Sunday 6 January 2013

New retro novel cover

StarTrek.com have revealed the delightfully retro cover, and a new blurb, for Greg Cox's forthcoming TOS novel, The Weight of Worlds:

The Ephrata Institute is an intellectual think tank at the outer fringes of the final frontier. Dedicated to the arts and sciences, the Institute seems an unlikely target for an invasion, but it proves easy pickings when the Crusade comes from beyond, determined to impose its harsh, unbending Truth on all the worlds of the Federation. Armed with weaponized gravity, the alien Crusaders will stop at nothing to rescue the universe from its myriad beliefs… even if it means warping the mind and soul of every sentient being they encounter.

Responding to an urgent distress signal, Captain James T. Kirk and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise soon find themselves in conflict with the Crusade, and facing individual challenges. When Kirk and Spock are transported to the Crusade's distant homeland to confront the source of the invasion, Sulu finds himself trapped behind enemy lines, while Lieutenant Uhura is faced with possibly the most difficult decisions of her career. As the Crusade sets its sights beyond Ephrata IV, it is up to the Enterprise and its besieged crew to keep freedom of thought from being crushed beneath the weight of worlds!

If you didn't know this was a new book you could mistake it for some of earliest Trek novels; it would fit right in with some of the 1980s reprints of the first Bantam novels - Could be the next in the series of these classic covers by Enric Torres-Prat:


There is another layer of familiarity to this cover; it uses character portraits that have been appearing on a variety of Trek products for a year or two now. You can for instance get wall stickers of all three characters here in versions up to two and half meters tall from Walls360! They offer several poses of the entire original crew, plus a handful of other popular characters from the other prime series, all in the same rendered style.


So if you wanted to paint the background, you could make yourself a massive preproduction of this cover using the sticker versions of the characters!

The same collection of renderings were also used for special pre-order promo cards for the TOS edition of Bandai's Star Trek: Deck Building Game.


Most recently the new range of Star Trek printed fabrics includes one design with versions of Kirk and Spock from this series:




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