Cover of Ghost Ship | 1st September 2013, 20:28

Diane Carey's Ghost Ship is the first regular novel in the Star Trek: The Next Generation tie-in series. I was surprised by how well written it was and how much I enjoyed reading it some 25 years after publication, but my thoughts on the book are for elsewhere. Here, I shall dissect the cover... As with the novelisation of Encounter at Farpoint, there were some differences in the US and UK editions of the book, published respectively by Pocket and Titan books. The US cover is pictured on the left above, and the UK edition on the right. The quality of neither scan is brilliant, but they were the best I could find. My copy of the novel is the Titan edition, but the artwork looks more like that in the Pocket cover above - the colours on the right-hand image are probably lighter because of the scanning process. The differences between the two covers are minor. The colour of the TNG logo changes, and the absence of a drop shadow makes the UK cover's more prominent (to my eyes) than the blue and white which blends into the planet behind. The appearance of the number 1 on both covers suggests a plan for more novels, but it's much bolder on the UK cover (the US one is hidden away in at the right of the logo in tiny white text), an interesting choice, as surely at this point the publishers would surely want to tell their audience to come back for more (although the images may not be first editions - my copy looks like this and is an eighth printing). Most amusingly, the text at the top of the covers is tweaked slightly on the UK edition to abbreviate 'U.S.S. Enterprise' to just 'Enterprise', possibly to get rid of the American reference (or more likely to make it fit tidily on three lines). Finally, down to the artwork. The foreground is actually very good, with Riker and La Forge looking really realistic and just like the actors. Data on the other hand looks like he has a really flat face, with a flat forehead angled back from it. The choice of characters to illustrate it works well with the plot, where all three play a major role. The background however makes no sense at all. There is only one planet that appears in the story and that's a gas giant - not an M-class world like that depicted. Similarly the space vessel pictured does not appear in this story. It's like they commissioned images of the characters then threw them onto some generic space imagery - did they not think that we might have seen what the Enterprise looks like on the TV show? The planet is forgiveable, but to picture a spaceship that's not in the story? No. That lets the whole cover down.

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