Bruce Pennington covers

06/05/98 09:40 Bruce Pennington covers

Whenever I read praise for the Maitz covers I feel this evangelical urge to champion our own original British covers (not to be confused with the various naff covers of the later reprints). Thank you giving me the chance to preach, Dan! The artist is Bruce Pennington, and for my money his covers evoke the romance, the mystery, the great age and the ruinous beauty of Severian's world like nothing else. The covers for Claw and Shadow are the most outstanding, but they all convey - through tone and colour as much as through what is depicted - exactly what the reader is in for. Dan, I'll be happy to scan the covers for you. And anyone else who has never seen them will be doing themselves a favour if they take a peek too.

Agreed. SF fans always assume the moral high ground in the great SF versus Literature conflict, but in fact there's an awful lot of inverted snobbery in there. And the only thing that's worse than a snob is an inverted snob.

I have to agree with this. The cover for Shadow, showing a mysterious figure (Severian) below a cluttered hill, has haunted me ever since I first bought it. There's a sense of age and decay, mixed with a half familiarity of seeing our own past; the figure, totally enfolded in his cloak, is at once a focus and slightly apart from the world. It's full of all the right sorts of ambiguity. By the way, I noticed that the cover of Claw in the Italian translation was the one from this series. I wonder how far they've spread. pws

I have to agree with Tony: the covers for the UK version are (IMHO) far better than the Maitz covers. On the other hand, the covers for the UK version of the Long Sun series are very poor indeed, compared to the covers I've seen for Lake and Exodus on P.Duggan's website. A nice touch on the UK covers, though, is the embedding of stained glass windows in the otherwise naturalistic landscapes. Good conception, poor execution. Plus, I don't like to see clear depictions of protagonists' faces on covers (this is turning into a bit of a rant..better stop). While I'm on tangential and subjective opinions, though a film of the Urth sequence would have to be a travesty, it would also have to feature T. L. de Victoria's "Ascendens Christus in altum" as mood music. Been away for a while. I have to say that a stuffed-to-overflowing Urth mail folder is a nice treat. Kieran C. North West Labs Finisklin Industrial Estate Sligo Republic of Ireland Tel. +353 71 69441 Fax. +353 71 69451 email: kierannwn at tinet.ie

Me either, especially when they don't look like my mental picture, which they invariably never do, especially in this case. The stained glass windows are very nice, and I liked the way the first two joined together to make a bigger picture; I was looking forward to the third and fourth books, and was very disappointed when the spines did not continue to build up but were duplicates of the second. Of course, Calde had the subtitle "Volume Two of the Book of the Long Sun", so I suppose it's only fair that it should have the same cover as Lake! Hello, by the way. Peter. Peter Westlake, Harlequin Ltd, Barrington Hall, Barrington, Cambs CB2 5RG.