Good News!
One of the rare pleasures of being a published author, a pleasure that plumbers and physicians and highwaymen cannot share, is the thrill of seeing the cover art for your next book.
Well, friends, that just happened to me this very hour. The art department at Tor books just showed me what the cover for my next book, COUNT TO A TRILLION will look like. Naturally they are going to put the title and name on the cover, as well as, in a prominent location, the price. This is merely the initial art.
While it is true that some authors grouse and gripe about mistakes in the cover art, it is my policy never to complain. The editor sent me cover art in strictest secrecy, merely to ask if there are any inaccuracies, for example, in the hair color or cup size of my heroine, Space Princess Voluptua, or whether the polearm held by the Vampire-Bride of the Samurai Nosferatu of Kyoto is a naginata or a glaive–guisarme (the difference of course is that glaive-guisarmes have a hook on the dorsal blade, whereas naginata are smooth: readers notice this crucial details.)
Let us examine the cover art together, shall we?
COUNT TO A TRILLION by John C. Wright
Well, I must say, this looks completely accurate to me. My story starts out on the planet Jupiter, which I describe as having angular flamingos and awkward looking dark trees, evergreen trees, and, due to gravity anomalies, weirdly peaked mountains.
My main characters, Princess Voluptua, Alsan the Magic Lion, and Venomina the Sparkly Vampire Concubine of Kyoto travel in the shape of square-winged crows to Venus, which is a volcanic landscape filled with snakes and watery banners: and I notice the flying horselike crow-lizards of the Moon, which I described in some detail from chapter ten, are visible in the background.
If you look closely, you can see the spaceship shaped like a bloated spider hovering in front of the crater cracks of Mare Imbrium on the moon, which comes from an exciting scene where Voluptua is caught in the carbon nanotube spider web strung between earth and moon, and has to decide whether to use to space vampire powers to escape, at the risk of opening herself up to the negative energies of Dark Force, while fencing her own traitorous brother Lord Doomshadow, whose radioactive sword, Verminfang, has set the oxygen lines leading to the life support chamber (where Little Nell is in hibernation) ablaze! Not to give away the surprise ending, but the princess manages to club Doomshadow over the head with one of the angular flamingos of Jupiter, which were close at hand due to interplanetary migration.
But you know, it sure would be funny if someone used cover art like this and stuck it on a book that did not have even a single flamingo in it. But, ho ho, I am sure that could not happen!
No, friends, I am just kidding. That is not the real cover art for my next book. I insisted to the publisher that I wanted something dignified, austere, artistic for this book, which is actually a serious work of speculative fiction, sort of a departure for me, combining my discontent about modern politics with my heartfelt environmental concerns about global climate change.
The main character is actually an octogenarian scientist named Margaret Shadow, an environmentalist studying the disruption caused by global climate change to the flight patterns of angular flamingos. She attempts to construct an artificial being, whom she calls only by the name ‘Man’ and whom she loves with a mother’s love. The synthetic creature is designed to live and flourish in the harsh and hot environment that industrial civilizations foolish overuse of fossil fuels has brought into being. But this is an environment only her son, not Margaret herself, can live in, and so the environment, and man’s inhumanity to man, tears mother and son apart. When they part for the last time, they stand on the oil-streaked beach with tear-streaked eyes, watching the last flight of the last flock of angular flamingos in the environment. It is a very quiet, sad, and solemn story.
I told, nay, I demanded, that the publisher give me cover art in keeping with the dignity of the work of art and with my stature as a well known and well respected writer. Here is the cover picture:
The Shadow Men by A.E. van Vogt
My original title was called MAN OF SHADOW, but the editor changed it to the briefer ‘THE SHADOW MEN’ and told me to write under my alternate pen name of Alphonso Earwince van Vogt. Our hope is that readers will pick up my book by mistake.
This picture is almost accurate. I had envisioned Margaret as much older, and her son as a little boy grown in a vat, not made of metal, and looking like a chubby pink-cheeked eight year old, and I don’t recall a scene where he is grabbing her shrieking yet space-lingerie-clad redheaded body with his brutal metal hands while firing a deadly space-raygun from his iron finger, but nonetheless I think it conveys the mood and atmosphere of the work, even if it does not depict a specific scene.
My only complain with this cover art is — where are the angular flamingos?
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
