What was your conclusion to that question of "What is this for?" And how did you get past it? I'm having similar questions about many things...

Worse than just a cautionary tale. It's a terrifying lesson in how to subjugate a populace and undo the fabric of civilisation. Sadly the UK seems to be following in those footsteps. Nothing is being learned by anyone!

I love going down these rabbit holes of research and identification. It's fun and fills a tiny hole in the big puzzle of cover art history and preservation. I'll submit the changes to ISFDB for approval. It feels good to help out with this sort of thing, however tiny the contribution. 🧵/end

I also found a definitive mention in this copy of Asimov magazine, digitised by the Internet Archive: "The cover, a landscape, is reminiscent of the work of the great midcentury SF artist, Hannes Bok; it is by Michael Embden." So there you go: mystery solved! 🧵/3
archive.org/details/Asim...

I was able to identify Embden's style as I'm currently researching all his book covers for a project. The way the rocks are painted is quite the giveaway: he used this approach to shading rocks on many other covers. And the way he suggests mist/clouds is quite distinctive.🧵/2

It's the other way round: Tim White for the image, Dean for the logo. You can check it on this video flip through of White's art book, around the 3:05 mark. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ub1R...

No, it's by Tim White.

Hey, nice work. Would look even better with texture filtering off to get those nice crunchy pixels back.

Take care not to over-saturate or clip the colours though. Professionally photographed/scanned imagery in the public domain is often the best you'll get, as they were digitised under controlled conditions. Boosting these too far can destroy subtle details and misrepresent the true image.

Oh wow, what a fantastic resource! That's the entirety of my YouTube viewing for 2026 sorted! Thanks for the link, I really appreciate you taking the time.

Thank you. It looks like those sources are just a bit too early, I'm focusing on a few illustrators active from the 70s to the 90s. I'll check them out though, they sound a great way to expand my knowledge. I've also used ISFDB which was very helpful. www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/inde...

Yes! Geoff Taylor is responsible for my love of landscapes on fantasy books. A fantasy book without said landscape just doesn't seem right to me. His Malloreon covers were great, each one picking up a detail from the previous cover, to show the heroes journey. Great stuff.