The Pollinators of Eden by John Boyd, 1969. Penguin Books, 1978. Cover painting by Peter Cross. From jovike’s flickr.

I picked up this edition from a Book Exchange here in Austin. I find all sorts of gold at this store. This painting is so weird and otherworldly. What’s unfortunate is that there probably isn’t a scene in the book that matches the strange alien beauty of this cover.

It’s twilight on another world, before the sun rises or just after sunset, and the flower analogues are blooming. But these flowers are just the above-ground manifestation of a rhizomatic network of semi-conscious flora. They have detected the presence of human beings on the planet, and the human-faced seeds are the beginnings of an autoimmune response system that will breed simulacra to try to communicate with the outsiders (concept stolen from Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris).