From: Michael Straight <straight@email.unc.edu>
Subject: RE: (whorl) My reaction to IN GREEN'S JUNGLES
Date: Wed, 6 Dec 2000 08:53:08 

On Wed, 6 Dec 2000, Endymion9 wrote:

> I like both covers for the reasons you described.  However, I have never
> been ashamed of letting my friends and associates know that I greatly enjoy
> reading scifi, watching Dr. Who, etc. and other things that I've heard
> people in NGs mention could embarrass them.  I wouldn't want a book cover
> that fooled people into thinking I was reading a Physics book.  So I have
> the same confusion as to what people want in a Wolfe cover.  Perhaps if they
> mentioned which Wolfe covers from past books they approve of??

I'm not ashamed of scifi covers, I just don't think the artwork on the
Short Sun books is very good.  The multi-legged thing on the cover of IGJ
just looks dumb.  And Babbie looks too much like a teddy bear on the gover
of OBW.  And Horn's boat is too big, and I just don't like the style of
the artwork in general.  It seems too fuzzy, almost cartoonish.

I think the artwork on the Soldier books is the classiest.  I like the Orb
trade paperback versions of Shadow/Claw, Sword/Citadel (although I don't
much like that illustration on the front of Sword/Citadel) - the original
covers that someone put on a website a while back are even better.  The
illustration on Lake of the Long Sun is one of my favorites, Nightside and
Calde are pretty good, but Exodus is not very interesting.  The cover of
Free Live Free didn't do a very good job of attracting me to the book, but
once I'd read it I thought the illustration captured the characters very
well.  

I like the paperback cover for "Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories
and Other Stories," but was disappointed that they wimped out on the
title, shying away from the weirdness of it by making the second "and
Other Stories" look like a smaller echo of the first rather than forcing
people to puzzle it out and risk looking like they made a blooper (which I
think would have done a better job of attracting attention to the
book:  "Look they screwed up the cover!  No, wait..."

-Rostrum


*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.
*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.moonmilk.com/whorl/
*To leave the list, send "unsubscribe" to whorl-request@lists.best.com
*If it's Wolfe but not Long Sun, please use the URTH list: urth@lists.best.com