Why are science fiction and fantasy books so crappy?

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