An Unsuitable Cover For A Classic

It's always good to see an important and influential SF writer's magnum opus get a new printing. But I was really taken aback to see Phoenix Pick had chosen this as the cover for their new edition of Cordwainer Smith's Norstrilia:

What this image says to me is: "This book is Horror. HORROR, HORROR, HORROR."

(The red-glowing eyes also inevitably bring to mind Carly Fiorina's infamously bizarre "Demon Sheep" campaign ad for her failed 2010 Senate campaign.)

While elements in some of Smith's stories are pretty horrifying ("Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons"; "A Planet Named Shayol"), he's not a horror writer. His work is very much science fiction, with far flung space empires, animals uplifted to human intelligence, immortality drugs, and other aspects sheerly in the science fiction camp, written from idiosyncratic angles and perspectives that few other writers have managed to emulate. Smith might be described as the grandfather of the New Weird movement, epitomized by writers such as China Mieville and Jeff VanderMeer, although New Weird tends to frequently mashup horror, fantasy and science fiction (usually with the major emphasis on horror, it seems to me) into its own particular stew.

Googling around, I found this image originates as a piece of vector stock illustration, available from a number of stock-image providers. *sigh* While I can understand why a small press like Phoenix Pick would want to use stock art (they save a lot of money over a commissioned piece), I wish they'd hunted around longer to find something more suitable.