Not one of ours • 30 April 2010 • The SnowBlog

Not one of ours

          
StarBeast.jpg
Really bad book covers? Thanks to BoingBoing I've just stepped up to my neck in them. Good Show Sir is full of awful sci-fi/fantasy covers like the one you're looking at now. It really takes me back to when I used to stand in my local bookshop after school, trying to decide which ripsnorting sci-fi yarn to buy, with only horribly written blurbs and horribly designed covers to guide me. And later I could never figure out why the front cover might contain, say, a space gunfight with aliens that turned out not to occur in a story which might have been set, say, entirely on Earth with no aliens anywhere. And I can honestly say that it never occurred to me that the reason might be a publisher who didn't really care that much. Or to be charitable, a publisher who suspected they were a little out but didn't have the time or money to do anything about it. I have to say, looking back, that I see it now as a low-level sort of contempt. I wonder how many publishers thought sci-fi readers were so undiscriminating that it didn't matter. Whereas the truth was that I pored over books the same way I pored over album covers for favourite bands (which, back in the days of Roger Dean, might have contained exactly the same artwork). I'm pretty sure I even read 'The Star Beast' back in the day. If I remember rightly, it's a sort of precursor to ET, if ET were more like a brainy elephant than a brainy monkey. Good times.

Rob

The SnowBlog is one of the oldest publishing blogs, started in 2003, and it's been through various content management systems over the years. A 2005 techno-blunder meant we lost the early years, but the archives you're reading now go all the way back to 2005.

Many of the older posts in our blog archive suffer from link rot. Apologies if you see missing links and images: let us know if you'd like us to find any in particular.


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