Spoilers NO SPOILERS FOR CODA - A Lit-verse Grand Finale...What We Know (Spoilers for Entire Lit-verse)

Yeah it's only recent news thanks to a preview page from one of the Hero collector books.

 

WWWHHHAAATTT


https://twitter.com/TrekCore/status/1426202481550372866

 

There goes the Defiant getting all incursion'd.

For covers with just the ships and no people, the graphics themselves are pretty cool! I love me movie poster style character covers, but this is satisfactory.

 

Those are great covers!

If the story is that good we have nothing to worry about

 

As I quoted myself, I was expecting the third cover to be Voyager or Titan, given that we'd already had nu-DS9 and Aventine on book 2. But now we've got Defiant, that implies 2 out of the 3 books are DS9 heavy (whether they actually are or not is another matter of course, but you are supposed to be able to judge a book by its cover) which obviously makes me very happy.

And yes, I notice that both DS9 and Defiant blend from photo-realistic to obviously drawn and outlined at the edges, yet the Enterprise-E doesn't. Artistic license or a hint to the storyline? Benny Russell reference maybe?

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It seems to me to imply a chronological progression from left to right, the effect getting more extreme with each book. It's not just the station and the Defiant, but the entire background, as if space itself is coming apart. And it seems to be spreading out from the white streak that's behind the Enterprise on the first cover.

I'd expected the breaking glass to be a much bigger component of the third cover, since its placement on the second cover implied it was leading into something bigger. But instead of reality "shattering," it's more like reality being undrawn.

 

Photoshop nerd here! That is the 'find edges' filter to make that effect on the Defiant. As for artistic license, I believe the overall piece to be saying that reality is being pulled away to its basic parts (realistic to hand-drawn-looking) until there is nothing left and then to be rewritten. Obviously, knowing what the story is kind of about colors that interpretation. We could see this as the events in the third book wiping out time and moving backwards to DS9-II and eventually the E-E. If this were an animated set of covers, after all the ships/station are rendered hand-drawn, they just turn into sketches, then when the background anomaly has done its work, the covers would be replaced with the ships from the Prime timeline. This would probably not be that dramatic looking though since its likely only DS9 would make a big visual shift.

 

Oh, I assumed it was just rendering the image as a wireframe or something like it, but I guess if it's a stock 2D still rather than a 3D model, that would make sense.

 

My thought was the whole image is transitioning into the style of the Discovery title sequence.

 

The image they used for the cover is a standard publicity image of the Defiant that we commonly see on things like model kit boxes, Netflix thumbnails, magazines, etc. For 'existing' ships, I think its generally much more sensible and efficient to grab one of the zillions of readily available 2d images from the library of Star Trek. I probably would have tried to at least find a different picture of the Defiant, tho. It stood out right away when I looked at it and was a little distracting.

 

I dunno... It's Picard that's done the most to overwrite the novel continuity.

 

Oh no, I can't unsee it now But also, the splintering on the second cover reminds me of the shard of the sky that "breaks away" at the start of the Picard intro. Probably neither is intended as a reference to the title sequences, but pretty cool anyway.

 

So incredible! Love this so much!

 

That is great. What's the ship under DS9?

 

The U.S.S. Aventine.

 

thanks, didn't recognize it from that angle.

 

Left. Right. Forward. Backward.

Don't be so linear.

 

Yes - in fact it’s the first published photo of the Defiant from its unveiling in TV Guide ahead of the season 3 premiere. The while forward portions of the warp engines are the giveaway.

 

Solid advice in particular when referencing elements of DS9.