Oct 09
Dead Stuff with Big Teeth Comments: Unable to nail Soapman to his chair, Throckmorton suspended him next to his brother in a tube of mineral oil.
Published 2003
Dead Stuff with Big Teeth Comments: Unable to nail Soapman to his chair, Throckmorton suspended him next to his brother in a tube of mineral oil.
Published 2003
October 9th, 2013 at 9:30 am
‘They mocked me,’ cackled Chris de Burgh, ‘but when my clone army strikes my chart triumph will be assured!’
October 9th, 2013 at 9:42 am
The eternal conundrum: what does he have in his hand and where is he going to put it?
October 9th, 2013 at 11:10 am
“In his prime Laumer could nail you to your reader’s armchair”
Quote goes on:
“Sadly, Laumer hit his prime some years ago and has been in steady decline ever since. Expect to be mildly stuck to your have-some-time-to-kill-waiting-for-the-gas man armchair.”
October 9th, 2013 at 11:12 am
Star Fleet had worked out how to deal with the Red Shirt staffing difficulties on the Enterprise.
October 9th, 2013 at 12:07 pm
It was 2003, and someone should have told the artist he wasn’t limited to 16-color mode anymore.
October 9th, 2013 at 1:20 pm
So Laumer wrote cheesy vampire fiction too? ‘Cos that creepy dude in the red, he don’ t cast no shadow, man. And I made the mistake of taking a closer look at his face. He seems pretty vacant(and he don’t care). What is this guy, like a high-tech Jeffrey Dahmer?
You know, if they think I’m gonna wanna read this with a cover… wait! Eric Flint! Baen? Oh, how can anyone resist?
October 9th, 2013 at 1:30 pm
Judging by the review quote, Keith Laumer was a member of the Piranha Brothers’ gang.
“So this bloke Keith came to me house and said: ‘Dimbley, you’ve been a naughty boy,’ then he took a hammer and nailed me to me reader’s chair… I bled all over his suit, and then he really got mad…”
October 9th, 2013 at 1:31 pm
Any moment now, that short dude starts singing “To dream… the impossible dream…”
So much for pathos!
October 9th, 2013 at 4:10 pm
Looks like either a rejected cover for a Robin Cook medical thriller or a poster for Back To The Future IV.
October 9th, 2013 at 4:25 pm
My reader’s armchair? I don’t have a reader. If I did, he wouldn’t be too pleased to find that I had been nailed to his armchair.
If, indeed, he had an armchair.
October 9th, 2013 at 5:55 pm
“In his prime Keith Laumer was just another common or garden murderous psychopath. However things turned nasty when he started to write for Baen.”
October 9th, 2013 at 6:16 pm
Another ghastly Baen cover. Is there no end?
As Diderot would say: “Sci-fi readers will not be free until the last Baen writer has been strangled with the entrails of the last Baen cover artist.”
Now, have a happy day! 🙂
October 9th, 2013 at 7:25 pm
I get it — he’s a hypnotist:
“SLEEEEP!”
October 9th, 2013 at 8:50 pm
“Glen, come on out of there, you are being a drama queen. Everyone has to get the colon check done, its mandatory!”
October 10th, 2013 at 12:32 am
This work is by KEITH LAUMER according to the giant caps on the top…so why does it need to be “complied and edited” by Eric Flint? Is it a book of short stories? If so, I wonder what other stories could have been chosen for the cover besides the one about floaty-glowy-people in cylinders. It can’t be liquid in those tubes or the hair on the men would presumably be floating around like Luke Skywalker’s in bacta healing solution. I’m not going to lie, though. I am intrigued by this Baen…
October 10th, 2013 at 12:49 am
“I took the liberty of examining this reader, and found thet the only reason he was sitting in his armchair with this book, was because it had been nailed there.”
October 10th, 2013 at 10:32 am
@Phil – I have this great view of you with your man servant.
Man servant: And what would sir like to be read today?
Phil: well… How about something we can really nail ourselves to… A vintage Laumer?
Man Servant: Good Show Sir.
October 10th, 2013 at 3:47 pm
No color blend title, Baen? Don’t listen to the people who tell you to stop — don’t ever stop being you.
October 10th, 2013 at 7:15 pm
I love the cut-and-paste look to this cover. It’s like Baen was saying to the prospective reader, “We didn’t care, why should you?”
March 18th, 2014 at 7:03 pm
This cover. Wow.
March 18th, 2014 at 7:55 pm
Have you noticed that it is now 2014 AD… and not a single human being has been put in a giant transparent vat yet?? Not one!!
That’s one “prediction” that needs to be sealed in a vat and buried…
March 18th, 2014 at 11:18 pm
@ARYngve: Hey now! I’ll have you know that I’m typing this from a transparent vat RIGHT NOW.
I do wish my original would stop standing in front of my vat, arms outstretched, leering at me. It’s just creepy.
September 24th, 2017 at 2:59 pm
@AR: in hindsight, the trade-off was that we lost out on vats and got Steam instead.
August 12th, 2022 at 11:54 pm
@B’man (12): There will only stop being these ghastly covers when they go out of business and the remaining ones crumble back into the cheapest-possible wood pulp that they’re made of.
I have been mercilessly weeding the book collection here at Chez XN, and these are in much worse shape than books 10-30 years older. They also require eye drops and nose spray, as the decay is pronounced and stinky. We have a few books over 100 years old that haven’t gotten that bad, and many various paper things 50-60 years old that also are fine.
Seriously, I’ve got a scrapbook of newspaper clippings from the first Moon landing that survive better than that. Paperbacks that decay faster than daily newsprint are proof that this is a publisher that knows it’s putting out DESF/FC — Disposable Extruded SF/F Content. Shouldn’t take long for that copy of “Armor of Light” I recycled recently to finish decaying even before it’s recycled.
Also, Laumer in his prime was quite good. Sadly, he kept churning out DESF/FC for years after he’d had a massive stroke, and it shows.