This cover isn’t all that old, but we thought it was interesting enough to post here. This is the cover for Laberinto de Muerte by Philip K. Dick. For our non-Spanish-speaking readers, this is a 1999 Spanish translation of PKD’s A Maze of Death. It was translated by Carlos Gardini and printed in Spain.
Philip K. Dick probably needs no introduction, as he’s an author famous for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (which was the basis for the film Blade Runner), A Scanner Darkly, “Minority Report,” and “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” (which was the basis for the film Total Recall). Clearly, PKD is no small fry in the world of science fiction.
A Maze of Death, however, is admittedly one of his more obscure works, and it’s strange even by PKD standards. It tells the tale of a crew of random folks who are sent to a planet called Delmak-O to colonize it. However, when they arrive, they find themselves without any way of communicating offworld, and even worse, they begin dying off one by one. It’s a little bit like Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, only set on an alien planet inhabited by sentient globs of gelatin.
The delightfully strange cover illustration is by Theo Rudnak, whose work has appeared in publications such as The Atlantic Monthly, The Boston Globe, Forbes, and Harvard Business Review. Rudnak is a member of the Society of Illustrators, and he even works with sculptures, having created pieces that are a part of the Smithsonian’s permanent collection.
The design layout was done by Jordi Forcada.