However, a while ago I bought a collection of his SF criticism, Sibilant Fricative, on a whim, and it reminded me just how clever and funny a writer he is. Investigating several of the many, many, many books he has published since The Snow showed me that my loss of interest achieved nothing but the exclusion from my life of some extraordinarily good science fiction, and that I had been an idiot.
So I got his newest, Bête, a splendid story about consciousness, animal rights, prejudice and poor social skills, among other things--the central conceit being the invention of AI chips which, when fed to animals, migrate into their brains and gift them human-style consciousness and the ability to speak.
The cover of Bête is also splendid: the work of Blacksheep (or Black Sheep, I've never been quite sure which), it combines woodcut-style animal silhouettes into a delirious swirl of detail, with little added details like megaphones which play up the themes of the novel. (Click for biggering)
And further hunting around reveals Roberts's forthcoming novel to be entitled The Thing Itself, a brew of John Carpenter and Immanuel Kant that I'm exactly enough of an intellectual show-off to be be able to truthfully state is exactly my cup of tea, and which I want to read right now. The 6-month wait is my punishment for my former foolishness. And it has this great cover, also presumably a Blacksheep design.
3 comments:
Both covers look great but Bête especially.
Those are both beautiful–thanks for curating such great covers. The rest of the Blacksheep work is impressive too.
Lovely jackets/covers--tracking down some of their others...
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