Rehuing

Next year, Gollancz is relaunching their venerable Science Fiction Masterworks series, a set of 70-odd books which are, with a few odd inclusions and exclusions, the central texts of the genre. Series relaunches are a necessary evil in the book world: every five or ten years, a publisher decides a line is looking tired, and needs an exciting new look. We've seen this recently with Penguin Classics, Penguin Modern Classics, Vintage Classics, Oxford World's Classics, and so on. It's a pain in the arse if you've been collecting books from a series--spines no longer match, or else a book you've already bought suddenly looks a hell of a lot nicer, and you feel a bit gypped. Or, at least, you do if you're an obsessive like myself.

This Gollancz relaunch has taken a slightly odd approach, though. Instead of commissioning new artwork for the books that were already in the series, or just adding the new dress to the same image, they've kept the old artwork but messed with the palettes to produce a range of sickly hues.

Here are some of the first books due to be relaunched, in their old and new forms.

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Cover art for the first four is by Chris Moore, and the rest by (in order) Fred Gambino, Jim Thiesen and Boris Vallejo*)

Although I haven't read Lord of Light (with or without the missing A in the author's surname), I can say that all the rest of the books shown above are genuinely great works of science-fiction, most of which I came to through this series. However, I'm not sure that these revised covers are an improvement.

Gollancz is also reusing this cunning ploy to add Kurt Vonnegut's great apocalyptic novel Cat's Cradle to the series. Their paperback-sized jacketless hardback will look like this...

 

..as opposed to the current Penguin Modern Classics paperback, which has this cover by noted album cover artist Julian House.

 

* All right, here's a link to Vallejo's stuff: make sure you have your tolerance for the sort of art that appears on the side of shaggin' wagons turned way up, though. The Gateway cover is unusual for Vallejo in not containing any nude women with unlikely breasts and 1980s big hair.