Oct 07
Click for full imageScott B Comments: A smug four-armed barbarian Telly Savales holding a bemused decapitated robot head. Works for me.
Published 1979
(Average: 8.53 out of 10)
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Scott B Comments: A smug four-armed barbarian Telly Savales holding a bemused decapitated robot head. Works for me.
Published 1979
(Average: 8.53 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)
Lastest Tweet
October 7th, 2011 at 9:56 am
Funnily enough, “ERG!” is the noise you make when your head is cut off by matey boy there.
October 7th, 2011 at 10:18 am
Man I just love the layers upon layers of text.
October 7th, 2011 at 10:58 am
I’m just glad the cover tells me that it’s a novel. Otherwise I might think it’s real.
October 7th, 2011 at 11:02 am
Why does it read
” a novel
BY PHYLLIS GOTLIEB”
instead of
“a novel by
PHYLLIS GOTLIEB”
…?
You get a sense of an angry retort, like this:
“Say, who did you say this novel was written by again..?”
“BY PHYLLIS GOTLIEB!! How many times do I have to say it?!”
October 7th, 2011 at 11:56 am
I don’t know what’s worst: the facial expressions, the hands, or that he’s standing on a road of Spam chunks.
October 7th, 2011 at 12:23 pm
@Alessandra: that’s a seafood highway he’s towering over.
O MASTER CALIBAN
is an anagram for
A MANIAC LOBSTER
October 7th, 2011 at 4:21 pm
I like this cover. Despite the fact that it features a severed head, a mutant four-armed monster and a highway made of body parts, everyone seems quite cheerful about the situation!
October 7th, 2011 at 4:32 pm
Surely if you had four arms and that many body parts to dismember you might as well use at least one more sword just to save some time.
October 7th, 2011 at 6:35 pm
I see no machines just life sized marionette pieces.
October 7th, 2011 at 7:20 pm
Four armed knife wielder is looking for a pair of feet (his legs are missing them) and comes across a head… Oh, Phyllis I wonder if the cover bears any relationship to your story line!
October 7th, 2011 at 7:27 pm
Okay Caliban, I’ll bite. What is an “O Master”?
October 7th, 2011 at 9:39 pm
I imagine this as a sequel to OH MR PORTER. Will Hay will be ol’ four arms. Moore Marriott is the severed head.
The Erg war was the first one. Then the SI system was introduced, and we had the Joule war.
October 8th, 2011 at 5:33 am
The robot head is all “Ehhh, when they finally give me a body, it’ll probably be a robotic toilet. That’s just how things work out for me. But that’s roboting for ya.”
October 8th, 2011 at 11:46 am
An “Omaster” is someone who is very, very bad at chanting meditation.
October 9th, 2011 at 12:42 pm
I’d like to register my approval that the image has been shot against a tasteful granite background, rather than the usual shelf-of-charity-shop-books. Good show sir.
October 9th, 2011 at 5:11 pm
Cheeky blighter! That’s one of my library bookshelves behind the Earthsea cover, I’ll have you know, and almost all my books were bought at bookshops for the cover price.
October 9th, 2011 at 5:48 pm
My mistake. You should have a word with Telly Savales about it. Not Telly Savalas — he probably wouldn’t return your calls. But I’m sure Telly Savales is available, and for a very reasonable fee.
October 9th, 2011 at 6:45 pm
That’s not granite; that’s shag-pile carpeting.
October 9th, 2011 at 10:07 pm
Adam, I left the smiley off my post 🙂 And I think Telly Savales needs to talk to Google about this greek guy who’s hijacking all his searches.
Incidentally that has to be the worst attempt at a four-armed figure I’ve seen. There’s no attempt at shoulders, obscured by the map of the world he/she/it seems to be wearing, and the head is stuck on as an afterthought. Perhaps this is really some fairground photographers stick-your-head-through-the-hole posing portrait. Pity the guy who gets to play the severed head, then.
Phyllis Gotlieb was apparently the “Mother of Canadian Science Fiction”. nI’m embarrassed, then, to say I’ve never heard of her before.
October 9th, 2011 at 10:17 pm
That is indeed my carpet, not granite counter.
Mea Culpa on Telly Savales though.
And I agree with Muttley, there’s something off about the whole torso — how the arms, legs head all come together doesn’t seem quite right.
October 10th, 2011 at 3:12 pm
Now that you say carpet, I’m embarrassed I ever thought it was anything else …!
October 10th, 2011 at 8:05 pm
The whole Telly Savales/Savalas thing could have been avoided… by calling him Richard O’Brien. Or Jason ‘Gadget Show’ Bradbury.
October 18th, 2011 at 7:00 pm
Hey look, I found a twin of me. But I’ll cut his head off because he has hair and I don’t.
April 15th, 2012 at 4:44 pm
The decapitated head’s facial expression is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in my life.
April 16th, 2012 at 1:57 pm
As I said elsewhere on this site, Phyllis Gotlieb is a pretty good writer saddled with some of the worst covers ever.
This book of hers blew my mind when I was 12 or 13.
June 29th, 2012 at 10:23 am
It would be safer if he held the sword in one of his upper hands. This way he can easily sever his own upper arm. But I suppose he can’t help it – he’s obviously bottom-left handed. And the world’s not fair for bottom-handed people.
August 27th, 2015 at 1:31 am
Which one’s Caliban, though? Four-headed bald nutjob, or surprisingly relaxed decapitated head? And, for that matter, does this have anything to do with “The Tempest”?
November 20th, 2021 at 4:23 pm
♪ O Master Caliban
Cally me banana. ♪
November 21st, 2021 at 4:42 am
@Tor: 4 thumbs up.
This is the sequel to O Journeyman Caliban. Third in a trilogy.
November 21st, 2021 at 11:28 am
This might really be fun. According to a Goodreads reviewer:
“It features a jungle, radioactivity and mutants, telepathy, unethical science, sentient animals (including a goat), sentient machines (robots, but at least two of them are AIs by modern standards), delinquent children, and dis-functional families.
There are a lot of elements. It’s an sf meditation on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, with a multi-coloured sentient gibbon in the role of Ariel, a four-armed boy child replacing Miranda, and a Prospero who makes different decisions.”.
So matey boy there is actually Miranda from The Tempest? Mind blown.
September 9th, 2023 at 12:40 pm
“By Phyllis Gotlieb, you shall be avenged!”
– Dr Lazarus, Galaxy Quest