I love the original cover – the back is a photo of the Pleiades by my friend Jerry Gipson, and the front was created by Charles Oines – and will continue to use elements of it. My original thought was that 90% of the hard science fiction books I surveyed featured a spaceship – usually dramatically unrealistic – and a planet. Phallus and chalice, as it were. So that’s what I asked for, and Charles delivered brilliantly, with a gorgeous and realistic model of the torchship UCM Tereshkova departing a partially terraformed Mars.

However, the cover said very little about the story (my bad), and did not resonate with “the market.” So I started looking for a new cover, which meant a new cover artist. I seriously considered generative AI. We’ve all seen amazing stuff at this point, and prompting seemed like a useful skill to pick up. But… solidarity amongst creators, and all that. I don’t want to be replaced by AI, after all.

I contacted a few artists whose work I admired, and those who replied were already overbooked. So on to the various services. I’d used Fiverr before for business graphics, but their covers looked like AI-generated slop to me. I eventually settled on Reedsy, which seemed expensive at $1K a pop, but had real people doing good work. 

After paging through hundreds of covers, I found a couple artists who looked like good fits. One of them was Christopher Doll, who did the covers for Becky Chambers’ Wayfarer series. Chris and I are peas in a pod… we both grew up in the same era of moon shots and Roddenberry’s Star Trek, and are avid modelers of science fiction subjects. (This is a golden age for modelers, by the way… the quality and breadth of subjects available now is amazing.) 

So we were off to the races.