Weird stuff on novel covers

[F. King Daniel]

I really like most Star Trek novel cover art (unless it's those useless photo covers).
Over the years I've noticed some neat not-exactly-hidden tributes to other sci-fi shows and other bewildering stuff I thought I'd share here, in case anyone missed them...

(past threads have mentioned one or two of these, but I don't think a full list has been done)

The Romulan Way featured a Colonial Viper from old Battlestar Galactica attacking McCoy and Arrhae.

Q-Squared has a light sabre battle on the front.

Survivors had a little picture of Tasha dressed like a nurse with a man in a TOS-era uniform.

Ghost Ship had an upside down classic Battlestar Galactica on the cover.

Power Hungry was a Star Wars cover.

Fortune's Light features a ringer for Babylon 5's Delenn (someone I know disagrees with me on this one)

Entropy Effect depicts fearsome Hippie Sulu.

Destiny: Lost Souls features a thinly-disguised Stargate Atlantis flying though hyperspace.


Any other Trek cover-art oddities?

 

[F. King Daniel]

Almost forgot: Battle Lines gave Voyager a big, cheesy smiley face.
If the TV Voyager models had it (it's the deflector dish + photon launchers on the book cover), the TV people did a really good job of hiding it!

 

[captcalhoun]

i dunno about Voyager on the battle lines cover, i was wondering what in the name of Kahless those other things are.

 

[Therin of Andor]

Any other Trek cover-art oddities?

The original cover art of Bantam's "Perry's Planet" features a tiny, shadowy image of Kirk, but he's wearing a TMP white T-shirt uniform top with Perscan buckle! IIRC, it was Joe Haldeman (Jack's brother) who pointed this out to me when he visited Sydney.

"Yesterday's Son" has Spock in a unique blue version of the ST II maroon movie uniform.

"Enemy Unseen" features its guest alien on the cover but they used a photo reference of a ST IV Caitian admiral!

Similarly, is the alien on the cover of "The Patrian Transgression" loosely based upon Ted Cassidy's Ruk?

The avian alien in "Ghost-Walker" is derived from photo references of the bird-like alien in cut scenes from "The Cage".

The authors of all of the "Captain's Table" novels make cameos in the background crowd of the connected montage of cover art, buut not necessarily on their own books. (Thus Diane Carey makes her third cover appearance as Piper. So she and Sarda are captains now.)

Cover images of Sarda the Vulcan ("Dreadnought!", "Battlestations!") are based on Greg Brodeur, IIRC.

 

[Christopher]

Q-Squared has a light sabre battle on the front.

I think it was meant to represent more conventional sabers or foils as in "The Squire of Gothos," but charged with cosmic energy. The idea of glowing or electrified swords was around long before George Lucas came along.

Power Hungry was a Star Wars cover.

No, it just draws on the same type of desert-dweller imagery that was presumably an inspiration for the design of the Jawas. Like Roddenberry, Lucas didn't invent any of these things, he just mashed up existing tropes and popularized them.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

The authors of all of the "Captain's Table" novels make cameos in the background crowd of the connected montage of cover art, buut not necessarily on their own books. (Thus Diane Carey makes her third cover appearance as Piper. So she and Sarda are captains now.)

As Piper is described in the book as wearing the yellow uniform top, I've come to the conclusion that Piper's tenure in command of the Banana Republic is enough to get her in the Captain's Table. Otherwise, she had a very fast promotion, to make captain before pajama hell set in.

 

[TiberiusMaximus]

Not really 'wierd' but Kirk is on the cover of his Captain's Table novel but it's not Shatner, it's Kirk...not sure how else to describe it.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Therin: Those are great, thanks!

Christopher: I see where you're coming from, but I find "It only happens to look exactly like Star Wars" a little suspicious.


A couple more:

The asteroid field in the background of Kobayashi Maru? The same one as seen in the Phase II fan film "To Serve All My Days" (1969 edition). Both are the work of Doug Drexler.

On the cover of Mission Gamma: Twilight, Vaughn looks way too much like Old Grey Riker from "All Good Things". IMO.

I've got to mention Kalrind's hilarious monobrow on the cover of Timetrap.

 

[Nardpuncher]

Not really 'wierd' but Kirk is on the cover of his Captain's Table novel but it's not Shatner, it's Kirk...not sure how else to describe it.

Do you mean the one where he's teamed up with Sulu? I looked at the cover and all I can say about what you said is maybe it's not a very good likeness of Shatner...if that's what you really meant.
The same way that in the original run of the DC comics Star Trek they never really got Shatner right.

 

[JarodRussell]

Q-Squared has a light sabre battle on the front.

I think it was meant to represent more conventional sabers or foils as in "The Squire of Gothos," but charged with cosmic energy. The idea of glowing or electrified swords was around long before George Lucas came along.

Power Hungry was a Star Wars cover.

No, it just draws on the same type of desert-dweller imagery that was presumably an inspiration for the design of the Jawas. Like Roddenberry, Lucas didn't invent any of these things, he just mashed up existing tropes and popularized them.

Problem is, once it's popularized, you can't really use it anymore without getting KingDaniel's reaction, and you simply have to be aware of that and accept it. Glowing sabers are light sabers. Can't do anything about it. Any scifi that uses teleportation is ripping off Star Trek, intentional or not. I don't want to Godwin this thread, but it's just that the Swastika is an excellent example for this. If you ever use this symbol anywhere, you need to be aware of the reaction it will provoke. Same goes for glowing sword battles.

 

[Christopher]

Christopher: I see where you're coming from, but I find "It only happens to look exactly like Star Wars" a little suspicious.

Well, first off, they don't look exactly like SW, especially not the Power Hungry cover, which only bears a very vague resemblance at best. As for the Q-Squared cover, the swordfighters are in fencing stances rather than the sort of stances we see in lightsaber combat, and the glowing swords have foil-like "pommels" totally unlike lightsabers, so it's simply untrue to call it "exactly like" SW. The primary reference is obviously to the swordfighting scene between Kirk and Trelane in the climax of "The Squire of Gothos." The use of "energy" swords may have possibly been influenced by lightsabers, but it's a secondary element at best.

And second, as I said, Lucas copied tons of stuff from pre-existing pop culture and cinema, so it's inevitable that other things borrowing from the same sources are going to resemble it from time to time. Just because A resembles B doesn't mean that A is copying B. Usually, it's because they're both copying some earlier C that influenced them both.

(What with the lightning converging on the swords on the Q-Squared cover, I'm always reminded of the Lost in Space episode where Guy Williams and Michael Ansara fought with "plugged-in" swords that were actually electrically charged so that sparks flew whenever they touched.)

 

[JD]

On the cover of Mission Gamma: Twilight, Vaughn looks way too much like Old Grey Riker from "All Good Things". IMO.

I don't see that at all. It's just the Vaugh model, who IMO, looks nothing like Johnathan Frakes.
As for Power Hungry, are you saying those are sand people? I can see plenty of differences between the two. Power Hungry Sand People

 

[EmperorKalan]

Power Hungry was a Star Wars cover.

No, it just draws on the same type of desert-dweller imagery that was presumably an inspiration for the design of the Jawas. Like Roddenberry, Lucas didn't invent any of these things, he just mashed up existing tropes and popularized them.

And let's not even get into the question of "When did reasonable desert outerwear (i.e. Ben Kenobi's outfit in A New Hope) become the de facto Jedi uniform? And since the Jedi seemed to favor that look, didn't that mean old Obi-Wan was kind of sloppy and lazy about staying inconito all thise years?"

Doesn't seem as if you're putting much into it if you're wandering around in the same outfit you used when everyone called you "general", does it?

 

[Greg Cox]

True story: back when I writing the first EUGENICS WARS novel, John Ordover called me up.

"Hey, Greg, is there a helicopter in the novel?"

"Not so far."

"Can there be a helicopter in the novel?"

"Sure, I guess. Why?"

"Because there's a helicopter on the cover . . . ."

 

[David cgc]

Power Hungry was a Star Wars cover.

No, it just draws on the same type of desert-dweller imagery that was presumably an inspiration for the design of the Jawas. Like Roddenberry, Lucas didn't invent any of these things, he just mashed up existing tropes and popularized them.

And let's not even get into the question of "When did reasonable desert outerwear (i.e. Ben Kenobi's outfit in A New Hope) become the de facto Jedi uniform?

The end of Return of the Jedi. But it's still weird, because Anakin, it seems, never once wore those robes while he was alive.

 

[captcalhoun]

Power Hungry was a Star Wars cover.

No, it just draws on the same type of desert-dweller imagery that was presumably an inspiration for the design of the Jawas. Like Roddenberry, Lucas didn't invent any of these things, he just mashed up existing tropes and popularized them.

And let's not even get into the question of "When did reasonable desert outerwear (i.e. Ben Kenobi's outfit in A New Hope) become the de facto Jedi uniform? And since the Jedi seemed to favor that look, didn't that mean old Obi-Wan was kind of sloppy and lazy about staying inconito all thise years?"

Doesn't seem as if you're putting much into it if you're wandering around in the same outfit you used when everyone called you "general", does it?

why does he let the kid he's trying to protect grow up under the moniker 'Luke Skywalker' and not something more unobtrusive like 'Luke Lars'?

 

[Dayton Ward]

True story: back when I writing the first EUGENICS WARS novel, John Ordover called me up.

"Hey, Greg, is there a helicopter in the novel?"

"Not so far."

"Can there be a helicopter in the novel?"

"Sure, I guess. Why?"

"Because there's a helicopter on the cover . . . ."

Something similar happened with Open Secrets. When I saw the cover art Doug Drexler had provided, I changed a couple of scenes so that the Endeavour would be in a position with a need to fire phasers while "near" the station.

 

[Orion Pimp]

The cover of Final Frontier by Diane Carey has a Romulan that bears a more than striking resemblance to magician David Copperfield.

http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Final_Frontier

 

[Christopher]

True story: back when I writing the first EUGENICS WARS novel, John Ordover called me up.

"Hey, Greg, is there a helicopter in the novel?"

"Not so far."

"Can there be a helicopter in the novel?"

"Sure, I guess. Why?"

"Because there's a helicopter on the cover . . . ."

I've had similar things happen to me, though not to that extent. I gave Pazlar a bigger role in Orion's Hounds when Marco told me he was putting her on the cover. I amended descriptions in The Buried Age and Over a Torrent Sea to match the cover images. And the dark and stormy cover to Spider-Man: Drowned in Thunder is so awesome that I took the story in a darker direction to be worthy of it.

Unfortunately, when Margaret settled on a recycled Ships of the Line calendar image as the cover for Greater Than the Sum, it was too late to revise the text to include anything resembling that image.

 

[Greg Cox]

I had a similar conversation regarding an X-MEN book.

"Er, why is Iceman on the cover?"

"He's in the book, isn't he?"

"Not at present."

"Well, it's too late to repaint the cover, Greg."

And that's why Iceman shows up halfway through my X-MEN trilogy . . . .