A while back I presented readers with a collection of awesome cover art for Russian alternate history/sci-fi novels. Today, that trend continues. Lucky you.
UPDATE: Many of these covers were originally collected on the VK page Ебанутые обложки русской фантастики (Fucked-up covers of Russian Fantasy), so now you know where to go for more. And yes, new covers are added frequently.
Comrade Stalin’s Star Wars. Kind of self explanatory really. Much like Vader, Stalin also takes a hands on approach to fighting battles in space.
This is the perfect alt-hist/popadanets cover. Whereas normal alternate history asks something like, “What if Hitler had nukes, thus complicating the war for the Allies,” these authors seem to prefer totally stacking the deck in Russia’s favor. In this case, it looks like the Battle of Poltava is about to be won in six minutes but a guy with a mini-gun.
If you think there’s not going to be any shapeshifter sex in this novel, you are wrong. Period.
Again, it’s not enough to simply win a war (in this case the war against Sweden). No, you must go back in time with modern-day spetsnaz and make the war a complete blowout. Interesting choice of a lever-action carbine, by the way. Still horrendously unfair.
Ladies and gentlemen- the worst bodyguard in history. I gather from the cover that poor Nikolai I was poisoned, but you still think his bodyguard there could try doing something other than posing as Daniel Craig at the end of Casino Royale.
Do you have a friend that complains about the lack of popular literature depicting Hitler as an action hero? Well now you know what to get them this holiday season!
Your guess is as good as mine.
Every year a certain amount of vatnik fap-fantasy novels must be published. In this one the heroes manage to capture Washington DC in spite of the fact that it is apparently defended by flying astronauts armed with Carl Gustav anti-tank weapons. I’ve been saying for years we should have shut that program down a long time ago, but you know what its defenders say every time- “It creates jobs!” Go to hell.
The English title for this novel is Fuck History!
For starters, I’m not sure you can stand where he is. And secondly, the Statue of Liberty isn’t a particularly strategic location.
Bolshevik Graham Phillips and Tsarist John Cena reconcile their political differences in this playful romp.
Your move, Tolkien!
Because of course your have to have some anti-Ukrainian fantasy to fap to. This tall tale is called Banderite Genocide. It certainly doesn’t help when the only Banderite we see is about to be shot at point blank range.
I love the Kalashnikov but I thought the whole point of fantasy is to feature weapons and artifacts that we can’t have in real life. I’m not sure how well 7.62×39 penetrates dragon scales.
Armed only with a cat and a pack of papirosy cigarettes, Oleg must save Stalin from an evil turncoat NKVD agent! Just kidding. Oleg took DMT. He’ll be fine in a few minutes.
This novel answers the question: “What if douchebag PR spokespeople existed in medieval Russia?”
Jason Statham is…Nicky II!
Yup, totally fair. Britain had it coming for using rifled muskets during the Crimean War.
I don’t know what’s supposed to happen in this novel, but I’m guessing it’s illegal in Russia.
Machine gunning the Teutonic Knights isn’t devastating enough. Better bomb them from the air just to be sure. That’s what they get for trying to mess with time-traveling Slavs.
Because one thing the HALO series really needed was battles against Ottoman Janissaries.
A Russian paratrooper must go back in time to stop a George Soros-funded plot to turn Stalin and the entire Soviet Union gay. Pretty much writes itself, really.
The year is 2025. Two years ago ISIS operatives managed to capture an experimental military walker from a top secret Japanese lab. They would have captured the Russian prototype for the PAK DA strategic bomber, but lucky even by that time the project still hadn’t advanced beyond the concept drawing phase. Anyway, with their new technology, ISIS goes on a rampage across the world, leaving the rest of humanity no choice but to organize an underground resistance movement. As you scour the land for any form of sustenance while desperately hiding from ISIS hunter-killer droids, you curse those who failed to support Donald Trump. He alone could have prevented this. He even said so in a tweet!
The third one is the worst one, IMHO – the characters are awkwardly photoshopped on the cover.
The girl is staring at the title, thinking something like “So… that’s the sh***y story I’m supposed to live”; while the wolf is looking at her – “good good, I’ve just found my dinner!”
The only question is, does she change into a wolf, and then they have wolf sex, or does the wolf turn into a man and they have normal people sex. I guarantee you at least one of those is happening.
I’m not sure if I want to find it out…
Bestiality – brought to us from the Land-of-higher-moral-values.
You mean you haven’t read the novels? I’m shocked. But the New York times wanted to talk to you about s job offer.
The second one looks like something straight out of Warhammer 40k, but my favourite is probably the eighth for how batshit insane it looks.
Oh, they are almost as bad as baen.
Btw re the first one, both js and dv fid injure their arms in their youth, didn’t they?
A lot of this is not only in bad taste, it’s also bad art. Lighting is wrong, compositions are bad, perspective is uncared for. This is cheap bad stuff made for cheap bad books.
Not exactly a revelation, brother 😉
Great stuff! Thanks
Keep up the great work
Lucky Indeed!!! Say Jim, aren’t you a self described ‘космобиолух’ of sorts (‘pinko globalist hipster’)??
🙂 Keep on adding new installments to this line!
That was actually the words of some Putin fanboy. He’s really funny because he actually linked to my stuff more than once and though he always has to describe me with these snarl words, he cites me as a way of saying “Look, even THEY’RE saying this!” Kind of like when the Russian media says “Western journalist says…”
That one with the mech seems pretty good, but it reminds me of another artist I’ve seen online. I wonder if these book covers just take stuff from other people without attribution? I doubt many pay attention to the Russian pulp fiction publishing world.
The mech thing was taken from some artist, but it’s actually not a book cover. It was on this bizarre article from Russia’s Lifenews.
The NovoRosija insurgent on the cover of ‘Ukraine in Blood’ best be careful of his position. The dramatic pose on the cover is flanked by the Ukraina Hotel, that lies flat in the middle of the Kyivan Maidan area. This is where Banderite sharpshooters were supposedly picking off their own street demonstrators, at the behest of Victoria Nuland, the notorious Obama shill Maybe now they’d be more inclined to pick off the FSB backed Donbas militiamen??…
Don’t you think that if you took pro-Russian stance and were vocal about marvels of Putin’s Russia, you could’ve gotten some lucrative jobs in sphere of journalism in Russia, for example at RT?
Oh definitely. I could have probably had my own show. I have got offers to be on domestic Russian channels but nowadays my policy is to avoid that.
btw, speaking of Russian media, do you think they will make something of this Father Jack-esque Ukrainian Archbishop?
After a few days of absorbing and appreciating these vibrant covers, I think that my favorite is the one titled ‘The medal of Stalin’. Your own observation, pointing out that the young lad Oleg has only a pack of ‘papirosy’ and a fluffy cat to accompany him on his arduous task, to save Stalin from a turncoat NKVD agent, led me to your encrypted portal entry for ‘papirosy’. It states that: ‘Belomorkanal [a popular brand of papirosy] is also used by cannabis users, “emptied cigarettes are then filled with a mixture of tobacco and marijuana” for smoking’
Which leads me to believe that Oleg’s glazed look may have ‘benefited’ from a visit from the космобиолух that is embracing a peculiar looking plant in the similarly entitled novel depicted above. Just a theory, the tobacco within papirosy is also known to make dizzy many an imbiber? 🙂
“Пиар по-старорусски” looks like it was something written by Terry Pratchett, which is kinda cool.
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