German Dreams
Posted on June 16, 2008 Posted by John Scalzi 31 Comments
The cover for the German version of The Android’s Dream, which comes out in January 2009:
Like the other German covers to my books, I’m not entirely sure what the spaceship pictured has to do with anything in the book, but since the books are selling well (the German version of The Last Colony just came out and is in the Top Ten of the Amazon.de SF list) I have to conclude Heyne knows what they’re doing and am content to let them do their thing. And they just made an offer on Zoe’s Tale, which I’ve told my agent to accept, so you readers in Germany will have another book to look forward to as well (in, I would suspect, the summer of ’09). Danke, for reading them.
Heh.
That thing at the top does look like a heiny!
This reminds me of Peter Watts question about the German cover of his book Maelstrom.
His book also has a heiny.
What’s with the notation “ROMAN” on the books? Does this denote a typeface style or something? I noticed it on both <> and <>….
(Dratted HTMLizer… meant to do German-style quotes around the book titles, and they vent avay…)
“Roman” is the German word for “novel.”
I like the sheep on the cover much better. This cover seems to be a bit hardcore military SciFi for Android.
i am a native german with polish origins. i read all my scifi in english. this way i don’t have to wait for a translation and i don’t have to miss anything that won’t be translated. it is also a good practice for the english language. education is great :).
Danke für die tollen Geschichten und schöne Grüße aus Deutschland.
If there’s a spaceship on the cover, it’s SF. And vice versa.
Simple!
Well to be fair, it is a pretty rad spaceship.
It is! I kinda wish it was in the book.
I’m reading your books in Berlin, but I’m bringing them in from the States. I just got The Android’s Dream in Tor edition and I thought it was cute- it’s a play on Dick’s novel, right. The cool spaceship cover doesn’t really have the same connotation.But it is cool. There’s lots of interesting stuff in SF and YA here if only I could reach enough German to understand it… and I was wandering through those shelves today and realized that Germany age bands. And it age and sex bands too.I hope the US doesn’t go that way.
„Danke“ for writing them.
By the way: Heyne is always putting strange pictures (with almost no connections to the novel) on the cover of their scifi books. Mostly space ships or space scenary but also computer circuit boards. It’s a kind of weird tradition.
Too bad they couldn’t make a sheep-shaped space ship.
A great cover would have been [spoiler deleted — js] – or something on that order. I miss the covers that depicted scenes from the books – like a lot of the Heinlein covers from the ’80s.
I want a cover with a sheep-shaped circuit board.
Poor John, he’s got a hot new rad German starship — and doesn’t have a story to fit it into. Yet. Oh, yeah, that’s how authors work. Inspiration — it’s a good thing.
Dr. Phil
sorry about that – wasn’t thinking along those lines.
That ship looks like it could do the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs!
Phil,
One of the really cool scenes from Northworld was when they put a tank on the cover and then Drake went back and wrote a scene that used said tank. So it does sometimes happen.
In translating a science fiction book, do publishers add much in the way of exposition to clarify cultural references (see, e.g., the source of vension in chapter one), or do they really just try to translate the text properly into the new language and leave references to American pop culture (or, say, DC geography) left as an exercise to the reader?
btw, is that pronounced “new-GENT-e-uhns” or “new-gen-TEE-uhs”?
The ship is cool. Someone should write about it.
When I did cover art for Baen books (namedrop, namedrop) it was the bestest possible bit to get shiny new sci-fi months before it came out, and to sit in the pub reading it off my PDA.
With a pint.
And it was work! I love my job sometimes. Picking out sexy bits to build imagery around is just more fun than a collie pup.
That’s a sweet vessel, even if it’s pertinant to neque androids neque sheep.
oh, i should say, I’m just working through Android’s Dream for the first time right now and it is most excellent. $6.99 very very well spent.
The lasers are the right color, at least. Perhaps they’re actually high-tech wool-beams?…
I don’t suppose the ship on the German cover looks anything like a frigate belonging to the bad guys in the book? Didn’t want to give out spoiler material so this is intentionally vague.
It has spikes, and laser guns.
Those are important design elements that were sadly neglected when they came up with the design for the STS orbiters.
What good is a taxpayer-funded spaceship design program when they won’t even put spikes and lasers on the damn thing?
Why did they make the title plural? Do you know if there is any reason?
I have no clue.
It sounds a little more smooth in plural. The singular version (Androiden-Traum) sort of begs for an article. The plural version reads fine without an article, which makes it more compact and “punchy”, if you will.
Then again, I don’t work for Heyne, so I officially have no clue, either. I was, however, a bookseller apprentice in Germany once upon a time.
Pathetic Earthling, it really depends on the individual publisher and translator what happens to cultural references, etc… The current trend seems to be to leave cultural references as they are, though in the past it was more common to substitute German references. I once even came across a translated YA book which contained a sort of glossary of unfamiliar cultural practices.
SF and fantasy tend to fare fairly well in German translation compared e.g. to romance novels, which can be butchered pretty badly by the less prestigious publishers. Though China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station was published in two parts in Germany, which I only realised when a friend whom I’d given the German edition for her birthday complained about the abrupt ending. I eventually got her the second half for Christmas.
I’m showing my geek here, but if you look at the ship, it looks like the artist copied the Centauri battlecruiser from Babylon 5, then grafted on a great honking jet exhaust and the blocky bow structure. I realize it’s not uncommon for artists to copy others work for book covers. I remember a book cover from the 80s, where an assassin was depicted wielding a Millenium Falcon toy as a gun. I kid you not.
I agree about Heyne covers. When I was in Germany a few years ago I bought a couple of Terry Pratchett books in Heyne paperback form. One had an appropriate cover; the other had the cover art from “The Sprouts of Wrath” by Robert Rankin. Well, it was by Josh Kirby who did Pratchett’s UK covers at the time.
Why can’t the ship be one of the destroyers in the book? Nidu or Human?
I mean, they are minor parts of the story, but still…
Chris