Are there any illustrations of the Ganymeans from James P. Hogan's Giants series? The only one I can find is the cover of the second novel, The Gentle Giants of Ganymede, and it's too small to make out any detail. What I'd like is a large image along the lines of the Bonnie Dalzell illustrations in certain editions of Larry Niven's Known Space books.
2 Answers
There are a few other covers that depict the "Ganymeans," as Earth humans term them. (Even though historically they were "Minervans" and in contemporary time would be better termed "Thuriens.")
The Science Fiction Book Club released an omnibus of the first three novels (Inherit the Stars, The Gentle Giants of Ganymede and Giant's Star) in 1981 under the title The Minervan Experiment with this cover:
The flat-nosed, pointed-ear look of the blue-skinned giants in this picture is highly reminiscent (though anticipating by more than 2 decades) the Na'vi in Avatar.
The original Orbit hard-cover edition of Entoverse (1991) keeps the blue skin, but elongates the skull and completely removes external ears:
(Note that this is only a snippet of a high-resolution image of the cover, but the only part of relevance to this answer.)
Finally a new version of the Giants is depicted on the 2007 Baen omnibus The Two Worlds. These Giants are midway between the two depictions above, with small ears and a slightly elongated skull, but drops the blue colouration entirely. This picture clearly shows the Giants' hands with six fingers and two thumbs:
I found some fan art. Don't know about copyright so I'll just include the link:
This is an illustration I did in 1980 for the long-defunct Fantasy Artists Network Quarterly. It depicts a scene from "The Gentle Giants of Ganymede", a science Fiction novel by James P. Hogan. The premise is that an alien civilization visited Earth in the Oligocene and took samples of the wildlife of the time. The alien Ganymeans themselves were a well thought-out evolutionary development.
