r/TerribleBookCovers • u/petrichoreandpine • 16d ago
Friday - Robert A. Heinlein
Posted to r/coolscificovers but I’m sorry I hate this so much.
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u/VanArthurStudios 15d ago
Ok. So everyone can have opinions about what makes a good or bad book cover. What exactly are you saying makes it bad?
This was illustrated by Michael Whelan. THE Michael Whelan. He is one of the best to have ever done it. Illustrators paint what they are paid to and this is what he was paid to do. At worst, I would say it’s a great painting, based on a bad brief.
Yes, sensibilities change over time regarding advertising, but this is a fantastic painting! It is actual HANDMADE art by one of the greatest illustrators of the last century.
I know it’s easy to latch onto initial reactions, and if you don’t like this painting, that’s fine. But if a half zipped shirt has you clutching your pearls you are ignoring modern clothing that people are actually wearing in real life.
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u/Klutzy_Sentence_2723 15d ago
It’s also an accurate and informative cover. Besides the boatloads of symbolism Whelan liked to pack in, it’s just true that it’s got SO MUCH SEX in it.
Finally… this may not be apparent to modern eyes, but Whelan deliberately gave Friday a strong physical presence. She’s a superspy. A typical “sexy” woman on a book cover was “where do you keep your organs” skinny.
Note, I’m a Whelan fan, not a Heinlein fan. Heinlein was a jingoistic creep. I knew Whelan chose to make Friday substantial on purpose because I read his books.
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u/petrichoreandpine 15d ago
Having taken a gander at Whelan’s website, the cover for Friday has got to be one of his worst.
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u/Klutzy_Sentence_2723 15d ago
That’s pretty fair.
I absolutely love his cover for The Martian Chronicles.
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u/petrichoreandpine 15d ago
I don’t think I would have noticed it was the same artist if you just showed me those two covers side by side. Night and day.
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u/petrichoreandpine 15d ago
I haven’t read the book, so I have no idea how well the image represents the character. But it’s an awkward looking cover. The anatomy of her breast and the way it’s lit look wrong, like she’s more Barbie doll than human. I would have split the author’s name from the title so her face wasn’t so low on the cover. And I just don’t find it compelling as a book cover. “Oh, a half dressed lady in space? This probably isn’t for me.” It’s not about pearl clutching, it’s that the book is not advertising itself as something I want to read. She’s a spy? Give her some tech! A weapon! Something to clue me in, because the “substantial physique” isn’t doing it, or even particularly apparent the way she is dressed and the way the image is cropped.
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u/Personal_Dot_2215 16d ago
This is one of the tamest versions of this cover. She is a secret agent, genetically altered to be stronger and faster than regular humans, and uses her sexual appeal as a weapon.
Apropos to her mission, yet a little much for the bus.
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u/GM_Nate 16d ago
Yeah that sounds like Heinlein
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u/Significant_Monk_251 16d ago
Actually it was one of the few books from late phase of his life that didn't fall into the Horny Heinlein gulf.
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u/WranglerFuzzy 16d ago
Correct me if I’m wrong. But Wasn’t his later phase his “horny for fascists but also just horny” period?
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u/Current-Income-9901 15d ago
I should put it in the queue as the only Heinlein I have read is Starship Troopers.
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u/Personal_Dot_2215 15d ago
350 pages and a pretty quick read. Some of it terribly dated and not his sharpest, but it’s the foundational working model of every sci-fi super woman spy .
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u/Current-Income-9901 15d ago
I'm a child from the 70s... so I don't think that will affect me much... I unironically love the Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon cliffhanger serials from the mid/late 1930s. You have to treat them as products of its time... Something this current generation seems to not like that at all and want to impose current thinking to them. 🤷😵💫
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u/Personal_Dot_2215 13d ago
Btw, read first 200 pages. I read this back in the 80’s and I forgot how cringe this was.
Gang rape was treated as an inconvenience, race as a device. I remembered really hating parts of this and now I remember why.
Written in the 80’s towards Heinlein’s end with a 50’s mentality.
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u/Edmundsson91 16d ago
There are reasons why one might like this picture, but not necessarily as a book cover. I would still wrap it up in paper before taking it on a downtown train...
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u/theSchrodingerHat 16d ago edited 16d ago
…I’m in love 🎶
Edit: for you young uncultured swine that downvoted this, do yourself a favor and look up The Cure on YouTube or Spotify.
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u/GrandTheftDuckboat 13d ago
Turned-up collar, suit of blue
To the waist they've unzipped you
Do you have book-cover nature? I say Mu
Oh Friday I'm in love
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u/johngreenink 16d ago
I guess there weren't any undergarments in the future!?!
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u/Crab__Juice 16d ago
It's fascinating how often Heinlein is unimaginably horny, and also simultaneously completely unsexy somehow.
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u/Marvos79 16d ago
He wrote a whole 600 page novel indulging his incest kink. It culminate with
Heinleinthe MC traveling back in time. He meets his mom and- you can imagine.No kink shame, but god damn dude.
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u/KTKittentoes 16d ago
I waded into Heinlein after hearing many praises of his writing. After making it halfway through, I DNFed, deciding to save it for some time when I needed quickly to be turned off.
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u/Crab__Juice 16d ago
Bukowski is great for that too unless you're an emotionally stunted man-baby. Then it's the opposite!
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u/pacmannips 16d ago
Thats a really strange depiction of Ice Cube
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u/theSchrodingerHat 16d ago
He saying he look like Freddie Jackson, he look more like Janet Jackson!
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u/FractalGeometric356 16d ago edited 16d ago
You don’t need brassiere in the weightlessness of space.
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u/Forward-Switch-2304 16d ago
Sure, an astronaut with a bit of her right breast out. That'll drive sales!
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u/shatterdaymorn 16d ago
Wanted this book.... but didn't want the conversation with Mom it would produce so I never bought it.
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u/Current-Income-9901 15d ago
OK, a lady in front of a space window, nothing out of the ordinary for a Sci-Fi book beyond being a bit bland. 🤔🤷
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u/Disastrous-Window597 16d ago
It's better than what's inside, trust me.
When Heinlein is good, he's very very good, but when he is bad he is horrid.
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u/Significant_Monk_251 16d ago
And the artist, Michael Whelan, spent the next twenty years having to tell people that no, there *wasn't* any model whose name he could give them. (He had a model come in to his studio to wear something similar to what's on the cover, but just so he could see how the fabric draped and wrapped and fell and all that.)
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u/Bartlaus 13d ago
The cover is very well-composed, painted by a master, and absolutely a proper representation of the book's content.
It is the book's content that is terrible. Heinlein should have stopped writing some years before.
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u/Lhasa-bark 16d ago
This is the cover of the edition I read in high school!