Star Trek Seekers Cover Art
2 min read
Rob Caswell, the artist responsible for the beautiful cover artwork of the new Star Trek Seekers series of books, spoke about his Blish-inspired artwork.
The Star Trek Seekers series of books is being written by Kevin Dilmore, David Mack, and Dayton Ward.
Caswell decided one day to update the art of the James Blish novelizations just for fun. “As a personal project I decided to create new book covers for all twelve of the original James Blish ‘novelizations’, updating the imagery with details of what we were then seeing in the ‘remastered’ version of TOS, which was airing at the time,” he said “I had so much fun with that I wanted to do more, so I created a fictional Star Trek spin off TV series – The Seekers – and popped out about five well-weathered covers, posting the results on my Deviant Art site.”
Years later, some of the Trek novelists came upon his work, which inspired them. “Years passed and I was unaware that, behind the scenes, the writing team who handled the monumental Vanguard TOS novel series was looking for some new direction to take their work,” said Caswell. “They ran across my Seekers treatments and got excited with the idea of making this series idea become real, using me as the cover artist and keeping my ’70’s Blish cover graphics treatments. To ‘Trekkies of a certain age’ those big, bold book numbers below the Star Trek name hits a nostalgic sweet spot.”
Ward explained what happened on his blog. “Early last year, David [Mack], Kevin Dilmore and I began talking about what we might do as a trio now that our duties on the Star Trek: Vanguard series had come to an end,” he said. “Though our individual storytelling approaches differ from one another, the three of us are friends and we enjoy working together, hanging out together when opportunity presents itself, and talking shit about anyone and everyone who’s not the three of us.
“These discussions were triggered by the artwork of one Rob Caswell…One of my favorite things of his is the set of book cover mock-ups he did as an ‘updating’ of the great covers gracing the James Blish Star Trek novelizations from the 1970s. I even gushed a bit about those covers a couple of years ago. One image in particular stuck with me, because HEY! VANGUARD!
“But what really got David, Kevin and me talking was a series of faux covers Rob started doing early in 2012 for an imagined series of Star Trek spinoff novels titled The Seekers.”
“…Our masters at Pocket Books granted our wish to enlist Rob Caswell’s services as cover artist for Seekers,” said Ward, “which is fitting considering it was he who inspired us to take a chance on pitching this new idea in the first place.
Star Trek: Seekers will have at least four books in the series. The first two books can be ordered here.
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