One of the lessons my fairly priced and invaluable liberal arts education taught me was that books have covers, and that I shouldn’t judge the contents of said books by said covers. But as a writer and editor who made upwards of three value meals off the publishing industry last year alone, I think I’m qualified to do a little judging. And since there weren’t any job openings for judicial positions on Craigslist, I decided to write this article about a stupid (stupid awesome) book cover.
The perfect cover works on multiple levels to sell a book and keep it fresh in the minds of readers. It should probably represent the contents of the book, literally or abstractly, and it should ideally please the author, although that’s not always a requirement. There’s no formula that ends with the perfect cover—something that stands the test of time and burns itself into cultural memory—but the fact stands that a good cover can go a long way towards a book’s success. Which is what makes this particular cover of Spacial Delivery so baffling. Baffling and perfect.
Cover artists aren’t always in contact with the authors before they’re commissioned to create an elegant design that accurately represents the literature. Or, in the case of science fiction, before they’re paid in sheets of dubious LSD to paint an elegant scene of a unicorn in high-heels leaping from a comet as it smashes into an emerald city. I know that occasionally cover artists aren’t even able to read the book for which their cover is being created. I know these things, I just don’t care. This article isn’t called “Let’s Calmly And Reasonably Talk About Cover Design,” it’s called, “Where Did My Drugs Go And Holy Shit, Where Did That Bear Come From?”
To be fair, this lusty predator (and the bear standing behind him) aren’t irrelevant: Spacial Delivery is about a man unceremoniously trucked around the planet of Dilbia by a bear-man who also delivers mail. A space-bear-mail-man. A mail-male-space-bear.
A book like this should be pretty awesome, right? I generally expect giant, sexually-deviant bear-men to keep me on the edge of my seat by savagely fighting on every page and perhaps showering once every three or four chapters. Unfortunately, or fortunately, if you’re me and writing this, it falls in the shallow end of the content pool.
So I said to myself, “Self, you should make fun of this cover because it’s crazy and you love to tear down others in order to make yourself feel better.” And I did, merrily chuckling at my own wit the whole time. Then I went to the internet to do some research, and found out that the clever, groundbreaking idea I had just birthed had been done before, several times, and probably by better-looking people with big muscles and cool cars.
That’s okay, though, because after three or four days of cutting the eyes out of celebrity magazine photos, I had an epiphany: what would the book be like if the cover wasn’t just crazy and stupid, but accurate? What if the story was based on the cover? Sure, there are bear-men in the book, and yes, the protagonist has red hair and impossible muscle tone, but in no way does the novel achieve the level of discomfort promised by the image. And if there’s one thing I want to do, it’s make everyone in the world as profoundly uncomfortable as I am.
With that goal in mind, I decided to write a small sample of what I think Spacial Delivery could have been, in a better, more terrifying world. Don’t think of this as a critique of Gordon R. Dickson’s work, which has spawned sequels because, sure, we’ll all be dead eventually anyway, why not. Instead, consider it an indictment of any time or place that would allow that cover to be paired with anything less appropriate than a sexual relationship between a man and a bear. Bear-man. Space-bear-mail-man.
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The Erotic Space Journeys of Randall Spaceface
Chapter One: Ursine So Fine
I ran when darkness fell.
I ran harder than I’d ever run before, stumbling through the alien jungle, driven by a terror so wild that now, in hindsight, surprises me—where had my training gone? The cool, collected Randall Spaceface, fresh from the space-cademy with his shock of red hair and well-pressed shirt, was gone. When faced with real horror, the kind they don’t tell you about on human worlds, my resolve had torn as easily as my shirt. But I had left that behind—the fear, the pain, the shirt, all of it—and now it was just me and the jungle. I patted my head. At least my hair is still fantastic, I thought.
It was hard to measure time on the strange planet. After I landed, things escalated so quickly that I still wasn’t sure about the sun cycle, the hours in a day…hell, I didn’t even know how many suns the planet might have. I was lost, groping blindly in the darkness, woefully under-equipped for survival on an alien world. Not that it mattered much. None of it had mattered three hours ago, except getting far away from him.
I huddled in the crook of a great tree whose bark was leathery and pungent, like citrus, only, you know, not. There, sheltering myself from strange sounds and unseen evils, I wrapped my arms around my knees and drew them to my chin. My teeth chattered in spite of the wet heat that made the air thick and swampy.
He had fallen asleep afterwards. Of course he did; snoring, drooling from his huge, cruel snout, the chains and straps on his wide chest and wider belly moving slightly with the in-and-out of his breath, rancid with some awful indigenous liquor. My own chains and straps were loose—he had let me go earlier, for sport. Chased me in circles. Snuffled my crotch. Dipped me in honey.
I cried.
Of course I cried. I wept like a baby as he explained to me, in calm, surprisingly understandable human-standard, that since my escape-pod had landed on, and destroyed, his mud-brick shed, I owed him a debt. A debt that he would collect, I quickly discovered, from my chiseled abdomen and firm buttocks.
I slipped away from his settlement after watching him sleep heavily for several hours. I knew I had to take my chance—I wouldn’t survive another round with my furry captor. I don’t know what scared me more, the thought of dying in his strong, furry arms, or knowing that my death wouldn’t stop him at all. I shivered in the crook of the strange alien tree in a strange alien jungle, though the temperature was quite warm. I fell into a deep sleep.
In that tree, my dreams came and went with a new rapidity, a new ferociousness than I’d known before. Images were harsh and scattered, as if the light reflecting off of everything passed through prisms and pinholes before it reached me. Smells and sounds, too, blended together in a chaotic and disorienting blur, until at last there was only him, and the smell of lemongrass, and the whistling of a tea-kettle. As he neared me in the dream, all of my emotions surfaced, one by one: fear, rage, and sorrow boiled and disrupted the imagery, but when he reached me, the negative emotions faded away, replaced by something else, something elusive. Finally, when his claws pushed my chin up, when my eyes met his, I wondered, What am I really running from?
When I awoke, I did it slowly, feeling-first. I was spread out, smiling, stretched like a sunning tourist on a pristine beach—I had forgotten all about the tree, the forest. All that remained was a pleasant something, something I couldn’t place. My face was pressed against something warm, soft. A tickle of sensation moved from behind my ear down my neck, a gentle, cold touch. I opened my eyes.
He was below me, the bear-man, like a great pelt, a rug still very much in possession of its insides and dangerous bits. I was face-down on top of him, nestled like a nursing babe amid curly hair and the impossible rig of straps and buckles that wrapped around his chest. All the while he slid one claw up and down my back, slowly, gently.
“You didn’t think you had escaped, did you?” the bear-man asked, just above a whisper. His long pink tongue snaked from between his teeth and slipped into my ear. “I let you run,” he said, snuffling his nose on my neck, holding me close with his strong arms. He produced from a pouch in his leather rig a ring, gold with dazzling stones embedded all over, and with surprising delicacy, slipped it onto my outstretched finger. “You belong to me now,” he said, and I knew that I had been wrong. I knew that I could love him.
fin
Justin Bostian edits the fiction that runs through these parts. When he’s not writing or editing, he can be found staring into corners and speaking to animals. Find him on twitter or something.