Paperback 1058: DAW UY1167 (PBO, 1975)
Title: Berserker's Planet
Author: Fred Saberhagen
Cover artist: Jack Gaughan
Condition: 8/10 (unread, some surface wear)
Estimated value: $10-15
Best things about this cover:
- "That's not a toothpick! ... THIS is a toothpick!"
- There was an early-80s arcade game called "Berserker." It was pretty cool. I don't remember these guys, though.
- I like the big guy's aesthetic. Very Prince Valiant-meets-Grizzly Man. It's just ... he looks more like an action figure than a living humanoid creature. He has many points of articulation and is neither standing nor holding that sword in a way that one might call "naturalistic" or "plausible."
- Little buddy, on the other hand—very believable. Cowering nakedness, total unpreparedness, I can relate.
- The pink palette here is amazing, as is the suggestion of a giant skull in the oddly machine-like background.
- The actual title has an apostrophe in "Berserker's" but the cover does not. This bothers me about as much as you'd expect (a lot).
Best things about this back cover:
- No one needs this much text, truly.
- "NO QUARTER! NO QUARTER! NO COIN! ONLY DOLLAR! DOLLAR BILL! OR CREDIT CARD!"—someone behind me at the vending machine
- This feels pretty prescient—the idea that your robots would learn and "develop"; sadly modern out-of-control robots didn't take over the planet with swords, they just figured out how to sell you things you don't need and show you "content" that makes you angry ... in order to sell you things you don't need. Give me the robots in pelts and disco boots, please!
- "It's a Fred Saberhagen science thriller" doesn't quite have the standalone energy you'd expect a climactic back-cover paragraph to have.
- Also LOL "Have you seen THE BOOK OF SABERHAGEN" what, is it missing?
Page 123~
As the two men wrestled, it was still Omir who smiled, and Thomas who looked desperate, but quickly it was demonstrated that Omir was not the stronger of the two, not with a spear stuck through him, anyway.
Yeah, impalement will really take it out of you, I find
~RP
4 comments:
I, too, yearn for the return of berserker robots with swords and disco boots.
DAW produced a lot of books with interesting covers in the 1970s through to the early 80s. At times it seems that all the good cover art migrated to fantasy and science fiction books, while the other genres got stuck with cheap generic photographs and BIG! COVER! BLURBS!
Yeah I think of cover art starting a long slow dive in quality starting in the mid-60s but clearly there are major scifi exceptions
RP
The big guy is probably not meant to be a "living humanoid creature", but rather a killer robot. I'm not familiar with this particular part of the Berserker series, so I don't know if he's supposed to be passing for a living thing or not. That wasn't really the usual MO for Berserkers, but the back cover copy suggests it might be the case here. Saberhagen was pretty good at not repeating himself or getting formulaic in this series.
Jack Gaughan was pretty good, but I always feel like he worked better in black and white than color. His interior illos were generally good, though he had a fondness for abstracts mixed with figures and big blocks of black.
Well that would explain the action-figure joints
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