Oct 02

Book Cover Throwback: Heinlein

By Raven Oak

This week’s Book Cover Throwback is from Robert Heinlein.

Besides being an amazing story, the cover to this book is just breathtakingly gorgeous. I honestly miss the days when book covers were works of art, rather than the same photoshopped, stock-photo girl who’s on the other ten books released this month.

That’s not to say that you can’t make art with stock photos, but there’s a higher art involved in painting the cover to a novel, especially one as good as Heinlein‘s Stranger in a Strange Land.

Raven Oak

Bestselling science fiction & fantasy author Raven Oak is best known for Amaskan’s Blood, Class-M Exile, and the collection Joy to the Worlds: Mysterious Speculative Fiction for the Holidays.

She spent most of her K-12 education doodling stories and 500 page monstrosities that are forever locked away in a filing cabinet. When she's not writing, she's getting her game on, enjoying cartography, or staring at the ocean.

She lives in Seattle, WA with her husband, and their three kitties who enjoy lounging across the keyboard when writing deadlines approach.

2 comments

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Raven Oak - Author

I would agree with that assessment. ;) Love this cover. I miss good art covers like this--too many stock photo covers these days.

Jason Pineo

I have this one, and it's a great cover. I always presumed that was Jill right before he kissed her. Smith's 'halo' and calm pose, the gentle play of underwter light, just great. And I always liked that it ran edge to edge. As for the story inside: whatever Heinlein may have said of the work later, I always enjoyed it. And it remains the only book I've ever used for bibliomancy.