Why are science fiction and fantasy books so crappy?

the related thread, full of examples: S/D: Freaky/psychedelic pulpy book cover design

best cover ever:

http://www.efanzines.com/EK/eI14/rb309.jpg

if liking "cheesy" sci-fi book covers is wrong then i don't want to be right

and, hey, to people who don't frequent i love books, i am always looking for good tips here:

School Me On Some Sci-Fi My Astral Brothers And Sisters!

and i don't care what the covers look like.

Ha, skot! Just looking at the picture (three posts above) I would never have known who the author was on that one. Actually even looking at the words gave me a hard time figuring out who it was, the name is kind of tiny.

It comes down to what kind of design or iconography a person particularly wants on their cover. Do you need explicit literalism(actual spaceships and actual space people), or would more an iconic abstraction(relevant or not) work?

I recall Ray Bradbury had some nice covers back in the day, maybe because he was a crossover artist, but the ones that come up nowadays on a google image search are kind of cheesy.

My dad had this version of this book, and the cover image haunted me for some reason

http://home.wlv.ac.uk/~in5379/covers/fullsize/ill_man5.jpg

Yeah, that one and I Sing The Body Electric used to haunt me too. (And Camus's The Stranger, with the black and white and red all over theater actors on the cover)

I like how the font used will date a book better than any image.

So why are they so crappy? Well, because there's so much out there, published, which means you just have to wade through it and find the good stuff. Same goes for detectives/thrillers and romance novels. Although I rarely buy the latter.

well, let's narrow down what you mean by crappy. You mean in terms of cover design, the typesetting, or the quality of the paper, printing & binding?

I actually happen to own this version of this particular book
http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/c0/c1194.jpg

Which not only has the derivative, crappy and obvious cover typical of the 70s but also appears to be printed on tracing paper and stuck together with spittle.

And don't get me started on the title - I'm fairly sure I detect the hand of an editor who must've thought "If we call it something shitty the geeks'll lap it up in droves."

They were trying to crossover to the all the Charlie Watts fans from the Stylus Best Drummer thread.

it's FIVE TIMES farther away than the Stones! Extreme!

well well well, when did this start?

http://www.avclub.com/content/blog/the_box_of_paperbacks_book_club_1

I don't get why anyone would care what the crap a book's cover looks like, unless it's got a giant golden statue of Moroni on it. Ugly. But if so, what are you doing reading the Book of Mormon, anyway?

I like that Tiptree cover. :(

I do too...I liked all the covers on the trippy book covers thread & even when they have crap covers, who cares.

I love scifi.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b9/A-Deepness-in-the-Sky-book-cover.jpg

I love this book so much.

i just bought the collected vinge story collection. gonna read it soon.

I'M IN YER FICTION. SPECULATIN'.

http://home.sprynet.com/~dbrukman/Vernor-Vinge-at-1999-Lunacon.jpg

CORDWAINER SMITH IS IN DA HOUSE!

http://www.fantascienza.com/magazine/imgbank/ARTICOLI/cordwainer-smith_1.jpg

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n2/n12854.jpg

i think it is so cool that cordwainer was also the ultimate psy-ops expert:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f3/Psychological_Warfare_Linebarger.jpg

HAI IM UGLY

http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/imageDB.cgi?isbn=9780679734468

http://www.tomandmaria.com/st197/images/dick%20cover.jpg

ha, i remember those dick covers. when did those come out? were they for generation xtasy?

I have at least 25 of them on my shelf; usually I droop a handkerchief over them :(

80s paperback editions of Dune and Dune Messiah had fantastic, mysterious covers. They were also two of the best books I've ever read (and I mostly can't stand science fiction).

THATS YOUR PROBLEM

SHUT

Those PKD covers were from 95/96, and totally look like my drunken experiments with Photoshop as an undergrad.

Man, every photo of me for a while, I insisted I hold that copy of Dune Messiah. What a phase.

Also, who's fucking idea was it to stick adverts in the middle of paperbacks?

http://www.avclub.com/content/files/images/flagellator%20interior.jpg

I have a few of the late 60s/early 70s printings with this shit. Its as gaudy as seeing pepsi commercials before a movie you already shelled out a shitload of dough for at the theater.

I love adverts just cos they capture an exact point in time

I really like those 'crappy' covers w/shit paper - saw an old for a Burroughs paperback ("The Wild Boys") last week and besides the fact that I hadn't read it I couldn't resist.

Frank Herbert's "Whipping Star" ws another recent-ish cover I saw.

I don't get why anyone would care what the crap a book's cover looks like

if you have to ask...

http://www.hatrack.com/osc/books/songmaster.jpg

Thomas Disch wrote about the shitty covers in his "The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of", and talked about how most sci-fi covers are representational only in terms of marking their genre, and little else. His own "334" had a British printing w/ a rocket & planets on the cover, and the book has nothing to do with space travel.

I kinda like something between the abstract photoshop garbage of those Vintage PKD printings and the bleedingly literal representational portraits of specific characters in specific ships.

I have this copy, which fits the book better perhaps
http://g-ec2.images-amazon.com/images/I/513G30W2DFL._BO2,204,203,200_PIlitb-dp-500-arrow,TopRight,45,-64_OU01_AA240_SH20_.jpg

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1098/1223872643_129afc6526_m.jpg

It's a bit small but you can click on it to see it bigger. Anyway it's a display for the new Gollanz editions mentioned upthread. Look great together.

Gollanz -Gollancz - for shame...

Oh, but I love those PKD covers! They're bright and fun and not overly literal illustrations of events in the books (I hate that).

There's a new series of PKD's lesser-known books just out, I snagged it from the slush pile at work. The covers are very Jeff Noon-esque. There are also some Neal Stephenson reprints which have completely hideous covers.

probably intended to compliment to the hideous writing

80s paperback editions of Dune and Dune Messiah had fantastic, mysterious covers.

I think I know the ones you mean, they were srsly excellent, and they kept being good up to God Emperor... and then someone decided the whole series needed a new totally lame cover redesign.

those 10000000 david weber novels that clutter the end of the sf section have the worst design.

i bought blood music based on the cover posted above (they all die!) and have just ordered two of the others. (£4 each on amazon)

(what's the bottom left? i haven't seen that one. i also have revelation space (top left + bottom right) in the original size / cover so...)

the top right appears to be that sculpture in manchester The B Of The Bang - http://www.bofthebang.com/

(bottom left is 'altered carbon' which i also already have - http://www.chronicles-network.com/forum/40727-the-gollancz-future-classics-range.html )

wrong link: http://www.uksfbooknews.net/2007/09/06/gollancz-editor-simon-spanton-on-the-future-classics-promotion/

The depressing thing about those Gollancz books is that I actually own most of those books with their original shitty covers of spaceships and the like...

Alastair Reynold's Diamond Dogs is pretty much the same idea as the Budrys (he's said as much in interviews and is the reason i bought Rogue Moon off ebay) (and also film The Cube. and the 42 episode of doctor who). the puzzling machine thing crops up a lot in his full length novels as well - the city maze in Revelation Space, the having to vary paths in Pushing Ice...

(that said, the Budrys doesn't spend as much time in the pyramid as i'd like it to. too much talking)

I like that Tiptree cover. :(

M. John Harrison's stuff gets a nice treatment.

i believe the cover of "her smoke rose up forever" is actually a recreation of one of klimt's paintings that was destroyed?

Maybe. Seems like the back cover IS by Klimt. Found something where the front cover illustration is said to be "Reconstructed by Andrew Smith," whatever that means.

Oh yeah, inside back dust jacket (in the copy I have at hand slightly obscured by library security device) it says "The front cover presents Zug der Toten (1903; destroyed in 1945) by Gustav Klimt, in a reconstruction by Andrew Smith; the back cover is Klimt's Tod und Leben (1915)." Thanks for clearing that up, Gott Punch.

I just read Simmons' The Terror and I honestly don't know what to think. Well, I mean, I do. I think that 800 pages was way too long, and even though the myth-y stuff that wraps it up helps, it was honestly a slog to get through hundreds and hundreds of pages of hyper-detailed winter survival stuff with scurvy, and frostbite, and starvation, and cannibalism, and murder, and ice and ice and snow and ice and ... oh yeah, once in a while an indomitable snow monster just shows up with no warning and dismembers people, and then it's immediately back to the scurvy, and military surgery, and frostbite, and starvation, etc.. And yet virtually no one ever discusses the monster, which I thought might be some sort of metaphor, except the book didn't need a metaphor and the monster is not a metaphor and ... I dunno. I guess I'm trying to say that the book would have been OK with no monster at all and didn't really need a monster any more than it needed several verbatim burial services for felled crew. And yet the addition of the monster definitely made it more intriguing, especially in light of the denouement. It was definitely some sort of arduous achievement, regardless, not just for me as a reader but Simmons as a researching and the book as semi-historical fiction.

I am suspicious of the forthcoming TV adaptation. Ultimately the novel probably works best as a read-only-once mood piece and having read it only once, I'm good. (I'm a sucker for Polar literature/explorations as such, so said details intrigue me more than anything else. Personally I still can't get over the fact that the crew really did haul all that seemingly useless stuff with them for no reason.)

Yeah, reminded me of the coffee grinder or whatever in Into Thin Air. "Men, only bring the barest of essentials! So, 100 kegs of rum, 300 gold candlesticks, a phonograph player, one pair of socks, one Welsh cap, 250 sets of silverware ..."

You know one of the problems I had with it, something that wasn't really a problem but sort of was ... a problem? Because we all know the expedition failed and everyone disappeared/died, it became something of a suspense-free endurance test. Like I wrote before, the last 100 pages or whatever brought a fresh vantage to what preceded it, but that almost could have been a different book in its own right, separate from all the survival stuff.

to the original question, there are a handful of books getting prestige editions or rereleases with covers by well-known artists but it's generally works that are decades old

Ted Chiang hated the cover art on the initial release of one of his books enough that he spent his own money to commission art for a cover and the publisher still was a dick about it and wouldn't use it! He eventually was annoyed enough to change publishers
http://withboots.blogspot.com/2005/02/adventures-in-publishing.html
http://www.cityartsmagazine.com/issues/eastside/2010/07/ted-chiang-vs-tor-publishing

the art for William Gibson's recent books makes no sense to me, either, and it's amazing how much better the covers (and sometimes the binding and printing) are on the editions released in other countries. I have at least one UK version because the cover is better.

this is possibly the worst sf cover I have ever seen
https://sciencefictionruminations.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/the-knight-of-kadar.jpg?w=474&h=770

awesome

little n large, the early years

what is going on here
https://sciencefictionruminations.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/the-hand-of-zei-sprague-de-camp-1.jpg?w=768&h=1281

is this like Catchphrase?

"trunk line?"

Samuel Delany's generally entertaining on facebook and he went through a series a few weeks ago about how he feels the newer editions of his work, that tend toward the abstract shapes and colors school of covers, are racist for not portraying main characters, who are mostly people of color in his work

I mean, that's fair! Also kind of a market thing where a lot of science fiction books are tending toward more abstract covers, especially a decade ago during that series of reissues

also wondering right now if the L. Sprague de Camp book above actually features trains with elephant-like creatures instead of locomotives because lol

An author's name has rarely been so apposite.

i could tell you some tales about *my* viagens interplanatarias