{"id":155,"date":"2008-06-15T08:34:00","date_gmt":"2008-06-15T16:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=155"},"modified":"2008-06-15T08:34:00","modified_gmt":"2008-06-15T16:34:00","slug":"like-many-of-my-relationships-in-fact","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=155","title":{"rendered":"Like Many Of My Relationships, In Fact"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a onblur=\"try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}\" href=\"http:\/\/rifters.com\/real\/uploaded_images\/mahlstrom-722607.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;\" src=\"http:\/\/rifters.com\/real\/uploaded_images\/mahlstrom-722605.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a>Just came across this cover art for the upcoming <a href=\"http:\/\/www.randomhouse.de\/book\/edition.jsp?edi=281457\">German edition<\/a> of <i>Maelstrom<\/i>.  It is beautiful, but wrong.<\/p>\n<p>The feel of the piece is great, don&#8217;t get me wrong.  Technically, it&#8217;s terrific.  It even evokes a couple of specific scenes from the very top of the tale.  But I&#8217;m not quite sure where Lenie Clarke is.  Perhaps she was eaten by that Alien V. Predator hybrid down in the lower left corner.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d assumed that the armor (complete with Gigeresque back spines) from the <a href=\"http:\/\/rifters.com\/real\/2007\/12\/benthic-baptisms.html\">cover of <i>Abgrund<\/i><\/a> had been meant to portray Scanlon in his preshmesh outfit.  I guess not.  Can&#8217;t be anybody inside this <i>Malhstrom<\/i> armor but Lenie, and she <i>never<\/i> overdressed for such occasions.  There&#8217;s a reason I called it a dive<i>skin<\/i>:  she&#8217;s a &#8220;slick back amphibian&#8221;, remember, with occasional implants and implements protruding to break her lines.  Basically I envision her as a black-spraypainted nude with a fetish for chrome piercings.  (By the way, it would be a mistake to think you can infer anything about authorial taste in such matters from that description.)<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, bottom line, it&#8217;s the kind of cover that would catch my eye (in a <i>good<\/i> way) if I saw it in a bookstore.  I would not be embarrassed to be seen carrying it on a subway (although I&#8217;d be even <i>more<\/i> not-embarrassed if a blurb or two should find its way onto all that fiery cloud cover by the release date).  And it&#8217;s light-years ahead of the abomination Tor<sup>*<\/sup> inflicted onto <i>Blindsight<\/i>&#8216;s hardcover edition. <\/p>\n<p>So this is not a complaint, not by any means.  Just commentary.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size:85%;\"><sup>*<\/sup>Speaking of Tor, I see that they too are releasing a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Maelstrom-Peter-Watts\/dp\/0765320533\/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1213548674&amp;sr=1-1\">new edition of <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Maelstrom<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-style: italic;\"><\/span> here in N&#8217;Am.  Two days before Christmas, in fact.  It would have been nice if they could have, you know, <\/span><span style=\"font-size:85%;\"><span style=\"font-style: italic;\">told<\/span> me.  But hey, why start now?<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just came across this cover art for the upcoming German edition of Maelstrom. It is beautiful, but wrong. The feel of the piece is great, don&#8217;t get me wrong. Technically, it&#8217;s terrific. It even evokes a couple of specific scenes from the very top of the tale. But I&#8217;m not quite sure where Lenie Clarke [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ink-on-art","category-writing-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}