Mar 28
Click for full UNSHEEPED image
Tom Noir Comments: Naked cybernetic armed cat woman in an improbable pose bursting through a cover of shiny 3D fonts? This is what happens when cover designers play Bingo. This cover is SO shiny that the camera couldn’t quite deal with it. Pretty much everything that looks black is actually highly-reflective chrome.
Published 1998
(Average: 8.30 out of 10)
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March 28th, 2012 at 10:45 am
Cat Lady: XTREME!!! Though I can’t imagine licking her would be pleasant. You’d probably get a static shock from either the fur or the metal.
March 28th, 2012 at 11:14 am
Good show, Sir. Jolly good show indeed!
March 28th, 2012 at 11:17 am
Boy, I’ll bet Larry Niven’s heart just swelled when he saw this one.
Are female Kzin even supposed to have noticeable breasts? Or am I confusing them with Chanur:
http://www.goodshowsir.co.uk/2011/10/chanur/
March 28th, 2012 at 12:55 pm
I’m not sure how much Niven would care — he wrote the original stories but aren’t these adaptations/sequels/prequels written by other authors? — i.e. they’re purely a money making scheme for Niven.
March 28th, 2012 at 1:55 pm
@Joachim: Oops. On my wee phone screen this morning I failed to see the “created by” above Niven’s name.
I also couldn’t quite make out her pose and didn’t realize how … um … displayed she is.
March 28th, 2012 at 2:01 pm
My retinas need surgery after viewing this cover.
March 28th, 2012 at 2:25 pm
Kzinti females aren’t sapient, for goodness sake, unless the Man-Kzin wars franchise has retconned that bit of original Niven out of existence.
The ears are wrong, too. 🙂
March 28th, 2012 at 2:46 pm
I thought cats had more than two nipples?
Looks like I have been proven wrong.
March 28th, 2012 at 3:05 pm
@Alessandra: Yeah, it takes either some serious guts, or total lack-of-caring, by the art director to go with that pose — and then throw in the “don’t know when they’re licked” tagline.
I mean, wow, nude cyborg catwoman, bright orange and shiny, font exploding toward our face… this one’s got the whole package. Maybe the first serious challenger to Body Electric in quite some time.
March 28th, 2012 at 3:17 pm
Everything else on this cover I can accept, but how could she fire that tiny gun with those long claws?
A BRIDGE TOO FAR, SIR.
March 28th, 2012 at 3:23 pm
And before anyone goes there, know that I’ve already trademarked the phrase ‘kitty titties’ and you will owe me 27 cents every time you use it.
March 28th, 2012 at 3:29 pm
Holding this book in public is like the equivalent of walking around in a dirty cat costume, while holding up a hand-painted sign that reads I WILL LICK YOUR FUR FOR FOOD.
March 28th, 2012 at 4:24 pm
#7 Muttley: I recall that on the Ringworld there were Kzinti females who could at least talk (Louis mentions this), and at least one of the early Man-Kzinti War stories had a sentient female (I think she’d been in a stasis pod for umpteen thousand years).
March 28th, 2012 at 5:10 pm
@A.R. – Are you making fun of my non-union job?
March 28th, 2012 at 5:13 pm
I wonder if she’s single. Maybe we should set her up on a date with the Body Electric centaur?
March 28th, 2012 at 5:20 pm
Wow, this one has everything! Is the world a better place because this cover exists? I don’t know, but it made my day, so I’m going with the glass half-full approach.
Good show, sir!
March 28th, 2012 at 9:17 pm
Would that cover be legal as blaze orange hunting gear?
March 28th, 2012 at 9:48 pm
Kudos to the photographer. It is probably quite impossible to catch this one in all its reflective glory.
Here are some more attempts that hint at the chromific awesomeness of it all.
http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/9/95/Boapw.jpg
http://redditorschoice.com/img/best-possible-wars_3723_500.jpg
March 28th, 2012 at 11:19 pm
But come to think of it, for Baen Books EVERY war is the best of all possible wars.
March 29th, 2012 at 12:07 am
But a war that includes kitty titties might be just an eensy weensy bit better.
I hope Tom has change for a dollar.
March 30th, 2012 at 5:53 am
Oh hell, the cat person is butt-naked. Or whatever you call it when it’s some kind of anthropoid creature with fake tits and a pelt and absolutely no clothes.
I DO want to know why it is with non-human aliens that they always seem to be using the humans’ cast-off weaponry. That gun doesn’t look much like something a species with long freaking talons (and anchored like fingernails, rather than claws, meaning they are most likely not structurally sound as slashing implements) would have designed, unless their engineers are just stinking out loud at it.
March 30th, 2012 at 11:27 am
@Jerk of All Trades: I was wondering that myself. On my phone’s wee screen it looked like she had a mountain lion’s paw, black nails and all, curled awkwardly arountd the gun’s butt. I wondered how she managed it.
But when I saw the image larger her hand made even less sense. With nails like that and no skin protection, why is she not a mass of random cuts just from casual movement? How does she hold anything, let alone a standard human-styled gun?
And even supposing she were at bay, rather than snatching up an awkward, small, fiddly, alien weapon thing wouldn’t she make use of those teeth and talons? Even a little house cat facing a much larger opponent would do that.
March 30th, 2012 at 7:35 pm
Furry porn. Niven’s already pene – sorry got into all the other markets. He’s going for a full house – but one with no soft furnishings, obviously.
March 30th, 2012 at 8:22 pm
10 years from now, Baen will publish ONLY books about furry naked aliens at war, and switch name to “Furryspace Publishing” — mark my words!
April 2nd, 2012 at 1:28 pm
@Jaouad Yeah thanks. I can’t take credit for this shot, actually. I tried several times with my own phone camera and the results were less than satisfactory. Fortunately my friend was also there with her iPhone, and its camera was able to produce the image at the top.
I really don’t think conventional cameras will ever cut it with this cover. It’s something beyond the ordinary. Like the Great Wall, it is perhaps one of the few man-made objects visible from space!
April 3rd, 2012 at 7:22 am
I used to have a secretary who had nails like that. She could type and do filing quite happily, so I expect firing a “space age” pistol would’ve been no problem.
Mind, after a few vodka ‘n’ cokes she’d probably have been quite happy to rely on talons and teeth.
June 6th, 2012 at 2:58 pm
Sequels were:
– OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR
– WAR! WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR? SALES FIGURES!
– WHEN I THINK OF WAR I TOUCH MYSELF
July 24th, 2012 at 11:47 am
I looked up BLOOÃRING (in top background) on amazon.co.uk, and was pleased to find that the cover featured a young woman in tight black leather with a gun in her hand and a sword on her back.
And another thing: D-with-a-crossbar is the letter eth, so BLOOÃRING is pronounced BLOOTHRING. Which sounds like something that a Northern person would tell you to stop doing.
August 7th, 2012 at 2:03 pm
I’d be lion if I said this wasn’t still one of my favorite covers.
November 4th, 2012 at 11:16 am
Alternate titles:
– The Furriest of All Possible Wars
– Pardon Me, But Your Fur Is In My Mouth
– Fur Wars: The Empire Strokes Back
– Your Mother’s Basement Forever
November 5th, 2012 at 4:44 am
Did the artist finish this and think “Spectacular!”? Did Larry Niven see this and say “Yes! That is exactly what a Kzin should look like!” Those answers I don’t have. Did I look at it and think “What???” Yes I did. Yes I did.
January 10th, 2013 at 7:06 am
I must confess that, to this day, I am remarkably fond of this cover. I first saw it in my local library when I was a teenaged nerd, obsessed both with big cats and my own burgeoning interest in girls. I found it captivating – a sexy naked cat woman? A cyborg sexy naked cat woman? With tits, no less? Then, some months later, I discovered the Internet, discovered there was an entire fandom built around this sort of thing, and the rest was history.
It’s tacky as hell viewed in the light of adulthood and good taste, but i cant help but love it. There’s some memories there, for sure.
January 11th, 2013 at 11:38 am
…You know, Gepard, sometimes it really isn’t necessary to share everything with everybody…
January 11th, 2013 at 2:05 pm
So apparently this book features references to “the boob cube”, i.e. a 3D or holographic version of a TV (http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=261). I’d say the cover artist took this reference and ran with it.
June 5th, 2014 at 3:12 pm
Pussy jokes! I’ll go first.
Ahem. Sorry, just coughing up a hairball, what was I saying?
August 25th, 2015 at 4:50 am
It wouldn’t surprise me if the cover artist has a catgirl fetish.
February 7th, 2017 at 4:07 am
I would like to complain that this (along with several others) does not have the fabulous “It’s Howling Time!” tag.
How clever did the cover designer think he was when he got the word “licked” on there? Must have made him happy all the way home (his mother’s basement).
BAEN! (explosion noise)
September 26th, 2017 at 4:23 am
Three people I hope I never meet:
The guy who painted this
The guy published it
The guy who bought it
October 22nd, 2017 at 1:04 am
I’d forgotten all about this till DSWBT linked it from another cover.
I guess I should say I’d repressed it?
This is pretty close to peak BAEN!meowpewpew
Weapon, cat person, bewbs, horrid text placement, cluttered layout, font problems, orange, and too shiny.