Earlier this year, Maestro of the Weird Damien G Walter offered his opinions on some current trends in cover design for science fiction and fantasy novels – highlighting the fad for what he called the Hooded Wizard Assassin.
The covers of genre novels are double-edged swords of the sort that Damien's archetype might well be wielding. On the one hand, publishers know what sells to their target audience. On the other, the standard elements of science fiction and fantasy covers – spaceships, heroes, heroes on spaceships, dragons, heroes on dragons, dragons on spaceships etc ad nauseam – may well put off passing trade.
There are, of course, modern books that subvert the tropes completely – and to marvellous effect. Witness the Art Deco retro-futurism of Adam Roberts's By Light Alone, the (now admittedly dated) hi-tech obtuseness of Jon Courtenay Grimwood's cyberpunk redRobe, or the clean, white minimalism of Stephanie Swainston's The Year of Our War. But for some people, the "traditional" SF/fantasy cover has passed beyond awfulness into high camp and deserves to be embraced, just as "nerd" and "geek" are no longer insults, and Abba are fine to dance to.
There are many websites that honour the SF covers of old – I particularly like this clickable montage at penguinsciencefiction.org, and UK publisher Orbit a couple of years ago asked for design and blurb suggestions to help assemble "The Most Awesomely Bad SFF Cover in the World".
But my current favourite has to be the site Good Show, Sir, which makes a virtue of "only the worst Sci Fi and Fantasy book covers".
Good Show, Sir, invites users to submit their own snaps of really terrible cover art, either from books in their own collection or volumes they've seen in secondhand shops. They say: "There are many pieces of cover art that are beautiful to behold. Yet, there are others which exhibit a rarer, odd form of beauty. We think that such conflicts of focal points, lettering choices, false perspectives, anatomical befuddlement, ridiculous transport vehicles, oversized and frankly unusable monster-hunting weaponry, clothing choices that would get you killed walking down the street let alone hiking through a frozen wasteland, clichéd cat-people, and downright bad art deserve their own special form of tribute."
There are some absolute gems on the site. Not so much the axe-wielding mighty-thewed barbarians with lithe, barely clothed dancing girls surgically attached to their legs; those have become 10 a penny. But delving into the past comes up with wonderful items such as The Human Bat V The Robot Gangster from 1950, which is illustrated with an almost slavish devotion to literalism.
Native Tongue from 1984 falls into the "must have seemed a good idea on the drawing board" camp, but the commentary from Good Show, Sir, says it all: "A Green bubble wrap alien looking at a baby on a jar of jam?"
Nor do the cover artists always have the excuse of age – an edition of Ray Bradbury's short stories, We'll Always Have Paris, looks like it was knocked up by a child on a computer in half an hour: an image of the grinning author overlaid on an improbably-coloured Eiffel Tower. With some extra red and yellow thrown in for good measure. As the notes say: "Are you SURE Bradbury is sufficiently recognisable to appear on his own book covers? Well, jazz it up a bit; he looks a bit plain."
There are hours of happy browsing on Good Show, Sir, and without wanting to steal their thunder and any potential submissions to the site ... what's the best worst SF/fantasy cover you've ever seen?