Jo Walton ([info]papersky) wrote,
@ 2009-06-14 17:21:00
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More Tor posts...
Heinlein's Friday, Atwood's The Robber Bride, A Fire Upon the Deep.

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[info]webbob
2009-06-14 09:36 pm UTC (link)
The link that is supposed to lead to your post about Friday points to the Macmillan US page about Inside Straight instead.

Was disappointed as I was very much looking forward to reading your post about the Heinlein book.

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[info]agrumer
2009-06-14 10:01 pm UTC (link)
"The worst book I love: Robert Heinlein's Friday" by Jo Walton

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[info]papersky
2009-06-14 10:34 pm UTC (link)
Sorry. now fixed.

But it would have been really easy to find, as it's the top post on the site at the moment.

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[info]maviscruet
2009-06-14 09:50 pm UTC (link)
I love A fire upon the deep - superb book.

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[info]antonia_tiger
2009-06-14 09:51 pm UTC (link)
The link for Heinlein's Friday is pointing at something totally different.

"http://us.macmillan.com/insidestraight"

I found the piece pretty easily, since it's still on the tor.com default page.

That's a good picture, a believable body shape, and the mixed messages from that half-down zipper do sort of fit. But it does seem that the shapes become invisible when they're not covered by cloth. Is that some loss of tonality in the original printing and scanning--I see variations in the precise look of that cover, scattered across the net--or does it go back to the original art?

(Sorry, I've been fiddling with computer graphics, and I'm in that sort of mood tonight.)

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[info]goljerp
2009-06-15 03:34 am UTC (link)
All I know is that when the book came out, I was prime audience to spend many a minute furtively doing all that I could to investigate those and other questions about the cover art. Ah, youth.

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[info]antonia_tiger
2009-06-15 06:48 am UTC (link)
Well, I do a bit too much CGI, for fun, and by the standards of the cheap CGI world--programs such as Poser--that's a quite respectable outfit. But you do tend to start noticing things such as lighting and surface qualities. Light reflects and scatters differently from cloth and skin, but I'd expect some skin highlight effects, from the change in surface normals, left to right. Instead, it's burned out, which could be down to the artist or a consequence of the reproduction process.

It's very much a picture of its time, I think. The first time I saw a mobile phone (and it may not have been for a cellular network}, it was being carried by a woman who was wearing a similar outfit. And I recall a report from the 1960s, via the AA, of an insurance company being reluctant to pay a road accident claim because a witness mistook a catsuit for mechanics overalls.

Emma Peel never had that problem.

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[info]redbird
2009-06-14 10:35 pm UTC (link)
I don't think I've mentioned how much I'm enjoying a lot of these, both the ones where I get to talk about books I know and love (like The Left Hand of Darkness) and ones about books I've never read, like The Robber Bride). Thank you.

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[info]eyelessgame
2009-06-15 02:57 am UTC (link)
I taught myself almost all I know about how to plot by lying awake trying to fix the end of Friday in my head.

That's something I really do respect about Heinlein. Even when he screws up (and he does so more often than many of his unreserved fans might admit), he does so in such an intriguing way that it still triggers all this cerebral tinkering.

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