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An Eminently Judge-able Cover
March 24, 2008

We just got a package from Ace containing ARCs of Charles Stross's Saturn's Children, due out in July. Ace has fairly nondescript ARCs, so they thoughtfully included cover flats.

This image of the front cover, courtesy of Amazon, doesn't really do justice to the honeycomb-stockinged legs that stretch across the back cover, with pointed toes extending just past the edge of the flap. The entity pictured is Freya, a "femmebot" left struggling to make ends meet after humankind's extinction. Perhaps the novel centers around her quest for non-human sources of the futuristic femme fatale's required quota of unzipped zippered jumpsuits. I am immediately reminded of the cover image on the Del Rey paperback of Heinlein's Friday, which may not be coincidental given that Stross dedicates this book to Heinlein and Asimov and the publicity letter calls it a "late-period Heinlein tribute."

The hot robot babe look is a change for Stross, whose high-tech hard SF novels tend to get abstract covers, though Golden Gryphon's edition of The Jennifer Morgue did feature a sultry woman embracing a handgun. It's also a bit of a shift for Ace, at least judging by the other titles currently on my desk; Phaedra Weldon's Spectre and Alastair Reynolds's The Prefect both have fairly understated covers in muted colors. Is this an effort to expand readership? If so, it may be a misplaced gamble, doing more to put off fans who read Stross for the techs instead of the sex and dismaying readers who are a little weary of Heinlein tributes. John Varley, John Scalzi, and Spider Robinson have been playing that tune for a while now, with varying success; Scalzi is still getting Hugo nods, but the others (much as I hate to say it, as a longtime fan of all three authors) are wearing thin. I can only hope that the novel inside this cover won't live up to its clumsily retro promises of same old, same old.

Posted by Rose Fox on March 24, 2008 | Comments (4)