Covering Covers: Galileo's Dream

I saw the cover for Kim Stanley Robinson's Galileo's Dream for the first time accompanying Adam Robert's glowing review at the Guardian website. I grabbed a brief summary of the novel from his review which is quoted below:

Two-thirds of the novel is a scrupulously researched and brilliantly effective historical tale dramatising Galileo's life and times; the remainder is set among the colonised moons of Jupiter in the year 3020. Alien life has been encountered beneath Europa's ice; it may be benign or it may pose a terrible threat to Jovian human society. By means of temporal entanglement (with just a little Robinsonian hand-waving), Galileo is brought "proleptically" forward to lend his prestige to the debate over what to do.

That sounds very interesting and the cover blends Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle with any of a number of Alastair Reynolds covers. Devoted SFF blogosphere followers might recall that Adam Roberts referenced Galileo's Dream in his rant about the mediocrity of this year's Hugo slate as one of the books he's read that he would nominate over any of the actual novels on the list. I'm definitely interested in reading this one but unfortunately it falls into the category of books that are published in the UK with no US release date in sight. I just might have to bend my rule about foreign releases once again...

What do you think of the cover? Any UK readers out there?

Update: Reader Kimon provided a link to the US Cover as well as a US Release Date of December 29th, 2009. There's also another review, this one from The Independent.

Here's the US cover:


I don't know about you but the cover + release date is two votes for the UK edition and two strikes against the US one. Book Depository Free World Wide Shipping, here I come.