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Saturday, February 4, 2012

Another "David Maine" crops up in Romanian...

A while back I posted some French paperback covers from books written in the 1980s; apparently some guy used the pen name David Maine for such timeless works as Geurillas Galactiques and so forth. (The link to my post is here.) Well, now another cover has surfaced, courtesy of a thoughtful fellow named Cosimo who wrote to this blog and left a comment asking if I am the author of this extra-lurid Romanian version:


The answer is: No, I did not write that, but man I wish I had. I especially like the New England Patriot-type tricorn-hat wearing laser-gun carrying starship trooper in the middle. The vaguely hawk-like face on the flying mechanical Raptor of Doom is also a nice touch. And is that guy in back a streaker?

Hey Cosimo! Thanks a million for tipping me off to this!

In case you're wondering, here is the original French version. (I think it's French. Or is "guerillero" Spanish? That would account for the faintly Aztec-like temple structure in the background.) Please note: this is an example of Super-Fiction. If anyone can put me in the same room as these materpieces, or anything like them with my/our name on them, please give me a shout.

3 comments:

Cosimo said...

As I said in previous comment, the cover is really awful (but the book is not), but it comes from the very first years after the anticomunist Revolution, when hundreds of publishing houses apeared over night and thousands books were published annually, sometimes with awful covers and paper, like this one. It was a hunger for SF, maybe because the communists kinda banned this genre. In short, the quantity was choosed over quality. Now, if you want to see the present day covers of Romanian SF books, this is one of the Romanian publishing houses specialised in SF:
http://www.millenniumpress.ro/index1.html

:)

Cosimo said...

Grace à toi, I was finally able to identify your fellow namesake. The real name of the french David Maine is Claude Avice and he usually used the pseudonym Pierre Barbet and he even has an Wikipedia page in Romanian - 'cause we Romanians seem to translate everything, and I mean it:
http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Barbet_%28scriitor%29
I can see now that he has many other works translated in Romanian - which is not a bad thing. :))

You can read about him in english too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Barbet_%28writer%29
and I see he was translated in english too.
I guess the mystery is solved.

David Maine said...

Hey Cosimo, I hope I didn't come off as snide or patronizing about rhe Romanian publishing industry -- the covers are garish, but heck, there's plenty of that in fantasy/SF publishing all over the world, the US included.

I'm thrilled that you forwarded the title to me--I'm serious about wanting to collect these books. I'm a huge SF/fantasy fan, and part of that love is the fondness I have for the often over-the-top cover images (often far more colorful than the writing within the books themselves!)

Thanks again for the tip, and for the other links in these comments.