A few months ago I loaned a friend a much-loved book.
She’s as voracious a reader as I am, and has a truly epic stack of “to be read” books that range from contemporary fiction to political books to classics to airport thrillers. Our tastes overlap in a few crucial areas, most notably our mutual love of mysteries, and over the last couple of years I’ve loaned her several of my favorite science fiction novels. Despite some initial skepticism, she’s usually enjoyed my offerings, and is particularly fond of Lois McMaster Bujold’s wonderful Vorkosigan series of space operas. That’s why I decided to take a chance and loan her The Bone Doll’s Twin, first book of a three-book fantasy series by Lynn Flewelling. These books, about a princess who is literally given the form of her dead brother to protect her from her usurping uncle, are an insightful look at gender roles and sexism cleverly disguised as an epic fantasy, and I thought my friend would enjoy it for that even though she’s not much of a fantasy reader.
My hunch was right – she loved the books, and was so caught up in its prequel series that she ran up to me shouting, “ELLID! IS THERE ANOTHER ONE?” waving one of the books over her head– but she admitted to me after she’d begun reading that the cover did not precisely inspire confidence that what she was about to read was any good. “If I’d seen these in a bookstore I never would have picked them up, so I’m glad you told me to ignore the covers,” she said.
Alas, she’s said the same about almost every other science fiction novel I’ve loaned her, and who can blame her? Even more than romance novels with their endless paintings of beautiful women in flowing gowns cradled in the steroid-inflated brawny arms of handsome men who all look like Fabio, science fiction and fantasy are notorious for boasting covers that, to quote John Scalzi, “a normal 30-something human being [would] die of embarrassment to be seen with in public.” This may be due to American science fiction's roots in the old pulp tradition, with its attention-grabbing but ridiculous covers, but all too many SF and fantasy novels have cover designs that are firmly in the pulp tradition of bright colors, plenty of action, and explosions (SF) or fantastic creatures (fantasy).
Before anyone starts slinging brickbats in my direction, go to your local bookstore and look at the other genre sections. The cover art may be predictable (badges equal a police procedure; the White House means a political thriller; a woman in a high waisted gown indicates a Regency romance; a man on horseback signals Western) or even boring, but the art doesn’t instantly and irrevocably brand the reader as someone who probably could work as an extra on The Big Bang Theory. And though the stereotype of the science fiction reader as a basement-dwelling male virgin with a large action figure collection applies only to a small percentage of fen, the covers of far too many books are so bad that it's no wonder the casual reader doesn't want to be associated with such a genre.
There are certainly exceptions. The legendary artist Michael Whelan, who began by painting covers for DAW books and is now selling non-cover art through New York galleries, is a stunning artist regardless of what he paints. The same can be said of Tom Canty’s lush, dreamy interpretations of Ellen Kushner and Roger Zelazny, the Hildebrandts’ reworking of Maxfield Parrish’s hyper-realism, and several others. Canty’s art in particular doesn’t scream “GEEK!” about one’s reading choices to every other passenger on the subway car, while the cover on the average paranormal romance or vampire novel can and does pass for a regular thriller cover.
None of this excuses the sheer cheesiness of much of what passes for cover art on mass market SF and fantasy paperbacks, or a level of cliché that frequently masks whatever crossover appeal what’s called “the literature of ideas” might have for new readers. I’ve long thought that the reason fen are so tolerant of differences and so ready to embrace new technology and ways of seeing the world is because science fiction discusses the new and the unusual years (often decades) before so-called mainstream literature…but if the ideas and the tolerance remain confined to what is still too often a literary ghetto because Joe and Jane Reader are so turned off by the cover art that they won’t even touch, say, Mirror Dance or Tooth and Claw, one wonders if the art directors at Del Rey and Tor might be on the wrong track.
Tonight’s offerings all feature Cover Art So Bad It’s Good, whether discussed in detail or given a quick once-over. Many of these books are actually thoughtful, well-written, and enjoyable, but the art is so bad that even SF fen frequently cringe and buy the e-version instead of the paperback:
The Lord of the Rings, by JRR Tolkien (cover art by Barbara Remington) - That JRR Tolkien was a brilliant and enormously influential writer is beyond dispute; his masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings, can truthfully be called one of the most important books of the 20th century for its impact on speculative fiction.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for his publishers. They neglected to register the paperback copyright for LOTR in the United States when the book was first published in the 1950s. Ace Books noticed this, thought the books had commercial potential, and in 1965 launched the first wave of the Tolkien craze by issuing a pirated edition of the books, with mediocre but not unbearable cover art by the late Jack Gaughan.
The books took off almost immediately. Tolkien's publishers, realizing that they had been well and truly skunked thanks to their own carelessness, took the extraordinary step of asking the author to make a few small revisions so they could properly register LOTR and The Hobbit in paperback. Ballantine Books then published a brand new, authorized version, complete with a statement from Tolkien on the back cover pleading with readers to show some respect to a living author and buy this edition and not the nasty bad Ace books that didn't pay the now-retired professor a red cent.
Unfortunately, in their haste to get the copyrighted version to press, Ballantine made one mistake: they neglected to send a copy of the manuscript to the new cover artist, Barbara Remington. And though Remington did her best based on vague descriptions of the books' plot and character, the resulting image, a single huge painting entitled "Wilderness" that was chopped into thirds for the covers of the trilogy, is what could charitably be described as a hot mess.
Abstract dragons and wolves outside the gates of what is supposed to be Mordor...huge birds with big googly eyes...pink bulbous pumpkin-things hanging in trees...anyone who looks for a single point of resemblance to anything or anyone in LOTR will be gravely disappointed. One critic wondered in print if the covers had been done by "a deranged Navaho on LSD," while readers either ignored it, bought the Ace reprints instead, or, just possibly, dropped a tab or two of acid and stared at the covers until they made sense.
The best comment on the Remington art, however, is probably the cover from the Harvard Lampoon's brilliant Bored of the Rings. Need I say more?
The Door into Fire, by Diane Duane – (first edition cover art by Terry Oakes, later cover art by Susan Shay Collins). This book, Duane's first, broke new ground in speculative fiction. Its treatment of sexuality, in all its grand and glorious permutations, was frank, matter of fact, and accepting to the point of being somewhat startling even today; bisexuality is not only a given for most people but is incorporated into the book's major religion, same-sex relationships (including marriage) are seen as normal, and the main character, Herewisse, not only has a much-loved boyfriend, the exiled Prince Freelorn, but later teaches a fire elemental about human love, sex, and desire. It's a wonderful and beautifully written book, and was met by critical raves in all the trade publications.
One has to wonder, then, why the cover art, by one Terry Oakes, is so very, very bad. Oh, there's nothing there that isn't in the book, but the way the elements are used is, to say the least, unattractive; Sunspark the elemental, who likes to manifest as a horse, looks like one of Mark Twain's gen-u-ine Mexican plugs after a brush with a nearly-dry Zippo, Herewisse resembles one of the Mighty Sons of Hercules instead of a wiry young man, and the Goddess is seemingly being raped by a very, very, very long sword. It's little wonder that the cover art for the next edition, by Susan Shay Collins, is much less, uh, distinctive, although the image of Herewisse riding Sunspark surrounded by flames through a miraculously undamaged field isn't all that much better as art.
The current e-book, available via the author's web site, Amazon, Smashwords, and Barnes & Noble, is much better, with a sword surrounded by glowing blue flames. It's not 100% accurate (the sword Herewisse eventually forges doesn't have a hilt) but at least there isn't a knackered horse rearing up in self-defense against Mighty Ursus.
The above but two of many, many, many similarly peculiar, off-putting, or downright terrible illustrations in the science fiction and fantasy fields:
- Leo and Diane Dillon's cover for the groundbreaking Dangerous Visions anthology, which seems to have taken Mr. Yuk, a singer for the New York Dolls, and an anatomical cutaway of an eyeball and thrown them into a blender.
- the Mercedes Lackey trilogy about a suffering gay Herald-Mage in a pretty pink cloak, clutching his pretty white horse's neck as he bewails his miserable, sucky teenage years. This one was so over the top that another author who writes fantasy with gay characters has an informal "no pink cloaks on the cover" agreement with her publisher.
- the strangely malproportioned riders and horses on the cover of the first book of Robert Jordan's interminable Wheel of Time series; yes, the woman, Moirane, is supposed to be short, but she seems to be riding a curiously precious pony, and her warrior companion, Lan, looks to be roughly the size of Shaquille O'Neal. The artist, Darrell K. Sweet, later contributed to an encyclopedia about Jordan's world, and was widely slammed for botching details and getting the anatomy wrong, so this is not an anomaly.
- Rowena Morrill's unspeakably horrid "Beren and Luthien" illustration for an old Tolkien calendar.
- a cosmic Ping-Pong ball on the cover of Jack Chalker's Twilight at the Well of Souls, which has no relation to anything in the book, or speculative literature, or, indeed, anything in the universe.
- what appears to be the bastard offspring of David Bowie and Richard Marx on the cover of Catherine Asaro's Diamond Star.
- Honor Harrington's motherly side, complete with suspiciously leering treecat, on David Weber's At All Costs.
And so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and....
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Now that I've finished blinding myself to entertain YOU, my faithful readers my little survey of Cover Art So Bad It's Good, it's your turn. That's right, my fellow Kossacks: what's your favorite lousy cover art? It doesn't have to be science fiction - God knows I damn near went into convulsions laughing at this extraordinary cover art for a gay Regency romance - so have at it -