Redemption

With all due respect to our esteemed host, AI actually does tend to screw up limbs and (especially) digits in certain ways: extra fingers and/or limbs on people sticking out at unnatural angles are one of the many telltale signs of a picture’s being AI-generated. That said, unless what’s dystopian about the future depicted in your novel is that everyone is forced to be plugged into some kind of crappy virtual reality simulator (like e.g. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta) where everyone’s avatar looks like one of the plastic-skinned people from a cheaply rendered 3D porn game and everyone (including girls and women) is forced to wear the sleeveless and collarless white undershirt colloquially known as a “wife beater” on said avatar as well, the cheaply rendered plastic-skinned models of Poser (or whatever software you’re using) are not the right kind of imagery for your book’s cover. Even though you’ll probably have to tell the AI image generator to re-generate an image several times before it gives you a believably realistic scene from the dystopian future in question you’re seeking to portray (and even then, you will probably have to do some fine tweaking in post-production to cover up obvious errors in the rendering), even the not-so-great AI image generators (e.g. Perchance) can probably give you something that looks far better than what you’ve got now.

Also, yes, there’s nothing about the imagery provided on your current cover draft that specifically says “this is about a dystopian future” to me. From the look of everything, I could just as easily believe this is a present-day hard-boiled detective novel about a tough-as-nails bodybuilding private eye (who’s just not into wearing that cliched classic trench-coat-and-fedora kind of clothing; not all detectives are, you know) living in a slum who goes around solving local mysteries and (occasionally) making citizen’s arrests as part of his day job to help feed his wife and son. You want to indicate this is the future—even the near future—you’ve got to show us something—some technology or some kind of behavior—foreign to our rather dystopian now.

What that specifically means for your particular story, I don’t know; that plot summary you gave us is a pretty generic been-there-done-that-and-got-the-T-shirt kind of setting for your story. If the past four years have taught me anything about politics, it’s that just having elections doesn’t mean the officials thereby elected (even making the highly unsafe assumption for the sake of argument that they were legitimately elected) will actually be running your country, state, and/or locale. As demonstrated by some of the scandalous details emerging about some of the rather Orwellian projects e.g. USAID and its network of “Non-Governmental” Organizations (NGOs) have been funding with taxpayer dollars with little or no oversight from our President or Congress or any other elected officials, corporations and other allegedly “non-governmental” organizations have already got a rather disturbing amount of political power and influence over some of our states right now.

As for having “everything… taken from you” and trying to decide whether to attempt to claw back what you’ve lost or take a chance on acquiring something new and different from the uncertain future, see: 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the “new normal” that’s been emerging in its aftermath ever since; enough said! The question concerning your book’s cover amid all these tropes familiar to us here in real life is: what does your story do differently that might be of interest to your prospective readers? What totally-plausible-but-hasn’t-actually-happened-yet event occurs in it that might intrigue them enough that they’ll be willing to buy your book to find out more?

Whatever it is that’s new and different, that’s what needs to be on your cover. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if somebody were to release a novel right now about a shadowy cabal of corporations and governments (and those so-called “NGOs”) taking advantage of a worldwide pandemic to enslave and oppress ordinary people and strip them of their liberties in the near future, then (as mentioned) “Been there, done that, got the T-shirt” would be just about everybody’s reaction these days; but if someone (a time traveler, maybe, or a clairvoyant or just someone really prescient) had released such a novel in 2019 or earlier, can’t you just imagine how intriguing almost any of the unusual imagery from these dystopian times would have been to people back then? Said prescient novelist would need only to show a picture of one of our closed-down buildings with quarantine signs that spoke of such then-unknown concepts as “shelter-in-place” and “social distancing” and “essential personnel only” and so forth in order to have the makings of a very intriguing book cover; go thou, and do likewise.