{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/whorl/1055",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "whorl",
  "thread": {
    "id": 1055,
    "subject": "The cover of IN GREEN'S JUNGLES",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2000-12-08T03:33:31+00:00",
    "last": "2000-12-08T03:33:31+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<whorl-v0012-0053@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "The Reverend Jacob Corbin",
        "address": "webmaster at afriendlysbooks.com"
      },
      "date": "2000-12-08T03:33:31+00:00",
      "subject": "(whorl) Re: The cover of IN GREEN'S JUNGLES",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "I thought the covers for LAKE OF THE LONG SUN and EXODUS FROM THE LONG SUN were both\nattractive and skillfully executed -- they had an air of old-fashioned futurity, like\nthe kind of paintings people living in the Whorl might have actually made, as opposed\nto the stiffly-posed, airbrushed techno-fetishism of, say, a David Weber cover.\nNIGHTSIDE and CALDE were ehhhh, but not embarrassing.  The new TPBs of FREE LIVE FREE\nand DOCTOR DEATH are both attractive and classily understated.\n\nThe Short Sun jackets have good layouts and nice printing quality -- it's the pictures\nthemselves, or more accurately what they depict, that bug me.  Call me crazy, but I\ndon't like walking around with naked women or badly-rendered aliens on my book\ncovers...they drag the books back into the mire of generic adolescent sf/fantasy.\n\nLiteral representation is the telltale mark of genre muck -- how many abstract fantasy\nnovel covers have you seen lately, for instance?  (The only ones I can think of belong\nto Terry Pratchett books.)  There are plenty of approaches that would have worked\nequally well or better.  For instance, since both OBW and IGJ could be considered\nplanetary romances, a well-done landscape painting or a Photoshopped photograph would\nhave been classy while still communicating some of the exotic appeal of the novels.\nAnother alternative would have been to depict the events of the books in metaphorical\nfashion, like on the British paperbacks of Iain M. Banks (USE OF WEAPONS, for instance,\nhas a great cover illo of an empty chair lit by a solitary floodlight with a gun\nsitting on the floor and a battleship silhouette in the background...you'll not find\nthose props in the novel, but they perfectly convey the tone of the book).  Or the\npublishers could have forgone an illustration entirely and grabbed the reader's\nattention by sheer dint of design work, like on William Gibson and Neal Stephenson's\nrecent novels, or the gorgeous Alfred Bester and PK Dick paperbacks they've been\nrereleasing.\n\nForgive the rant, but I remain convinced that half of sf's problem in connecting with\nthe public at large can be laid at the feet of just plain bad book design -- printing\nprocesses and paper stock may have improved since the pulp era, but the underlying\naesthetic is the same: \"naked women and/or monsters sell books\", and incidentally keep\naway people who might otherwise be tempted to try them."
        },
        {
          "kind": "sig",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Reverend Jacob\nhttp://www.fortunecity.com/tattooine/shirley/272/\n\"People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.\"\nRichard M. Nixon\n\n\n\n*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun."
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}