I don’t read as much as I should, since I’m currently winning my soul back from Guitar Hero and playing online Scrabble, but I nerdily admit that some of my most fulfilling reading experiences have come from the realm of dusty science fiction. The summers spent with Moorcock’s Elric and the Dancers at the End of Time stories are some of the most resonant ones that I can recall. Give me Ellison or give me death.
My knowledge of science fiction authors is not as well explored as it could be, so when I come across a science fiction or fantasy paperback, there’s only one way I can decide whether or not to get it – the cover. Yes, I defy everything that I, as a moral and generous human being, have even been taught. I remorselessly profile books and judge them accordingly. I have a loose set of visual rules for things that get onto my shelves.
First of all, nothing published past 1990 without first reading a review of it, and nothing that has anything to do, ever, with Dungeons and Dragons. Sure, the gaming system is a bottomless bag of fun, but the books – not so much. After 1990, and don’t quote me on this, but I feel like a certain amount of magic was lost in the world of sci-fi – mostly because we were fast adapting the technologies theorized in the science fiction of old. A certain homogeny was taking place, at least in the things I happened to read. This eliminates approximately 60% of everything that might clutter my limited living spaces. A guy’s gotta have limits.
And yes, I have a ridiculous number of Star Trek paperbacks – even if they are non-canon, they’re usually more interesting that the episodes.
Second, I start sorting by positive qualities. Anything with nudity, or almost-nudity on the cover, is pretty much a no-brainer. There’s gotta be some wicked barbarian love inside, or more likely, an unrelenting sexual tension between our hero and about a dozen damsels that he happens to encounter, or are trapped in spider webs or by trolls or something. These will be alternately helpless, princesses, or hard-to-know fellow warriorettes who will eventually be bowed by his masculine charms.
Such was the case with the Chronicles of Gor by John Norman – a wild series of books with golden priest centipedes, warring kingdoms, friendly spider monsters, and mostly, a subservient class of slave women. Our hero, who is from our Earth, resists these repressive cultural norms… until he kinda gets into it. It wasn’t until later, when I started seeking out more of the series, that I discovered that these books weren’t as obscure as I’d thought, and a whole sect of bondage culture had developed around them, and also that John Norman was a bit of a misogynist after all. I kinda lost interest after that – but the first three books were great, punch-in-the-face weirdness and war.
Of course, this book cover nudity might not be of the damsel variety. It MIGHT just be alien. These are slightly less common, but ‘Runts of 61 Cygni C‘ by James Grazier is a perfect example of nudity being used, in any bizarre context, to draw the reader’s eye to a book. Oh sure, they’re bald, ‘one-eyed runts’, the cover tells us, but they ‘play endless games of sex’! And those bodies look human enough to me, even with those nightmarish watermelon heads. When you’re in space, that’s good enough.
And when the bare skin isn’t alien or human, it’s bound to be robotic. Or, even better, transparent. When you can see what’s going on inside of a body on the cover of a book, you know that there’s going to be some great genetic experimentation, or some skewed conjecture on environmentally-twisted evolution, inside.
Now, don’t tell me that there’s nothing here for the ladies – almost every fantasy cover by Boris Vallejo has some stunningly muscled-beyond-recognition warrior guy on the cover to ogle. You don’t hear us rallying against unrealistic portrayals of our gender. While a vast majority of science fiction is written by males, you can dig a little deeper and find some fairly equal opportunity space-lust. Just keep an eye on exactly which genitalia are splayed on the cover.
Stay tuned for more reasons to buy that old science fiction paperback at the local rummage sale – none of them nearly as interesting or curvy.
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