INTRODUCTION
BY STEPHEN HICKMAN
The strongest impression that comes to mind on this 25th anniversary of the first Man-Kzin Wars book is “Holy (beep!), it can’t be twenty-five years, can it!?” We’re only up to volume XIV, after all, hmmm . . .
Consequently, my thoughts on the origins of the first covers are a bit hazy (a good thing, as this will make these reminiscences mercifully brief), but such as they are, these are my impressions—
I remember thinking, when Mr. Jim Baen was telling me that this was going to be a series (we spoke on the phone in those days) that I would do better not to read the stories, but to go with whatever I could conjure up in my imagination—I had done covers for several series before this, and some of the weakest of my efforts came from being constrained to keep too closely to the subject material. Also, I knew that Jim had no objection whatsoever to ‘illustrating the metaphor’, quite the contrary, in fact. Come to think of it, I may have been the one to have first mentioned that phrase to Jim.
So I made up a scene with a Kzin crew in the control room of a spacecraft, and for good measure designed a title logo and border treatment. This latter was to try and prevent the drastic cropping that tends to occur with Baen covers (ahem)—and besides that, it established a unique and distinctive look for the series.
This evidently was successful as I got a call from Jim after the initial presentation at the sales meeting, where the cover apparently received a strongly positive reaction from the buyers. Getting positive feedback from a publisher is unheard-of: in my entire previous career I had received only one such call (also from Jim, in fact) about a cover, to put this in perspective. So I was a bit surprised, but really jazzed about the whole series project.
I finished up that first cover very carefully—I had sent in a slide of the mostly-finished cover for the sales meeting, where the pilot looked like a white tiger. I was working in acrylic at the time for SF subjects, and it’s very easy to make drastic mistakes with an acrylic painting. Easy for me to make mistakes with acrylic, I mean to say.
For the second cover, I made up something I thought might out-do the first one, and so on for the third . . .
Out of curiosity, I read one of the stories in the second volume, and was startled to recognize in it the scene I had done for the first cover—wow, I was ahead of deadline by a whole book!
Fast forward to cover VIII, and Jim asks me to please not paint in the title and border any more, as this is giving him headaches trying to fit in the names of the authors. This is a relief to me as this adds considerably to the workload, and incidentally reduces the chances of selling the painting to a collector effectively to zero. Also, I had become fed up once and for all with acrylics as a viable medium (‘liquid linoleum’, as an artist friend of mine refers to it), and so cover VIII was the first I did in oil color.
Cover VIII was also the last I did as one of my own ideas— when M-K IX came along I was asked if I would please start reading the stories, and select a scene that actually had something to do with the writing in the book. I found a great scene from a story by Hal Colebatch titled “His Sergeant’s Honor,” and painted that for the cover. I liked the way it turned out, and was relieved, as I discovered, not to have the complete responsibility for the cover image on my own shoulders.
And, much to my enjoyment, I have been conscientiously reading the stories ever since—of all the anthologies I have ever discovered in fifty years of reading SF, the Man-Kzin Wars series is easily the most consistently brilliant and well-written. As such, it has been the most challenging series of covers I have ever tackled—certainly the most rewarding in terms of having covers I can be happy with.
The stories in M-K XIV are great, by the way—definitely check it out!