What's the story behind genre fiction's covers?

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What's the story behind genre fiction's covers?
January 19, 2011
Damien G Walter
Guardian.co.uk


Science fiction and fantasy book cover designs are as fashion fickle as an emo kid's dress sense, and produce the same kind of response. Like some sober-suited middle manager tutting over his son's electric blue spiky haircut, the literary reader sees the genres' gaudy covers and wonders how they can go out in public looking like that. Why can't they be more like a Penguin classic, or that nice Faber poetry collection next door? Boring, says genre as it slouches out of the door to meet its friends. It wouldn't want to be seen in public with the olds anyway. But behind the lurid illustrations hide some masterpieces of fiction.

Among the trending designs in genre covers is one I call the Hooded Wizard Assassin. Available in numerous variants, the design's key feature is a lone heroic figure, usually wielding a sword or staff, and looking vaguely magical/mysterious/dangerous. Inspired by the Assassin's Creed video game, the "bad boy" of SF covers appeals to the adolescent male in all of us. Most of the bad boys are doomed by their low IQs to educational under-achievement and careers in telesales. Jon Courtney Grimwood's The Fallen Blade, on the other hand, is already planning for grad school, but doesn't see why it shouldn't hang with the bad boys and enjoy some rough and tumble first of all.

The Fallen Blade is two books occupying the same page space. The first is a fantastic evocation of Renaissance Venice, both the atmosphere and architecture of the city, the beauty of the culture it gave birth to and the merciless, brutally violent and Machiavellian politics that ran alongside it. The second is an adventure fantasy with a smidgeon of romance, great hordes of vampires and werewolves and, of course, plenty of swordplay. Grimwood has made this fusion of genre energy and literary depth his calling card, with his Arabesk trilogy among the first books I recommend to readers looking for the best that contemporary SF has to offer.

Grimwood is far from the first science fiction author to transcend the boundaries of genre cover design. The original cover of JG Ballard's Crash likely did little to endear it to the readers who later applauded it as a cult classic. Drachenfels by Jack Yeovil has not only a questionable cover, but was also guilty of being written as part of Games Workshop's Warhammer franchise, and yet hides one of the most elegantly horrifying fantasy novels of its era (less surprising when you discover that Yeovil was a pen name for fantasy maestro Kim Newman).

But there is no denying that genre fiction also has its share of fashion victims. The tedious parade of tattooed, faceless young women gracing thousands of paranormal romance novels is a fashion that can only be improved by ending. And the original US cover for the 12th volume of The Wheel of Time saga actually seems to be issuing a challenge to the reader, via its stumpy-armed hero, daring us to test if the quality of the prose matches the illustration. But American independent publisher Baen Books have raised bad genre covers to an art in itself, producing covers so shamelessly packed with SF clichés and militaristic jingoism that it is hard to believe they are not some ironic spoof.

Genre cover design, it seems, can easily descend from the divine to the ridiculous, and sometimes hides unexpected masterpieces. Which are the best and worst covers the genre has to offer, and the best stories hidden in the pulpiest pages?