• US$310

• 54 designs

• 6 designers

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Book Cover Design Brief

**Another tidbit: The emblem of the Midas Coalition that has ruled for 50 years: a suited man passing through the eye of a golden needle into radiant light.

*Here I'm adding some description of the domestic droid:
The premium domestic aid was rendered in sleek espresso brown with grey highlights... it had the body of a 1.5-meter tall svelte woman ... clothed in form-fitting black and white subtly suggestive of a maid's uniform. Saul’s Blackbox edition had an umber ovum head with a speaker screen for a mouth and a slit for eyes. The rest of the face had curves only vaguely suggestive facial features — a hint of cheekbones and nose. The limbs and torso were covered in a temperature-responsive synthetic dermal layer — dark brown with visible gray seams at joints.

Protagonist is a priest and widower with a 12-year-old daughter, who live in a Manhattan protected from rising seas by a massive levee while the outer boroughs drowned.. A droid serves as a surrogate mother. Their stable if compliant lives are disrupted when the priest's mentor, now a bishop, shows up warning of government conspiracies and an alien visitation. Soon they find themselves on an against-all-odds mission to save the world.

I imagined a cover showing the starting threesome: The priest, the domestic droid, and the 12-year-old daughter. I rendered an image with ChatGPT that I kind of like, though the priest looks too 19th century. Still I offer it here for reference. I wanted a human artist to produce the book cover, and I want a cover that doesn't reek of A.I.
I also welcome different ideas and approaches.
Finally, I changed the title. Now it's: The Unseen: Resistance in MAGA's 50th Year.

The full cast is: The priest (caucasian; fit at 50); his daughter (12); the domestic droid (has muted sex appeal); priest's cranky father-in-law who helped build the surveillance state before being forced into retirement; priest's elderly mentor, a bishop of Haitian descent; Elnor, a middle-aged former journalist who becomes priest's love interest; Thomas Wilkins, a government surveillance engineer.

Here's a more detailed summary:
THE UNSEEN is an 83,000-word speculative literary novel set in 2068 in the Greater United Terasphere of States, where trends apparent today — corporate capture of government, systematic disenfranchisement, tech run amuck, and pervasive surveillance — have reached their logical conclusion under the Midas Coalition’s 40-year rule. A priest’s comfortable and compliant life in Manhattan is disrupted when his mentor shows up warning of a secret (and illegal) cyborg soldier program whose deployment will lead to a climate cataclysm — wild claims involving alien contact that convince Saul his friend has lost his grip on reality. Father Saul agrees to an investigative journey, but it is a ruse to stage a mental health intervention. At his mentor’s urging, he brings along his bitter father-in-law, a former government engineer, as well as his 12-year-old daughter. But when they encounter a malfunctioning cyborg warrior on an abandoned disc golf course, Saul is forced to reconsider his assumptions. Soon, they become an unlikely band of saboteurs thrust into an against-all-odds mission to halt a global military deployment that threatens human extinction.

While THE UNSEEN features a priest as its protagonist, it is decidedly not Christian fiction. Rather, it explores the broader philosophical question of how humans come to believe anything at all — examining faith alongside science, propaganda, interpersonal trust, first-hand observation and other mechanisms by which people establish truth in a world where an autocratic regime dictates the reality citizens are expected to accept. Saul's journey involves losing his religious faith even as he gains the moral courage to join an underground truth-archiving movement, making this a story about epistemology rather than evangelism.

Target Market(s)

Sci-fi readers; dystopian novel readers; despairing liberals

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Font styles to use

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Look and feel

Each slider illustrates characteristics of the customer's brand and the style your logo design should communicate.

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Requirements

Must have

• i offered an A.I.-produced image for reference, but welcome entirely different concepts and directions

Nice to have

• Signals of a dystopian near-future that is a natural (if speculative) consequence of today's headlines

Should not have

• not too sci-fi -- this novel is a recognizable near-future. What's different is a ubiquitous surveillance state

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