One Good and Many Bad from Military SF

A popular sub-genre of science fiction is military SF. It is, as are many things, mostly awful. There are occasional startling exceptions however. I recently read Joe McDermott's The Fortress at the End of Time, from Tor, which is being marketed as military SF, and though this is true, it is true in a way that happily subverts any expectations or cliches.

The book, also quite short in a genre which encourages bloats and endless sequels, is a perceptively written first-person confession by a young officer assigned to one of the worst postings imaginable: a boring station in orbit around an ignored planet on the edge of subsistence. The plot concerns the implacable hostility of bureacracy, frustrating attempts to combat the sexual abuse of female soldiers, and attempts to stay uncorrupted in an economy based almost entirely on bribes, favours and patronage. The hero is a stolidly well-meaning but also somewhat priggish and naive man, very well drawn. Though the setting is military, there are no battles and no aliens. McDermott is also imaginative and rigorous in his future physics, and the book is a delight. Even the cover is nice: a lonely figure in a uniform looking out over a nearly dead world. There should be more like this.

To contrast this book with the competition, this is what military SF is normally like, as exemplified by the output of reliably ugly Baen Books (see more on them here and at the end of here), which publishes books for people who just want battles, spaceships with big guns, and aliens that are either dead, comical or in possession of enormous breasts.

Baen (spelled with a double-D)

I've been trying to track down some obscure but supposedly excellent mid-century science-fiction short stories, and I find that some of them are available in new paperback collections published by Baen. That ought to be a good thing, but it isn't entirely--Baen books are almost universally hideous. Typography, colour choices and art combine to make for some of the most embarassing books you could be seen buying or reading in public.

They also tend to make use of one (or rather two) specific selling points in their art.

Those bosoms stay oddly pert for women who don't wear bras (or, indeed, clothes).

The Ingenious Eugênio Hirsch

Sometimes you start out writing one post, and it turns into something else entirely. This was going to be a quick look at the various covers for Philip José Farmer's Flesh (and it sort of still is--see the end). However, in finding said covers, I came across the work of an Austrian-Brazilian book designer who I just had to write about.

Born in Vienna in 1921, Hirsch and his family wisely got the hell out of Europe in 1938, moving to Argentina. Hirsch himself moved to Brazil in 1957, and was soon hired by the Civilização Brasileira publishing house. It was for them that he produced his first cover, for the local edition of Nabokov's Lolita, which caused as much of a sensation in the design world as the book's contents did in the literary world.



Hirsch produced a number of great covers for Civilização Brasileira, including eye-catchingly fleshy takes on Scott Fitzgerald and D. H. Lawrence, and a deeply sinister Graham Greene.











He also worked for several other South American publishing houses.









In the 1960s he went to the US to work for 'Playboy' magazine, producing some uniquely odd photographs...



..before working in Spain and then returning to Brazil in the 1970s. He died in 2001.

So how did I get onto this? Well, one of Hirsch's covers was for Farmer's Flesh, as noted above.



I was thinking about that book because of a wonderful feature over here: The Box of Paperbacks Book Club. The idea is simple--a man bought a big box of cheapo paperbacks from a second-hand bookshop, and decided to read and post about each one, no matter what they were or how well they were written. The range of titles is as pleasingly eccentric as you might hope: everything from the James Bond novels to Flesh to The Man From Planet X #1: The She-Beast to Avengers spin-off novels.

In rough chronological order, here are some of the many Flesh covers, various (mostly antlery) interpretations of its futuristic pagan/sex/orgy madness (I'm not sure you'd call it a good book, but it's certainly memorable).








And then there's the currently in-print version, as part of this collection published by Baen.



From hideous type treatment to Martian Mills & Boon artwork, that last cover is a mess. It is very representative of Baen's fine tradition of ludicrous, boob-tastic, and typographically woeful cover artwork.








The Cold Equations, of the first cover above, is story where a young girl stowaway must be ejected from a spaceship because the fuel aboard is only enough for the planned pilot to reach safety. It has absolutely nothing to do with women in bikinis roaming the snow with mutant sabre-toothed tigers as company.

Some links:
* More on Eugênio Hirsch, as well as the rest of his mental 'Playboy' photos, at Weird Universe
* A brief thesis on the graphic design of Civilização Brasileira (PDF format) at book designer Ana Sofia Mariz's website
* More on the awfulness of Baen covers at Judge a Book by its Cover