Don't you mean, that's why the Iceman cometh?
Weird stuff on novel covers
- Thread starter F. King Daniel
- Start date
Brrrr!
Same thing with DRAGON'S HONOR. I beefed up Beverly's part when I found out she was going to be on the cover.
When I looked at it, I thought "it's a scene from Star Wars". If you all disagree, fine.
But when one sci-fi franchise has established that "look" as part of it's universe (and note that desert world Vulcan has a unique look of it's own) and another uses it or similar, people will say "rip off!".
If Star Wars or Stargate came across a race of humans with pointy ears you'd think Vulcan, right? Despite the fact that elves have had pointy ears much longer.
Yeah, now that I'm not so tired I'm more coherent...I always thought it was a good likeness of Kirk, but looked different enough from Shatner that it was noticeable, a nice way of showing that Kirk isn't Shatner. I dunno if that was the intent or not, maybe it was just a bad likeness.
I thought more of Dune, than Star Wars for Power Hungry.
And by doing so, they just demonstrate that they really need to learn more about the culture that existed before the television and movies they're personally familiar with. If two recent things resemble each other, odds are they're both borrowing from the same antecedents from even earlier. All creativity draws on what's come before. Particularly something as derivative as Star Wars. It's just ridiculous to think that George Lucas was the first person in the history of humanity to depict desert dwellers wearing hooded robes.
Even if that were a valid example, it isn't a valid comparison to something as generic as hooded robes in the desert. I mean, come on.
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That's fun. You don't want to serve the target audience, you want the target audience to serve you.
As said before, when you draw a Swastika, you can't blame other people for associating it with Nazism instead of Hinduism.
Any movie that shows people fleeing from a grey ash cloud will be associated with 9/11, automatically. Can't blame anyone, just accept that it is so.
And glowing sabers are light sabers.
^Of course I can understand audiences seeing a resemblance. But the mistake too many people make is assuming that if they see a resemblance between two things they're familiar with, it's evidence that one is directly and intentionally imitating the other. There's a huge difference between "That reminds me of Star Wars" and "The person who created that must have been copying Star Wars." It's a profound error in logic to assume that the former proves the latter.
I don't understand why that's an oddity.
Not me. Sure I might think "hey they have pointed ears" but I wouldn't go to Vulcan's instantly. It's not like pointed ears are anything new or original, but now if they came across a race with blue skin, white hair, and antennae then I might think they were copying the Andorians.
Because the Bantam novels are squarely TOS novels and yet the artist of the first "Perry's Planet" cover managed to squeeze in a clever TMP reference on a novel published in February 1980, while the movie itself was still in general cinema release! That means the artist must have used an early publicity shot of Admiral Kirk in his T-shirt long before the film premiered in December 1979. The painting would have been done in advance. You really need a magnifying glass to perceive the detail of the short sleeves, rounded shirt tails and black Perscan device, but they are there!
(This cover - I once tried a close-up scan, but it works better when you use a magnifying glass and an actual cover.)
People generally think of "The Entropy Effect" (June 1981) as being the first ST novel to feature TMP uniforms.
"Ohmigod! STAR TREK is ripping off MY FAVORITE MARTIAN!"
Ah, I always wondered why they wouldn't have them back until Enterprise.
But I did mean that entire combination of elements.
Well, they did eventually sneak them into "The Offspring" and "Captain's Holiday", but former The Next Generation staffer Tracy Tormé once revealed at a New Zealand convention I attended that his original proposal for the episode Conspiracy included an Andorian Starfleet officer as the host of the alien parasites.
The lines of dialogue were eventually given to Dexter Remmick, and the blue skin given to Captain Rixx the Bolian, because Rick Berman told Tormé: "We don't do antennae on this show."
Look closely at the recycled STIV footage of Starfleet command in "Conspiracy". There's a tiny Andorian in a TWoK uniform, IIRC.
EDIT: I checked and I can't spot an Andorian. I can see an alien with bobbles of some sort on his head, but it could be anything. Sorry.
EDIT: I checked and I can't spot an Andorian. I can see an alien with bobbles of some sort on his head, but it could be anything. Sorry.
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I can't help but wonder, did this annoy you in a minor way, modifying your stories to match the cover art, or was it just casual?
Do you get approval over the cover art of your novels?