Why are science fiction and fantasy books so crappy?

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...

That photo I took is so out of focus when you click on it, sorry!

ugh I couldn't get past the first dozen pages of Altered Carbon

i second your ugh.

I just couldn't believe that anyone was still trying to get mileage out of dressing up noir tropes in pseudo-science mumbo jumbo (with a little extra violence thrown in) and passing that off as somehow "forward thinking" or an "alarming vision of the future" or whatever

the violence, specifically the violence towards women, was the main factor i disliked it, yes.

damn you amazon recommendations.

I'm mid way through Evolution. The small mammals and primates didn't really get my sympathy but now we're onto homo whateverus things have picked up, interesting to see how we could have got from primate society to this sick sad world. Quite good on the big geological stuff too - e.g. 5 million years ago the Mediterranean may have filled up and evaporated fifteen times, over a million year period.

i just made it through hyperion ... why?

Because you're supposed to. (The only thing I've read from Simmons yet is The Terror and I quite liked it.)

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