Dec 01
Alessandra Comments: Can’t quite decide if it’s a brilliant absurdist collage or a goofball collection of oddments. Egg cartons over the breasts? Seriously? And bags of candy on the shoulders and RAF wings over the head and… Yeah, goofball collection of oddments.
Published 2011
December 1st, 2011 at 8:59 am
I think her expression sums it up rather well.
December 1st, 2011 at 10:12 am
And that’s why it’s not a good idea to make your own Halloween costumes.
December 1st, 2011 at 10:18 am
Well, this is lit-crit from an author with a very broad range of output who for many years held that she didn’t write SF. The publisher didn’t know which way to jump.
I wonder if there are any talking squids . . .
December 1st, 2011 at 1:07 pm
So, who is tilting their head to read the text?
December 1st, 2011 at 1:34 pm
At a guess, this cover is a send-up. Where it falls down of course is the absolute *seriousness* of the people doing the sending up. ‘Oh we’ll have a cyborg woman to illustrate [name your trope]. But to make sure we’re not mistaken for, you know, a book about cyborg women, we use egg cartons, toys and candy to build her. How meta! We rule!’ This in itself makes it excellent GSS material.
Or maybe there’s a story about edible androids inside.
December 1st, 2011 at 1:34 pm
If I were the cover artist, I would have snuck in a space-squid somewhere. The poor lady on the cover needs something to cheer her up.
December 1st, 2011 at 5:16 pm
Apparently the mood-selector lottery machine in her navel has selected ‘glum’!
December 1st, 2011 at 9:37 pm
My imagination says Ron Jeremy should be on that cover.
December 2nd, 2011 at 8:24 am
Wow… this is like the book-cover equivalent of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”.
People who are afraid to seem “unhip” or “oppressive” will praise the cover, or pretend it’s “intellectual” and “analyze” its “message”…
The rest of us can just relax and laugh. “She’s got no clothes on!” (By which I mean the poor cover model, not Margaret Atwood. Honest, Guv!)
December 5th, 2011 at 3:11 pm
Egg carton bra or top designed to accommodate 12 tiny breasts? YOU decide!
Hyper-mammaryists – UNITE!
December 5th, 2011 at 3:14 pm
Or would that be “super-mammarysts”? “Supernumary-mammaryists”?
*Typical American. Struggling with English. Film at 11.*
December 6th, 2011 at 1:50 pm
..”we even gift wrap..”
December 9th, 2011 at 5:56 pm
The flowers look like they have seen something on the back end and are sniggering….can flowers snigger?
December 9th, 2011 at 7:30 pm
Now that I think of it, the girl looks like she’s from a Daft Punk video…
June 9th, 2013 at 1:04 am
Yes, she’s staring at a man with the head of a bloodhound and a boombox on his shoulder. Dance Dogman, dance.
There’s a tag I’m surprised Anti-Sceptic hasn’t proposed.’ Daft Punk girl’ tag.
March 12th, 2014 at 12:24 am
What I don’t understand is, when I search the site for the word ‘cheese’, it returns this cover and only this cover. Go on, try it yourself.
March 12th, 2014 at 1:53 am
Well now you wrote ‘cheese’ in the comments so it DEFINITELY will!
March 12th, 2014 at 10:19 am
Oh, so if I write ‘cheese’ in the comments again, other covers will pop up? 🙂
March 13th, 2014 at 1:28 pm
You can cheese all the comments you like and nothing new will pop. GSS search ignores everything you write.
Disappointing isn’t it? And oddly emasculating.
March 13th, 2014 at 1:38 pm
lol
March 13th, 2014 at 2:15 pm
Cheese is in the image’s mouseover text.
Cheeeeeeeeeeeeese
March 13th, 2014 at 3:44 pm
Ah, I hadn’t seen the cheese there. So to speak. Thanks again, Tag Wizard!
May 28th, 2015 at 11:03 pm
Kathryn’s right about her facial expression. If I was in a situation like that . . .
It’s like they grabbed all the random crap in the studio they could find and cobbled it together to make this “costume”.
May 29th, 2015 at 2:46 am
Cate Blanchett stifles a sob and wonders where it all went wrong.
May 29th, 2015 at 10:36 am
She-Robocop was not impressed with her dress uniform.
May 29th, 2015 at 10:41 am
@Tag Wizard: These images have alt-text? Crap.
January 8th, 2017 at 6:22 am
Looks frighteningly like Conan O’Brien. Facially, anyway.
September 5th, 2022 at 6:57 pm
Apologies to Count Basie…
Egg crate covered bazooms
Bits and bobs from church bazaar
All thrown together on this cover
Attempt at thought-provoking attire
In Other Worlds, fun for GSS crew
In Other Worlds, by Margaret Atwoo(d)
September 6th, 2022 at 12:47 am
@Emster: Uou hep cat!
Still think it looks a lot like Conan the Talk Show Host.
As to all the apropos comments about Space Squids, I recall a great deal of pride and LOL when “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out For Sushi” won the Hugo. Literal people-turned-into-marine-life-shapes to work in Jupiter’s orbit. It was a very good, unexpectedly moving story, and was a literal response to Atwood’s clueless, dismissive remark
Also it’s by Pat Cadigan, who is WAY more fun and less pretentious than Margaret Atwood. Can you imagine Atwood partying with a bunch of random readers? Never happen. Whereas Pat’s in her element and a real raconteur.
This is Pat the same year I last partied with her:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Cadigan#/media/File:Pat_Cadigan_in_2018.jpg
Looks like a fun gal, right?
September 7th, 2022 at 2:35 am
Girl Thing sounds like a story I’d really enjoy (as anyone looking at my bookshelf might guess), and I bet I’d also really enjoy hanging out with Pat too – that shirt is great.