I love the cover of the paperback version of my book Death from the Skies!, but this guy loves it a lot. I knew the cover art was done by a talented guy, but didn’t realize just how wide a swath this guy cuts in the comic industry. That makes my book even cooler. You should buy one, and another for all of your friends. And a spare in case you accidentally drop one copy down a black hole or a gamma-ray burst vaporizes it.
If you went to BadAstronomy.com and found yourself here, never fear: the BA Blog has moved to its new home at Discover Blogs. The original BA site (with the Moon Hoax debunking and all that) is still online, too.
Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
Contact me: The Bad Astronomer "at" gmail "dot" com
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"Reading this book is like getting punched in the face by Carl Sagan. Frightening, but oddly exhilarating."
-- Daniel H. Wilson, author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising
DISCOVERmagazine.com: Latest Articles on Space DISCOVER Blogs: The Loom
October 3rd, 2009 at 8:15 am
You wrote a book?!
October 3rd, 2009 at 8:26 am
Ivan @1: DANG you’re quick. I was hoping to carry the running gag this morning, but no-o-o.
October 3rd, 2009 at 8:36 am
I just ordered this and a trade paperback copy of your first book
. Should get here sometime next week.
October 3rd, 2009 at 9:29 am
God damn it ! (Hmmm, that’s not much of an insult considering the people on this site) .
I prefer that cover to the hardcover, Phil I want a trade in !!!
October 3rd, 2009 at 9:43 am
So, Phil. When will your book be translated into Chinese and Hindi? Those are two more markets that should really enjoy your work.
GAry 7
PS: Might be really interesting to see how the Arabic speaking world would take to it too.
October 3rd, 2009 at 9:51 am
LMAO @ IVAN3MAN AT LARGE!
Fantastic book, everybody should buy it.
October 3rd, 2009 at 10:15 am
heh, I was one of the few able to get a paperback copy at Dragon*Con this year
October 3rd, 2009 at 10:33 am
I like this cover better than the first one – it goes better with the title print style. I love the little skull over the “i” too. Too bad they can’t make a book jacket to replace the one on the original hardcover edition!
October 3rd, 2009 at 10:33 am
Got mine yesterday. Love your style of writing Phil, very entertaining to read and the subject matter just blows my mind. AWESOME!
October 3rd, 2009 at 10:50 am
OT
WND and right wing kooks (this time) spreading misinformation that H1N1 will contain RFID chips.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=An9lJH6zr08
“Enjoy.”
Oh, and this just in… girl who died after Gardasil vaccine ACTUALLY died of a cancerous tumor.
http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSTRE5905EN20091001
October 3rd, 2009 at 11:08 am
@Gary
Do you realize translators cost a *lot* of many?
October 3rd, 2009 at 11:10 am
I would get one if I could
It is not available in the UK, unless you import a copy from the US, which takes ages and costs more in import duties.
October 3rd, 2009 at 11:14 am
Speaking of books, I just came from Jim Baens universe, where there was a link to John Hodgemans presentation at the Radio and TV correspondents dinner with the Pres. It’s hilarious. Here’s the link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yW7OPByRGDY
It should make your humor day. It certainly did mine.
GAry 7
PS: For those of you who have not heard of this online SciFi magazine, it’s really good and I highly recommend it.
http://baens-universe.com/issues/Vol_4_Num_2
October 3rd, 2009 at 11:43 am
can some one explain to me why so many authors plug the paperback more then the hard cover. ive never understood the excitement they get when the paperback comes out. i am happy they have a book and all but i look at books like those by Carl Sagan (demon haunted world, pale blue dot, Cosmos) the paper back versions are smaller. text and pictures crammed into it
personally i will avoid paperback and prefer hard cover if i can get it.
October 3rd, 2009 at 11:46 am
I like the cover a lot, but I think it would look better without the word balloons.
October 3rd, 2009 at 11:54 am
There are benefits to buying either the hardcover or soft. Gifts, pictures, diagrams, look on the shelf, etc. I prefer hard when I can afford it and wait for soft if its not a top priority read. For me it was top priority because I lecture at a planetarium and I’m always looking for cool ways to explain this stuff to the public: I got the hardcover.
My nieces and nephews will get the softcovers.
October 3rd, 2009 at 12:31 pm
Eh to be honest, I’ve seen better Phil. It’s certainly thematically justifiable, it’s just not like, “AWESOME.”
You should have had it be completely detached from your theme of keeping it real and had lasers, and dragons, and alien spacecraft blowing up the innocent people. Then you could have fooled a bunch of people interested in that stuff into ingesting some real science for a change.
October 3rd, 2009 at 12:50 pm
Phil, thanks for that link. To be perfectly honest, I actually still prefer the hardback cover, because I don’t really go for bright-and-garish things. (Part of the reason I’m kind of a boring person.) All the more reason why Brandon Graham’s blog post interested me so. He’s 100 per cent correct: It really is a perfect cover for the book that you wrote, both in your chosen approach to the material and also to the kinds of people you’re hoping to reach. (We’re all hoping, really.) Kudos to Nathan Fox, and Phil: You’re a fortunate, fortunate man.
SkeptikSnarf@#10: The reason authors plug the paperback more is that they’re trying to make a living. With a few exceptions like dictionaries, paperback editions always outsell hardback editions, often by a HUGE margin. (I myself also prefer hardbacks, but even I will often wind up buying a paperback over a hardback for, say, an author that I don’t know if I’m going to like or not. It feels like less of an investment, not just in price but also in the space it takes up and the weight on my shoulder while I’m lugging it around in my backpack reading it.)
October 3rd, 2009 at 1:36 pm
have you been interviewed by Coast2Coast on the subject yet?
October 3rd, 2009 at 1:42 pm
After studying the cover, admittedly with aging eyes, it looks like only guys will be killed by flaming meteors. The women have enough sense to stay inside when burning crap is falling from the sky.
October 3rd, 2009 at 2:03 pm
@Nemo
I agree. It distracts from the artwork.
October 3rd, 2009 at 3:39 pm
The only thing that I question is why the subtitle was changed from “these are the ways the world will end…” to “the science behind the end of the world…”
October 3rd, 2009 at 4:51 pm
So, lose the word balloons and keep the penguin?
October 3rd, 2009 at 5:32 pm
I got the hardcover Death from the Skies for Christmas last year. Just bought Bad Astronomy (in PB) to take on vacation with me next week. Looking forward to reading it (it’s been very hard not to peek into it!).
I really enjoyed Death…. It was well written for someone like me with almost no astronomy knowledge to read and enjoy. I learned a lot. Almost wish I’d waited for the PB though. I like the cover. But then, I’ve always been a fan of comic books. The cover almost looks like something I’d have found in Mad Magazine back in the days I read it (in the 60’s and 70’s…and no, I’m not saying how old I was when I read it, I’ll just say at the time a lot of the jokes were over my head).
October 3rd, 2009 at 5:54 pm
Anyone else notice that the guy in the foreground on the cover looks like Maynard G. Krebs?
October 3rd, 2009 at 6:56 pm
I got the paperback, which is by my bed being read a chapter a night. Every time I glance at that cover though, I always think the bottom speech bubble is saying “MOOOO” and it sort of looks like a muzzle of a cow under the front guy’s arm. This causes me to ask, Phil, what are you doing to the poor cows??
October 3rd, 2009 at 7:40 pm
This just arrived in my mailbox (Wellington, NZ) this morning.
Pretty good considering it’s a full month earlier than Amazon predicted. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be offline for a while….I have a book to read…..
October 3rd, 2009 at 8:28 pm
@Gary – his speech bubble says “AAAHH!”, not “Work…?!?”
October 3rd, 2009 at 9:11 pm
Ok, I had to look up the Maynard G. Krebs reference, and I’m old! I guess that I can see a resemblance to Bob Denver. Is the guy on the right a Stan Lee cameo?
October 3rd, 2009 at 9:33 pm
Possibly worth mentioning:
http://www.foxnathan.com/
October 3rd, 2009 at 10:11 pm
[...] PAPERBACK OF DOOOOOOOOOM!!! [...]
October 4th, 2009 at 12:05 am
No fair, the paperback should have been released first! But darn it, I already bought hardcover.
October 4th, 2009 at 12:15 am
Well, I hate to say it but speaking personally I prefer the hardback cover.
BTW. BA, a request if I may please, are there any new images or latest news about the third Mercury fly-by of the MESSENGER probe for us? I’d love to hear more about that from you here.
PS. I’ve been having trouble posting here lately, did you get my email about that or see my question on the BAUT? Seems to be working from this library computer at least..
October 4th, 2009 at 6:13 am
I’d REALLY love to own a copy of this, but I refuse to pay Amazon for shipping across the Atlantic…
Any chance of it being available soon at Play.com? It’s the only place I buy books nowadays. Free shipping to Spain, and I don’t have to endure the messy Spanish translations.
October 4th, 2009 at 6:57 am
Dang, I bought the hardback.
October 4th, 2009 at 8:37 am
I wish I’d held out for the paperback rather than going ahead and buying the hardback. Awesome cover!
October 4th, 2009 at 9:13 am
Gary Ansorge, just Hindi wouldn’t do. For it to spread fairly widely in this country you’d need to translate it to at least five or six different languages — not dialects, languages. Having said that, the BA’s first book is probably the one that needs to be read by a lot of people here, including many urbanised, English-speaking sheeple.
October 4th, 2009 at 11:53 am
The hardback is more likely to survive any end of the world scenario, so it’s a self-consistent buy.
Also, it has more heat value when you huddle around the fire afterwards. (You don’t actually want to read it again…)
October 4th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
I wish we could get the book in the UK – period
October 4th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
37. Torbjörn Larsson, OM
Personally, while huddled around that fire, I’d probably be reading up on How to Survive the End of the World(a book Phil has yet to write) and burning US dollars for the heat and light(I think the fine linen they’re made of probably has more BTUs per lb than mere paper).
Gary 7
October 4th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
I got mine in the mail last week – but I’m having to wait until I finish ‘Greatest Show on Earth’ first (only coz I started it first)
In the meantime DftS sits on my desk at home – taunting me with promises of astronomical horror story goodness!
October 4th, 2009 at 7:09 pm
Now *that* is a cover that will finally get me off my south end and into ordering the book.
Hey Phil — and others — check it out, I accidentally caught a comet crossing Orion…
http://www.flickr.com/photos/fyngyrz/3952232557/
…coulda knocked me over with a feather when I saw that after uploading my photos to the computer.
October 4th, 2009 at 9:02 pm
Richie: You should have gone to thenile.co.nz. Mine took a week from order to (free) delivery.
Yus, teh paperback of DEATH (dooooooom!) has arrived in Christchurch.
October 5th, 2009 at 5:29 am
You could have mentioned get a second copy before the sun become a red giant . Also get a second copy of bad astronomy
October 6th, 2009 at 1:52 am
I just ordered it, sweet cover, but it better be good as the huge price tag could have gotten me a meal at wendy’s