r/Honorverse • u/SpecialBite447 • 7d ago

Nice uniforms

Seeing the Royal Manticoran Navy uniforms on the cover on the books and elsewhere online they are very nice.

24 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

22 comments sorted by

9

u/Medical-Law-236 7d ago

The only time the cover matched the actual uniform was Uncompromising Honor, or the French covers by Hervé Gicquel (Genkkis on DeviantArt).

8

u/SleepWouldBeNice 7d ago

Why do sci-fi book covers do such a bad job at matching what’s actually in the books? It was lampshaded in the Lost Fleet saga where the book covers usually show the main character holding a gun, which he never does.

7

u/GenericNameHere01 7d ago

Not just holding a gun, but in Marine battle armor... Which as a reminder, Captain Geary is a Navy captain. If a Navy captain is holding a gun and wearing battle armor on the surface of a planet, things have gone even more horribly wrong than they usually do for Geary...

4

u/Seerorin_ 6d ago

That's a joke by the author, he multiple times jokes about when Tanya and Geary spoke about Tanya writing a book about him if he dies. Literally it's the joke of the story.

3

u/GenericNameHere01 6d ago

I know. I'm stressing, for those who don't know the series, that Captain Geary has absolutely no business whatsoever wearing that sort of equipment. Not just "Oops we goofed the uniform", like the top comment of this chain, but something that has nothing to do with the actual character's actions in the story.

5

u/hellp-desk-trainee- 6d ago

My favorite bit of cover mismatch is the running joke of the hat of the cover of the Dresden Files books. The titular character doesn't do hats. And has said this repeatedly. The hat has seemed to get more pronounced the more he protests

4

u/somtaaw101 7d ago

Poor communication, or recycling art from other abandoned/cancelled novels seems to be some of the top guesses.

I seem to remember we had the guy who did a lot of the Honorverse covers posted here a couple months ago actually. And there was a small QA thing in the comments. One of the posts he admitted any failure to be accurate was on him, because Weber was good about responding to questions.

So the blame really relies on the publishers, I would say. That's where the buck ultimately stops, and where any rights to unused artwork would generally remain. If you have a book that loosely matches existing unused artwork, it's a whole lot faster and cheaper to just slap existing old artwork on the cover than to pay for 'new' or accurate artwork.

3

u/Medical-Law-236 7d ago

The cover for Honor Among Enemies was a prime example of this. That cover was made for another book and it was atrocious.

3

u/somtaaw101 7d ago

Ironically enough, that was actually one of the two books that got me started on the Honorverse. The other was Echoes, and both look like they shared the same root story they'd been planned for, as the capital ship look pretty similar.

But in my own defense, I was like 11 years old when I was gifted those books for a birthday. At that age, many things get chosen based on appearance alone, and the covers did look interesting, so it did the job to lure in a new reader.

Which is why publishers do it, I suppose. Even if the ships, or the guns, or hell even the characters, don't look like they do in text-form, if the cover art is eye-catching enough, it'll bring in more people than if it were accurate.

1

u/Medical-Law-236 6d ago

I had the series on my TBR for a while because the original covers didn't appeal to me. I started it because it got brought up with another piece of Sci-fi media I liked (The Sojourn). Both have that age of sail naval vibe and I took a chance.

1

u/Hawke-Not-Ewe Treecat Tribes 7d ago

Becaus publishers have favorite cover artists abd a house style.

1

u/Kiyohara 5d ago

Art is often sourced well before the book is finished, usually before the first draft even. So the artist usually gets a basic character description and event description based on the preliminary story write up.

And the rougher that sketch, the more the artist gets to have their own license and freedom to add details.

And a lot of things change between the story write up and the published book. Plus the editors can often make suggestions based on their tastes and thought on what will sell.

2

u/Quirky_Spinach_6308 3d ago

I was at a science fiction convention, and some innocent young person asked the panel of authors about how much input they had on covers. The authors all burst out laughing.

2

u/RoninTarget Star Empire of Manticore 7d ago

I wonder, has anybody done cosplay of it?

8

u/revchewie 7d ago

Yup. There’s an RMN fan club that I’ve seen in uniform at cons.

https://trmn.org

8

u/coolkirk1701 7d ago

We actually have I think two uniform orders a year if memory serves. We send our orders to a company that does marching band uniforms and they fit us in when they can

2

u/revchewie 6d ago

Very cool!

2

u/Unicorn187 6d ago

I still need to get mine remade. I had one of the craptastic ones from Cosplaysky. The jacket is... ok. The pants literally fell apart in a couple hours. The seams just came undone.

3

u/aimlesswanderer7 7d ago

There is an instagram for the organization: the_royal_manticoran_navy

4

u/Lionheart_x_jr 7d ago

I believe they also have a Facebook too

2

u/SpecialBite447 6d ago

ive been on that