Time Machine covers tend to draw heavily on clock imagery, naturally, as well as scientic "timey-wimey" stuff, like algebraic-looking stuff, just floatin' around. This will be the toughest book, because so many people have read the Time Machine and grown accustomed to these types of images in association to it, but I don't necessarily think that they capture the feeling of the book, simply by referencing what it's about (which is only loosely limited to "time"). If a book is so popular, do people want to see images from the story-line? the Time Traveller standing in the ancient museum? Morlocks popping out of a hole in the ground? This will require some exploration.
End of Eternity is a cerebral sci-fi who-dun-it style thriller, which also happens to involve some very complex settings, most of which aren't described in much detail in the story, since the characters are the main focus. For this reason, I tend to dislike a lot of the "setting" style book covers that crop up for Asimov books. What are we looking at here? Some...space type things, a planet, a girl in there? I'm not so sure about it. Now, while I'm not sure it would make me want to read the story, I know my favorite of these covers is the one featuring the tunnel that goes on forever. I also like the psychedelic Asimov head one and the Cold War Robot style one of what I assume is Harlan tweaking with some time-related machine. The story definitely has a tone that, like many Ray Bradbury books, even if it was written today, you would feel that it had a flavor of having taken place during the space race.
The Graveyard Game was written in the early 2000s and has a very different feel from the other two, being written in the late 1800s and 1960s respectively. It's a story that is generally unknown, surrounding the fates of a number of cyborgs created by a large company in the near future (2200s), which are immortal. The travel through time simply by LIVING through the centuries at natural pace. The Graveyard Game takes place in several time periods, giving background on some of the characters and their fates, as the two main characters try to unearth information about their disappearing friends. These two covers, in what I think of as a kind of hybrid traditional sci-fi approach meets Dave McKean illustration actually does a fine job of drawing on the feeling set by the book. It is dramatic, but lacks the weight of "classicness" that surround books by such well-known authors as Wells and Asimov. I think I look most forward to this design.
No comments:
Post a Comment