought the two guys were the same because there couldn’t possibly be 2 guys who are SF-adjacent and also have one other geeky interest in common… because, again, like most RWNJ, the only individual people are those who are all RWNJ.
Also, he’s managed to piss off his neighbors by not treating his sewage properly and whines about his God-given right to dump shit all over. Proper septic tanks are for losers, sez Freer.
May 13th, 2023 at 12:22 am
Paging Dr Beeching
UPDATE: when will anyone learn that lights insde a space-helmet just leave the wearer unable to see anything except a distorted reflection of the wearer’s own face?
May 13th, 2023 at 6:04 pm
@GSS ex-noob: I wonder how many of the young’uns in the SF readers community know that meme.
Flint was definitely a lefty, but Baen published a fairly eclectic variety of authors, politics-wise, before Jim Baen died and they decided to double down on becoming the SF imprint of the MAGA Manosphere. He may just have been one of those people who can keep a strict division between business and politics.
May 14th, 2023 at 1:06 am
@Bruce: Well, it’s their loss, I say. It’s a fun story, particularly the variations on the quote. And it has a happy ending.
Flint stuck with them a loooong time after Jim died (till his own death), and a ton of his work has boobs, guns, and U!S!A! (*cough* 1632)
I had to laugh that Flint’s Wiki bio contains a write-up of the scam Baen has selling uncorrected proofs to the MAGAs and says “They are unproofed manuscripts and are full of typos and errors.” Sure, but so do the ‘finished’ books! Cuz Jim’s baby mama (who runs it now) is proud of never editing anything because, as she’s publicly said, their fans don’t care and will purchase the generic pew-pew stuff as fast as they can churn it out.
I guess ol’ Jim never stiffed Flint on payment like he did so many others, because they stayed friends till death. Flint does seem to have been a genuinely kind guy who didn’t deserve to have had Freer inflicted on him.
There’s no downside for BAEN!!!explosionstitsandbadfonts to have gone full MAGA, since they don’t have distribution outside the US and Canada. Which is apparently well-known to all except their fans, since the Honor Harrington fan club spent a lot of money to take their cosplay to Helsinki Worldcon to find their display table in the crafts building about 1km from the main hall, and even the Europeans who found them were all “the who what now?” I felt bad for them, they’re nice guys, but they couldn’t have googled?
@Tat: No wonder the Arcturan looks panicked. Primitive weirdos have turned up in his system and he can’t see where he’s going. Look out, they’ve brought a shuriken!
May 15th, 2023 at 2:57 pm
@GSS ex-noob
I don’t think I can say I was a fan of The Starlost but that thing has stuck in my head even though now it’s only the vaguest of memories. And I did introduce to “Cordwainer Bird” which I thought was pretty cool name at the time. In fact that’s probably the only thing I remember about it. Every thing else I think I remember is just the product of internet reading. (Maybe the space ship but I think I’ve got that mixed up with the one from Silent Running.)
May 16th, 2023 at 1:14 am
@FB: I saw every episode just because we were so desperate for SF content back then, even if it was low budget and cheesy and everyone could see why Harlan took his name off it.
The Starlost ship had many more sticking-out bits.
Still, the novelization of the original script (by HE’s and my mutual friend Ed Bryant) is worth a read, with the extended preface by HE spilling all the dirt. And Ben Bova’s parody “The Starcrossed” was funny as heck at the time, though it’s probably dated poorly.
May 16th, 2023 at 1:57 pm
IDW published a comic book version of Phoenix Without Ashes some years ago, and it was quite good — very faithful to the novel, and the imagery was such that one really wished the producers of The Starlost had had the same imagination.
Sadly, IDW no longer seem to carry it, but used copies can be found on eBay and other places if you search for it. I bought the digital edition when it was available, and I’m pretty sure I still have it on my iPad somewhere….
EDIT: And there it is on my iCloud drive. Made the initial mistake of searching for ‘starlost’ instead of ‘phoenix’. So, huzzah for me!
May 16th, 2023 at 10:16 pm
@Nomad: Huzzah! I knew about it, but never got it, because comics are too rich for my blood and I already had the autographed book.