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Growing up, US covers for sci fi and fantasy were more often than not absolute poo poo compared to the UK ones. I always wondered why that was and is this still the case?
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Jul 6, 2016 17:35
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NLJP posted:Growing up, US covers for sci fi and fantasy were more often than not absolute poo poo compared to the UK ones. I always wondered why that was and is this still the case? My best guess is "Think of the Children!"
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Jul 6, 2016 17:50
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NLJP posted:Growing up, US covers for sci fi and fantasy were more often than not absolute poo poo compared to the UK ones. I always wondered why that was and is this still the case? There's a current cover for Starship Troopers that features the Mobile Infantry deploying from gunships like it's Attack of the Clones without Marauder suits.. If that's not missing the point I don't know what is.
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Jul 6, 2016 17:54
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Arcsquad12 posted:There's a current cover for Starship Troopers that features the Mobile Infantry deploying from gunships like it's Attack of the Clones without Marauder suits.. If that's not missing the point I don't know what is. Totally missing the point. People are in danger of thinking Starship Troopers is action-packed and interesting. An ideal cover would just have a picture of your worst high-school history teacher/tea partyer uncle
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Jul 6, 2016 18:20
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Arcsquad12 posted:The best Discworld cover is Night Watch doing a parody of Rembrandt's The Night Watch. Fun fact about the painting: it was paid for by a group of rich men playing soldiers. Rembrandt made fun of them by painting the shadow of the captain's hand so it appears that someone his grabbing the crotch of the other soldier. It was also never called the Nightwatch and isn't even set at night, but it got coated with a dark varnish that wasn't removed until the 1940s.
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Jul 6, 2016 19:09
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Elohssa Gib posted:My best guess is "Think of the Children!" edit: it's Saturn's Children by Charles Stross  
SurreptitiousMuffin has a new favorite as of 20:45 on Jul 6, 2016 |
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Jul 6, 2016 20:42
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The Vosgian Beast posted:Totally missing the point. People are in danger of thinking Starship Troopers is action-packed and interesting. An ideal cover would just have a picture of your worst high-school history teacher/tea partyer uncle Oh I know. I still enjoy the book, but the current cover art I found hilarious because it is so far removed from the actual novel. At least the old covers usually had a guy in power armor on them, which is at least tentatively related to the subject matter.
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Jul 6, 2016 21:11
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The covers for the "Lost Fleet" series by Jack Campbell have the main character posing heroically in power armor with a large gun on every book. Except the series is almost entirely focused on fleet actions and the closest the main character gets to wearing power armor is watching the video feeds from his marines capturing PoW camps or space stations. IIRC he doesn't even leave his flagship until the second series.
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Jul 6, 2016 22:05
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Arcsquad12 posted:There's a current cover for Starship Troopers that features the Mobile Infantry deploying from gunships like it's Attack of the Clones without Marauder suits.. If that's not missing the point I don't know what is. The thing is they don't even use drop ships in Starship Troopers. They're basically fired out of cannons to the surface.
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Jul 6, 2016 22:52
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:The problem is the opposite. I can't remember his name off the top of my head, but a British author did an amazing blog post about the different regional covers of his books. The example he gave had the UK cover with a spaceship, and the US cover with a woman in a v-neck latex catsuit lying on her side. Apparently his American agent said US audience weren't interested in spaceships. That is quite astonishingly bad.
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Jul 6, 2016 23:45
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Powerful Two-Hander posted:That is quite astonishingly bad. It looks like a Amazon self-published cover for a Tripping The Rift fan fiction novella.
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Jul 7, 2016 02:17
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Maybe I'm hosed in the head but 70s sci fi covers are fascinating and great and I hate that books don't have that type of art on them anymore. I will frequently buy old 70s books I have no intention of reading simply because I love the cover art
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Jul 7, 2016 02:31
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bm5VoKDuJiE
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Jul 7, 2016 02:56
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SiKboy posted:I always assumed that was Bethan on the cover Terry Pratchett posted:As the druids spread out around a great flat stone that dominated the centre of the circle he couldn't help noticing the attractive if rather pale young lady in their midst. She wore a long white robe, a gold torc around her neck, and an expression of vague apprehension. And while I'm at it, here's Cohen: Terry Pratchett posted:By the light of the torches he saw that it was a very old man, the skinny variety that generally gets called 'spry', with a totally bald head, a beard almost down to his knees, and a pair of matchstick legs on which varicose veins had traced the street map of quite a large city. Despite the snow he wore nothing more than a studded leather holdall and a pair of boots that could have easily accommodated a second pair of feet.
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Jul 7, 2016 03:57
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Tracula posted:The thing is they don't even use drop ships in Starship Troopers. They're basically fired out of cannons to the surface. They do send ships down to retrieve the soldiers after. So like, pick-up ships?
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Jul 7, 2016 04:06
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I don't know the general opinion but of the Discworld series I really liked the Moist Von Lipwig series, due to them being Vetinari realising just how badly Ankhmorpork is being held back by lovely infrastructure, and ordering Moist to fix it. Then some backwater kid invents a train and he's like " I gotta get in on that..."
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Jul 7, 2016 05:46
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BioEnchanted posted:I don't know the general opinion but of the Discworld series I really liked the Moist Von Lipwig series, due to them being Vetinari realising just how badly Ankhmorpork is being held back by lovely infrastructure, and ordering Moist to fix it. Then some backwater kid invents a train and he's like " I liked Going Postal a lot and Making Money was decent, but Raising Steam was pretty much garbage. Nothing much happened and it wasn't funny. I felt like several of his later Discworld books seemed like they were written out of obligation or something, like he was out of decent Discworld ideas but just kept adding to the series anyway. Nation and Dodger were way better than any of the Discworld books that came out after about 2005.
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Jul 7, 2016 06:50
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The guy was writing two books a year with Alzheimer disease right up until he died. I can forgive Raising Steam not being his best work.
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Jul 7, 2016 08:08
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The worst thing is that, arguably, this is a not-inaccurate depiction of the protagonist of the book. (She is, after all, a sexbot model. Living in a society of various robot models originally created to serve and please humans, although humans have since gone extinct.)
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Jul 7, 2016 15:09
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Tiggum posted:I liked Going Postal a lot and Making Money was decent, but Raising Steam was pretty much garbage. Nothing much happened and it wasn't funny. I felt like several of his later Discworld books seemed like they were written out of obligation or something, like he was out of decent Discworld ideas but just kept adding to the series anyway. Nation and Dodger were way better than any of the Discworld books that came out after about 2005. I... kind of agree? To me it felt like he had decent ideas about where he wanted Discworld to go but knew he didn't have enough time, so the last few books felt very forced because he wanted to move things along in a hurry.
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Jul 7, 2016 15:32
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Arcsquad12 posted:The guy was writing two books a year with Alzheimer disease right up until he died. I can forgive Raising Steam not being his best work. This. There's a lot of writing style choices in his finals books that you can see in his earlier ones that had been reined in by an editor who had a good back and forth with him. For obvious reason, this wasn't able to happen anymore. Really sad. Snuff didn't even feel like it was written by him, like it had been ghost written from an outline. I haven't tried any of the other ones besides Unseen Academicals, and that was entirely forgettable.
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Jul 7, 2016 17:54
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I still like Raising Steam, largely because of the anthropomorphism of the train growing grander in each appearance due to the innate narrativium involved and the Goblins finally getting their niche as mechanics and becoming more respected. 
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Jul 7, 2016 19:50
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:The problem is the opposite. There's also the thing where the UK would publish YA novels with different, more sophisticated covers so that adults would be willing to read them in public without being embarrassed or ashamed.
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Jul 7, 2016 23:51
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Arcsquad12 posted:The guy was writing two books a year with Alzheimer disease right up until he died. I can forgive Raising Steam not being his best work. I'm extremely apprehensive about Terry's daughter taking up the discworld series, mostly because I've played the Overlord games.  I'm also apprehensive about sounding misogynistic by saying that.
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Jul 8, 2016 02:07
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Klaus88 posted:I'm extremely apprehensive about Terry's daughter taking up the discworld series, mostly because I've played the Overlord games. You're in luck, then. She's not going to write any or allow any to be written.
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Jul 8, 2016 02:36
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wallaka posted:You're in luck, then. She's not going to write any or allow any to be written. That was my understanding as well. Discworld is well and truly done.
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Jul 8, 2016 02:50
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It's real sad. Discworld has been a mainstay with at least a book a year for a large chunk of my life  Miss you Terry.Even the less good Discworld books were very readable and some of the latter ones were still amazing. I was about to mention Night Watch as one of the later ones but wtf that came out all the way back in 2002? I am also totally unashamed in my liking of the technically YA Tiffany Aching series. edit: oh wait, bad book thread. Well, I thought The Long Earth was a bit crap but I blame Stephen Baxter.
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Jul 9, 2016 12:16
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My biggest grievance with the Night Watch series was it turning into the Vimes show, with the likes of Carrot and Angua vanishing into the ether.
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Jul 9, 2016 14:22
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Alhazred posted:Fun fact about the painting: it was paid for by a group of rich men playing soldiers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Banquet_of_the_Officers_of_the_St_Adrian_Militia_Company_in_1627 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Officers_of_the_St_Adrian_Militia_Company_in_1633 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meagre_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Officers_of_the_St_George_Militia_Company_in_1639
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Jul 9, 2016 14:55
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Inspector Gesicht posted:My biggest grievance with the Night Watch series was it turning into the Vimes show, with the likes of Carrot and Angua vanishing into the ether. To be fair though neither of them would have worked with the book's setup. And we still got pre zombie reg shoe.
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Jul 9, 2016 15:48
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Arcsquad12 posted:To be fair though neither of them would have worked with the book's setup. And we still got pre zombie reg shoe. I think he's talking about the Watch series in general (they did start out as the Night Watch, after all), and he does kind of have a point- the later books like Fifth Elephant and Snuff were very Vimes-centric. That said, Vimes is awesome (at least by my reckoning) so this wasn't such a bad thing.
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Jul 9, 2016 15:58
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NLJP posted:edit: oh wait, bad book thread. Well, I thought The Long Earth was a bit crap but I blame Stephen Baxter. Pratchett thread here, and bitching about Baxter appears entirely on-topic there too.
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Jul 9, 2016 16:34
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Guy Mann posted:There's also the thing where the UK would publish YA novels with different, more sophisticated covers so that adults would be willing to read them in public without being embarrassed or ashamed. Scholastic did the same thing with the Harry Potter books in the U.S.. As if someone couldn't look at the title and know. 
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Jul 9, 2016 22:41
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SilentChaz posted:Scholastic did the same thing with the Harry Potter books in the U.S.. As if someone couldn't look at the title and know. The German art is the worst, though:  
Sham bam bamina! has a new favorite as of 23:50 on Jul 9, 2016 |
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Jul 9, 2016 23:47
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Sham bam bamina! posted:I don't think that's fair to say; they still definitely look like children's books. They just look like much more interesting children's books. The British artwork for the first two is literally "Harry is looking at a train" and "Harry is sitting in a car" - it's hard to blame Scholastic for wanting to dress them up better. The most German-looking Harry Potter ever. What I find more interesting is that they used her full first name on the German cover rather than just her initials. Apparently Germans don't have the same hangups about books being written by women as other countries do?
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Jul 10, 2016 00:46
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Sham bam bamina! posted:The German art is the worst, though: I dunno, I like this style. It reminds me of Jhonen Vasquez a little.
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Jul 10, 2016 02:29
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Sham bam bamina! posted:The German art is the worst, though: *ahem* 
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Jul 10, 2016 02:33
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DID SOMEONE SAY BAD HARRY POTTER COVERS? Have some Chinese knockoffs. EXPELLIARMUS I don't know what that means; am a very casual Harry Potter consumer. Harry Potter and That Time Ron hosed Up Summoning  Harry Potter and the Sexy Centaur Who Punches Dragons  Harry Potter Under Mind Control Lifts Hourglasses Out of Other Hourglasses...?
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Jul 10, 2016 02:57
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bringmyfishback posted:
So many trademark infringements.
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Jul 10, 2016 03:12
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Gann Jerrod posted:It's a shame that the US edition got this much more minimal cover: I had to put up with these things:   
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Jul 10, 2016 03:15
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