So thanks to Boing! Boing! for pointing out The Art of Penguin Science Fiction.
I was at the Arthur C Clarke Awards on Wednesday night with a friend of mine from publishing who doesn't normally read much science fiction. She looked at the covers of the six shortlisted books on display up on the cinema screen, and said words to the effect of: 'Why has only one of them got a decent jacket?' The decent jacket she was referring to was Martin Martin's On the Other Side by Mark Wernham, published as a mainstream novel by Jonathan Cape.
I looked at the six books and realised that while I didn't agree that the covers were all bad (they're certainly not), I accepted that they were unlikely to appeal to anyone outside a genre audience. This is not necessarily a bad thing. These books feature robots, spaceships, multiple clones, parallel universes, and enough future speculation to cause your average geek to burst a diode but also cause your average English literature graduate schooled in twentieth-century naturalism to weep into their kitchen sink. (My advice to the kitchen sinkers: get out more, or at least check out the horrors lurking in the cellar or the angels living it up in the attic.)
However, these covers ARE a problem if you want to tempt readers from outside the genre.
Which is why I got quite excited by these old Penguin SF covers. Because they rarely employ what have become your standard science fiction tropes. They may be loud or garish or freaky but there's a hell of a lot more wit and coolness and originality about them than a picture of a rocket ship hanging in space.
Over the last few years Victor Gollancz has pushed the envelope further by producing some wonderful, award-winning backlist SF editions (here are the latest set).
Congratulations to Ian R MacLeod and PS Publishing for winning 2009's Clarke with literary science fiction novel Song of Time. This limited edition £20 hardback from a small press publisher featuring a specially commissioned painting by fan-favourite Edward Miller was never going to be bought by anyone other than the faithful.
But perhaps the Award will bring a new mass market edition with a more allusive cover to draw in those, like my friend, who think science fiction is still in desperate need of a makeover.
Colin Brush
Senior Creative Copywriter
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