Tuesday 1 March 2011

Never judge a book by its cover - unless it happens to be a Pax Britannia novel

Jamie Fry (of Fighting Fantasy Collector fame) contacted me via my forum yesterday to let me know that Pax Britannia: Dark Side is featured in the latest issue of SciFiNow magazine.

I duly wandered down to my local branch of WHSmith this morning, picked up a copy, turned to the Library section and discovered this...

A full page about Dark Side and the impact its cover makes! Full credit must go to Mark Harrison (cover artist) and Simon Parr (designer), for the point of the piece is how the fantastic cover (a gruesome homage to Georges Méliès A Trip to the Moon) made Senior Staff Writer Jodie Tyley pick up the book in the first place and discover the whole Pax Britannia series.

From personal experience I know that this particular cover has created no like controversy. Mr Harrison's wife hated it (and my wife's not too keen), whereas plenty of people at the SFX Weekender loved it (as does my son), so much so that the book sold out during the course of the weekend.

Anyway, at the end of the article, you are invited to discuss your feelings about the Pax Britannia series over at the SciFiNow forum, which you can find here.

The Dark Side cover is certainly my favourite to date out of all the Pax Britannia covers. The challenge now is to come up with something equally inspiring for the cover artist of the next book in the series.

What about a steampunk King Kong...?

1 comment:

Jonathan Green said...

You think I'm kidding, don't you?