The Soul Eater, by Mike Resnick, is a science fiction novel published as a paperback original by Signet in 1981, which is the very edition that caught my eye. Its splashy orange, yellow and green on black and gray is exotic. The small planet at bottom-right makes me wonder. The artist: Paul Alexander.
The first sentence:
The first sentence:
There is a world, toward the core of the galaxy, where the evening sky is so bright that most of cities—outposts, really—have never bothered to install artificial illumination.
Mike Resnick has won five Hugos and a Nebula for his short fiction, and written nearly eighty novels. Eighty! And I haven’t read a single one, yet.