The Shockwave Rider
Re-release Book Cover
Background:
The Shockwave Rider is a science fiction novel by John Brunner, originally published in 1975. It is notable for its hero’s use of computer hacking skills to escape pursuit in a dystopian future, and for the coining of the word “worm” to describe a program that propagates itself through a computer network. Written 7 years before the invention of the internet, The author had a unique (if quite imperfect) insight into the future we have today.
Problem:
The Shockwave Rider has been out of print for many years now, and was one of John Brunner’s lesser known novels. For the novel’s 50 year anniversary publisher Del Rey (now an imprint of Random House) needed a cover for a new re-release of the novel which brings the nostalgia and history of the book’s content to a new audience.
Solution:
For this cover I focused on elegantly displaying the books history, recognizing it’s pulp novel history while still allowing the novel to stand out on modern store shelves. I ustilized distressed typography and burnt out images as a reference to the time the book was made.
For the cover’s content I decided to focus on the main character’s use of false identities to hide himself in a way which is abstracted and mysterious to someone who hasn’t read the book.
P.S: The faces on the cover are actually from a short photoshoot I did with my friend Jerry, whom I found to be great stand in for the fictional character!