Cover Crush: The Liminal Zone by Richard Abbott

Today’s entry really lights a spark in our somewhat dormant Cover Crush series – from the moment I saw it. I’m far too greedy and undisciplined to actually carry a package home and unwrap it like in the movies. So of course I tore it open in the car, at first expecting the black of the previous two covers in the series, instead gasping at the lovely coloring of this one.

Like the other Far from the Spaceports covers, this one is a dead giveaway to its sci-fi content, which I never was a fan of until I began this series. But it moves away from run-of-the-mill coverage with the lovely green, darker toward the top, transitioning to a lighter shade as the eye moves closer to the image of the person in a spacesuit. What lies to their right is included in the picture: a somewhat stark environment also reflected in the suit’s visor, bringing us to understand that this landscape stretches before and beyond the person, with a tension further conveyed as the image spills onto the back cover.

The contrasting sandy brown at bottom serves to divide the cover roughly in half, its distant horizon adding to the barren feel, and is replicated in the visor’s reflection. What is this world? it makes me wonder, an inquiry only to be answered by opening the book.

The Liminal Zone – A Far from the Spaceports novel

Author – Richard Abbott

Selkies in Space? Nina Buraca, investigator of possible signs of alien life, has heard tales of mysterious events on Pluto’s moon Charon, where a science outpost studies extrasolar planets. Facing opposition from her colleagues, she nevertheless travels from Earth to uncover the truth. Once there, she finds herself working with a team of people who have many secrets. To make progress, she has to take sides in an old dispute that she knows nothing about. Can she determine who – or what – is really behind the name “selkies” that the station’s staff have given to this uncanny phenomenon?

The Liminal Zone, a novel in the Far from the Spaceports series, takes you a further twenty years into the future – and out to the edge of our solar system – for an encounter with the unknown.

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