30 Covers, 30 Days 2017: Day Twenty-Five

Every November, during National Novel Writing Month, thirty professional designers volunteer to create book cover art inspired by novels being written by aspiring authors from around the globe. Why? To encourage new, diverse voices, and help build a more creative world.  

30 Covers, 30 Days is presented in partnership with designer and author Debbie Millman. Read more about these NaNoWriMo 2017 novels-in-progress, and the cover designers, below.

Luminescence

A Science Fiction novel being written this November by NaNo participant A. H. Aspar in Norway.

During a mining operation in the enormous asteroid field around θ Columbae, some 720 light years from Earth’s Sun, representatives of the Andersen-Polansky corporation spot the perfect candidate for the terraforming scheme their research department has been working on for the past few decades.

185 years later, θ Columbae V is one of nine planets, spread through seven solar systems, owned and colonized by the company. It is systematically being shaped and formed by a variety of microorganisms and gas-spewing terraforming stations—resulting, currently, in brilliant bioluminescence and awe-inspiring cloudscapes, and someday in a breathable atmosphere and human-friendly climate.

The story follows Alva, a microbiologist working on the terraforming station Von 72 years after humanity first set foot on the planet. Suddenly there are large dark patches appearing in the fields of fluorescing bacteria on the planet’s surface, and no one knows why.

Meanwhile, the station administrators refuse to let her or her team go outside to collect samples. Her friend in system engineering keeps complaining about random power outages all over the station. A surge of random violence among the station’s inhabitants suggests someone has found yet another creative, new way for people to get high despite the ban on hallucinogens in the colony. And the religion which suddenly emerged fifty years earlier is already preaching the coming of the end of the world.

Cover Designed by Debbie Millman

Debbie Millman is the host of the award-winning podcast Design Matters, the world’s first podcast on design; Chair of the first ever Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts, a curator for the Museum of Design, a contributor to Print Magazine, President Emeritus of AIGA, and the author of six books on design and branding. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter @debbiemillman. 

Author photo by Chase Jarvis.