Category: Book Covers

Classic Sci-Fi Book Cover: “Snow Crash”

It’s hard to believe that 32 years have passed since Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash was published. Not only is it one of the best books of the 1990s, it’s also one of the definitive novels of the cyberpunk genre. In retrospect, one of the most surprising things about Snow Crash is that it’s not really a dystopian novel. It’s more like a satire, a spoof of corporate America’s relentless pursuit of wealth and power in the 21st Century. Its hero (deftly named Hiro) is a Ninja-level hacker by night and a pizza-delivery guy by day. The pizza company he works for is run by the mafia (which has become legal), and if he fails to deliver a pizza in thirty minutes or less, Hiro faces summary execution.

Yeah, it’s that kind of book. It also has some really kick-ass fight scenes.

I love this cover by Bruce Jensen because it’s photorealistic and immediately suggests a narrative, which is perfect for this kind of sci-fi, quasi-adventure novel. More importantly, it captures the crazy melange of elements that Stephenson squeezes into the novel. you’ve got a hero with his samurai sword walking towards a clearly futuristic, cyberpunk city. Paradoxically, he’s passing through an ancient stone doorway that might be a relic from Bronze Age Persia. 

It’s an enigmatic cover but also thrilling and stimulating to the imagination. Which is exactly what one expects from a great sci-fi book cover. 

Classic Sci-Fi Book Cover

Most of the art I’ve included in my on-going Classic Sci-Fi Book Covers series has been from the 1970s and 1980s. Two golden ages of sci-fi, surely, which, more importantly, marked my golden age of sci-fi—my middle- and high-school years when I devoured all kinds of science fiction novels from the previous decades. 

And so it is with some surprise that I submit this episode’s sci-fi cover, which is only from 1998. But it’s still a classic. An instant classic, actually, and not just because it was done for one of the most influential sci-fi novels of all time, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Believe in Electric Sheep. Calling PKD a science fiction writer makes a bit more sense that calling Kurt Vonnegut a science fiction writer, or Franz Kafka a science fiction writer, but not much. Like Vonnegut and Kafka, Dick wrote surreal, even psychedelic novels that deal with issues of compassion, violence, identity, sanity. Most of all, they describe the problem of discerning reality from the fake. (The “ersatz,” as Dick likes to call it in his typical Germanophilic style). 

Do Androids Believe in Electric Sheep is Dick’s most famous book, in part because it inspired Blade Runner but also because it’s just a fine, complex, and vivid novel. Rick Deckert, the protagonist, is a bounty hunter who finds and kills runaway androids (called replicants in the film, these are flesh-based artificial people who look and act like human beings, only crueler.) 

The book was published in 1968 and has gone through dozens of editions and covers. But this cover, created by commercial artist Bruce Jensen, is my favorite. It depicts a male figure who might be a Greek statue, or a wax dummy (or an android), and yet whose expression conveys a sense of pathos that the viewer can’t quite look away from. This sense of pathos is amplified by the fact that lying between the viewer and the figure is a grid of what seems to be hog-wire, evoking a plot point in the book. Deckert, like many people in his dystopian future, keeps a farm animal as a pet—in his case, a sheep. But the wire also has echoes of the Holocaust, which is especially interesting since Dick’s inspiration for the book came after reading the diary of an S.S. Officer guarding a concentration camp. The figure is, we sense, a prisoner, although we don’t know what of. (Spoiler: it’s modern civilization.)

And then there is the sheep itself, rendered in a hallucinogenic little box over the male figure’s left eye. The only point of color in the work, the sheep draws the viewer’s attention the same way Deckert’s sheep draws out his latent humanity—it represents nature, vitality, warmth. Most importantly, it serves as something to love. 

Love, as it turns out, is the last human quality that the androids learn (and most never do). It is also, Dick strongly suggests, the defining aspect of living things.

Classic Sci-Fi Book Cover

One of the first books I ever checked out by myself from the library was Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man. I was a tween-aged sci-fi nerd at the time (as opposed to a middle-aged sci-fi nerd now), and this book started my life-long love affair with Bradbury’s fiction. More magical realism than actual sci-fi, his work always evokes a sense of the wonder I first felt when reading great science fiction. 

Like Bradbury’s other masterpiece, The Martian Chronicles, this book is actually a “fix-up”—a collection of previously published short stories that are grouped together by a framing device. In this case, the “frame” is an unnamed drifter and former carnival worker who has tattoos all over his body (except for one crucial, bare spot on his upper back; you’ll have to read it to find out why). If you stare at any of the tattoos long enough, it comes to life and shows you a story—which leads directly into the short story in question.

It’s a very clever idea, and hauntingly rendered. Some of the more famous stories in the collection are “The Veldt,” “Zero Hour,” and (my favorite) “The Long Rain.”

The cover for the book’s first edition, by artist Dean Ellis, is still the best, and is also the one on the edition I checked out from the library, lo those many years ago. A work of trippy surrealism, the man in the painting does not look like the character in the book (who is flabby and middle-aged and has hair) but it captures brilliantly the sense of intellectual lyricism and magic, of which Bradbury was a master. 

Classic Sci-Fi Book Cover

I went into my favorite used bookstore recently, and I was shocked to find only a handful of Michael Crichton’s old books on hand. When I was a kid, he was ubiquitous. He was guaranteed to have not just an entire shelf dedicated to his work, but often an entire case. 

I mean, dozens of movies have been made out of his books, and that’s before I even need to mention his two most enduring franchises: Jurassic Park and Westworld. The guy was clearly a genius.

My early introduction to Crichton was when I was twelve and I read his first big hit, The Andromeda Strain. I would argue that this one book created the entire techno-thriller genre more than a decade before Tom Clancy took over the pop-novel world. The Andromeda Strain is packed with all things nerd: aliens (in the form of a lethal micro-organism that turns human blood to sludge and eats radiation for breakfast), lasers, supercomputers, a high-tech underground lab, and a nuclear bomb set to blow up in T-minus-Holy-Shit minutes. 

The copy I read was an early edition with a cover by Paul Bacon. The cover depicts what appears to be the outline of a petri dish containing two colonies of microscopic life, but with all the shapes described by computer-generated digits. To top it all off, the image is superimposed over an image of planet Earth, looking very small and vulnerable as the Andromeda strain begins to literally invade it.

A simple design, but one that perfectly evokes the book’s theme of technology-plus-biology-equals-disaster. (The organism, as is revealed in the plot, was harvested by a top-secret military program to find extraterrestrial extremophiles for bio-warfare.) 

You can read a great tribute to Paul Bacon here.

Classic Sci-Fi Book Cover

The only time I ever got in trouble with my parents over a book was when I was thirteen. The book was Nova by Samuel R. Delany, and was reading while nested in the back of the family car on a long trip. My stepmom read the back-jacket copy, which made the book sound a lot racier than it really was, and freaked out. However, she was (and is) a great reader herself, and she and my dad knew better than to try to keep me from reading the book. (You can’t keep kids from reading what they want, not even back then, in the pre-Internet days.) 

So, yeah, I read the book, and I loved it. And not for the prurient reasons my parents might have expected. Rather, Nova is classic Delany—literary science fiction that somehow feels gritty and realistic despite being set in a far future environment. I had never read Delany before, and I was blown away by his ability to write a “hard” sci-fi novel, full of fresh ideas and plausible technologies, that also kept my interest as a work of fiction. That is, it’s about believable characters with believable agendas and distinct personalities. It felt more like Stephen Crane than Isaac Asimov.

I probably picked up the book because I was drawn to the great cover art, one of a fine series of Delany works that Ballantine published in the 1970s. Its cover, which is still my favorite of any Delany novel, was done by fan-artist-turned-pro Eddie Jones. It might seem dated, but for me it still captures the surreal, distant-future vibe that Delany managed to bring to his best books. 

I still have it on my bookshelf, lo these many years later…   

Classic Sci-Fi Book Cover

I could write a whole post on the various covers of Ray Bradbury’s classic novel Fahrenheit 451 that have come out over the years, as other people already have. My favorite is this one from the 1970s (the time of my childhood). It’s by a great illustrator named Barron Storey.

I like it because it show the main character, Montag, immersed in a kind of hell, which is a great metaphor for the authoritarian dystopia that he finds himself in. Also, Montag looks kind of like a bad-ass.