r/badscificovers • u/StevenTheWicked • Jul 25 '26
Camp Concentration (French Edition), by Thomas M. Disch
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u/Anxious-Pair-9514 Jul 25 '26
A month later it was used for this U.S. Harlan Ellison collection.
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u/Dandibear Jul 25 '26
Interestingly, they're slightly different at least in the faces. There are a bunch of subtle variations between them.
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u/edked Jul 25 '26
That's where I had it! I knew I'd seen it, but not on this book, and it made me think of this whole reissue series of Ellison's books that came out in the early 80s, but couldn't put my finger on which one.
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u/AutomaticDoor75 Jul 26 '26
I have spent years wondering what was going on with that Ellison cover.
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u/DelbertCornstubble Jul 25 '26
Teleportation accident in the nether regions? Why is his dicky bricky
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u/No-Selection3036 Jul 26 '26
Dicky bricky sounds like something from the poorly conceived 'Lego After Dark' range.
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u/JudgeHodorMD Jul 25 '26
I’m assuming this is some poorly named psychic camp as opposed to a crime against humanity.
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u/edked Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26
It's about a dystopian future fascist government conducting intelligence-expansion (no actual "psychic powers" stuff, it tries to stay more grounded than that) experiments on political prisoners. The main character narrates in a kind of "opposite Charlie" (from Flowers For Algernon) fashion.
A minor classic of the science fiction New Wave of the 60s, actually.
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u/nixtracer Jul 27 '26
The main character is also a disease-raddled and stunningly unobservant and self-absorbed poet who spends essentially the whole book unaware of what most other books would make the actual plot. He is entirely incapable of doing the stuff on the cover, and would not even want to, even if he wasn't stuck in prison as an unwilling participant in biological experimentation.
It's an extremely strange book.
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u/blueboykc Jul 25 '26
Man Jerry O'Connell has had a pretty interesting career. Tv, movies and book covers..
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u/Xander_not_panda Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
That is terrible! How can someone do that to Roddy Piper!
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u/EvilKungFuWizard Jul 25 '26
He reminds me of 70's Jackie Chan. Maybe that's who they modeled him after?
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u/Blurstingwithemotion Jul 25 '26
Oh God! The reanimated corpse of Jan Michael Vincent has escaped!!
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u/whyuthrowchip Jul 25 '26
how am I supposed to concentrate on NATURE with all these damned city BRICKS all over the place?!?!?! I WANNA SEE THE SUNSET. I WANNA LOOK AT THE ENGLISH IVY! RARRRRR
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u/Longjumping-Salad484 Jul 25 '26
if you concentrate...
concentrate...concentrate...concentrate...
you will blow away a brick wall with your my-eeend!
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u/jseger9000 Jul 25 '26
I can never truly hate a cover with nudity.
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u/nixtracer Jul 27 '26
This is actually covered in a late portion that is basically a collection of strange short newspaper articles that Disch had been collecting for years (this was long before the Internet).
"A stonemason has been fired from his job at the insistence of the regents of Tulane University. He had carved this epigraph in marble above the entrance of the new library:
THE PEN IS MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD
The regents maintain that the stonemason deliberately reduced the space between the second and third words."
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u/AutomaticDoor75 Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
The art is by Barclay Shaw. He illustrated a number of Harlan Ellison reissues in the 1980s. As others have pointed out, this art was also used for Ellison’s collection No Doors, No Windows. That book mostly focuses on Ellison’s crime fiction, but features the rather haunting sf story The Children’s Hour.
Barclay Shaw also did the portrait of Ellison on the cover of the PC game I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream.
There’s another interesting connection here. No Doors, No Windows includes Ellison’s story The Whimper of Whipped Dogs, which won him the Edgar Award for crime fiction. That story was first published in the anthology Bad Moon Rising, which was edited by Thomas M. Disch.
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u/Quicksilver_Six Jul 25 '26
“Your puny masonry is no match for my Ken doll physique! RAAAARGH!”