Let us now pay tribute to a cover that dares to ask: What if we took a cat, a human, and your ability to sleep peacefully ever again—and merged them into one terrifying jpeg?
Presenting: The Instrumentality of Mankind by Cordwainer Smith, lovingly defaced by the design equivalent of a power outage mid-Photoshop session. This isn’t just bad design—it’s an evolutionary warning.
First, the imagery. Someone, somewhere, looked at Cordwainer Smith’s complex sci-fi classic—a visionary tale of post-humanity, genetic manipulation, and moral philosophy—and thought: “This calls for a cat with human teeth.” So they took a cat. They took a person. Then they committed a crime against both species by blending them together at the mouth and calling it art.
The result is a horrifying hybrid with slit-pupil eyes glaring into your soul while flashing a full set of unnaturally white, perfectly human teeth. It’s less “science fiction” and more “Shark Tank pitch for a haunted orthodontics clinic.” And the blending? Minimal. There’s a hard Photoshop line where the human skin just slides into cat fur like it’s wearing a horrifying biological mask.
And then we get the typography, which looks like it was added in Microsoft Word during a lunch break. Dead-center, stacked, Helvetica-wannabe font with no consideration for placement, composition, or visual tension. The author’s name is bolded, but why? Because the designer gave up trying to make it look intentional? The title just kind of sits there, helplessly watching as the feline-human hybrid prepares to eat your dreams.
But wait—there’s more! At the bottom, we get a big yellow banner that reads “Gateway Essentials,” complete with a tiny compass logo as if to say: “Yes, you are lost.” It’s the publishing imprint’s attempt to inject branding into the crime scene, but really it just feels like an unrelated DVD menu from a forgotten sci-fi channel rerun.
There is no indication whatsoever of the book’s tone, genre, scope, or scale. Instrumentality of Mankind is a sweeping saga of transhuman ethics and surrealist world-building. This cover says, “Meow. I am become teeth.”
In conclusion, this isn’t just a design fail—it’s an interdimensional design accident, a feline fever dream glued to a stock photo smile, wrapped in typographic indifference.
The Instrumentality of Mankind deserves better.
We all do.