My new psi-fi novel, Alien Body, is released September 1, 2019. It’s the first in a series featuring my favorite alien, Phane Vikos, who looks like a large green tennis ball, with arms, legs, and a head. Oh, yes, and two eyeballs atop writhing tentacles. He’s cute!

Why don’t you see him on the cover of the book? I wanted to show him. But every cover sketch I tried made the book look like a joke. This novel is a serious exploration of how body configuration affects one’s mind. The tone of the story is light, but I didn’t want it to seem frivolous. Alas, Phane may just be too goofy-looking to be taken seriously on the cover of a book.

Here are a couple of early cover images that didn’t make the cut.

The early title was “Foreign Body,” but I ended up changing it.  I was especially fond of the tennis ball in the Stevie Ray Vaughan hat.  However, I had to conclude that Phane was not “cover material.”

Why did I make Phane so goofy-looking in the first place? The main point of the novel is to de-familiarize the body for readers because I want to discuss what it’s like to live inside a body. Phane had to be weird enough that a reader might think, “I wonder what it would be like to have a body like that?” When I designed him, I wasn’t thinking about the book’s cover.

In the end, I put Phane’s spaceship on the cover. It looks suitably sci-fi and eerie, (ooo-eee-ooo!) and it captures the climactic scene where the ship hovers, dripping, over a lake as astounded Earthlings look on. Phane is inside the cylinder, like a tennis ball in a can. You have to imagine him there.

Here’s the blurb for Alien Body:

In Alien Body (sci-fi, 80,000 words), Physician Dave Booker is shocked to discover an alien living in his summer cabin. Phane, the alien, is an anthropologist from another star system. His shuttlecraft has crashed, and he must regain it before the mothership gives him up for dead. But Dave is dumbfounded by the alien’s appearance, a large, green tennis ball with two eyes on tentacles above his head. What would it be like to have a body like that? Does one’s body determine how we think about the world, as the visitor claims?

Dave’s ambitious boss captures Phane but he escapes. In a wild chase, Phane flees determined pursuers including the military, but it’s not easy for a talking green tennis ball to hide. Dave realizes that Phane has much to teach humanity, but can he find his alien friend first and help him?

Alien Body is available as an ebook on Kindle and Smashwords and in paperback on Amazon:

Ebook – Smashwords ISBN-  978-1-7322274-9-1 (Epub)      www.smashwords.com/books/view/927284

Ebook –  Kindle:  ISBN-   978-1-7338927-0-4 (Mobi)                      www.amazon.com/dp/B07VWKRH75

Paperback – KDP:   ISBN-  978-1-7338927-2-8 (paper)
www.amazon.com/dp/1733892729