The five covers at the top of this post represent my five published works, in chronological order. Let’s take a closer look.

The first cover is a magazine, Galaxy, gone now but once highly influential. It was my first publication and I had the good fortune not only to be placed in Galaxy, but to be the cover story.

Just under the magazine title you will see a yellow-orange rectangle which can’t be read because of data loss. It gives my name and the title of my novella, then lists “Greg Benford: The Stars in Shroud, plus Pournelle, Fabian, Walker:.

These five covers are in order of their publication, not their creation. After a first novel which was unsaleable, I wrote Jandrax. Then I wrote the beginnings of the Menhir novels —  about as many words as Jandrax, but only a fraction of what that project would eventually become. Then I wrote A Fond Farewell to Dying.

At that time I was still unpublished. Before FFTD was finished, I had recognized that a chunk out of the middle could be separately marketed as a novella. I extracted it, trimmed it to fit, and sent it to Galaxy, then finished FFTD. They bought the novella, changed the name to To Go Not Gently, and provided the cover art. All I had to do was sign my name to the contract.

I’ve told all this before, but today we are here to analyze cover art. The scene depicted is quite accurate to the story. That often doesn’t happen. The guy in the center is David Singer, aka Ram David Singh, an American biologist working in the post-nuke era when India is the only remaining country which wasn’t basically destroyed by the last war. He is on his way to an important meeting as he passes through the Avenue of Abominations, a street in Bombay where mutants gather.

It is a somewhat old fashioned style of cover art, completely appropriate to a magazine which had been around since the Golden Age of science fiction.

Jandrax came next. I received an acceptance after TGNG had been bought, but before it was published. The sale of TGNG had no influence.

The art, by Doug Bleekman, is superb. Again, I had nothing to do with it. I saw it first when the author’s copies of the book arrived by mail. The creatures are leers, and yes they should be giant birds, and yes they were supposed to be pink. They also had teeth. I knew that brown reads fierce and pink reads silly, but I chose to work against expectations. The fellow with the long hair, leather clothing, and antique rifle is also true to the novel. He is a second generation survivor of a lost and stranded starship.

My first review, a one-liner in Locus, just talked about fierce flamingos. I have to accept that. Covers are completely about snap judgements.

Notice how big the title is, and how yellow. Against the pink sky and above the pink birds, it really grabs the eye. Notice how tiny my name is. That, too, is appropriate. It was my first novel; nobody had heard of me; making my name bigger would not have sold any more books, and it would have detracted from the overall effect.

I loved that cover. I didn’t love the next one, but we can talk about that next week.

More next time.