Judging More Sci-Fi Books By Their Covers
10.13.07 By Collin DavidLast time, I mentioned that I avoid Dragonlance books like the plague. And if there’s any ambiguity in that statement, yes, I actively avoid the plague. At least until they make action figures of it.
The prevalence of wizards and dragons and overly stereotypical portrayals of various character types within the realm of Dungeons and Dragons fiction never seems to appeal to me, especially when I can go out and gather up a group of meganerds and play my own game of Dragonlance with far more interesting circumstances and the pleasure of interactivity and Doritos and a musty basement lair. Even playing the D&D Nintendo games back in the early 90s was a fairly excruciating exercise in running through rooms as fast as one could, brandishing completely ineffectual weapons against a ridiculous cadre of enemies, and standing around for eons while your party’s healer replenished you enough to bolt through another room of bugbears and rust eaters and whatnots. Dungeons and Dragons should be kept to the core game… and maybe the tangentially-related cartoon show. And perhaps delicious breakfast cereals.
As a sponge for all things nerd, I usually accumulate entire boxes of sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks when they’re donated to the library. I quickly purchase these collections without properly observing the contents, mostly because I need to quickly get back to informing the patrons that you don’t send an e-mail by gnawing on the keyboard. As an unrelenting cover-judger, Dragonlance gives me every opportunity to cringe, recoil, and return the books sheepishly to the library’s book sale. Here are a few reasons why, without mentioning the names of the well-respected fantasy artists who’ve cobbled these covers together. Which is not to call these men bad artists - but artists who seem to have stumbled a bit.
If you look at them technically, these are pretty solid covers, but as far as doing the job of sparking interest in the story inside, they fail abysmally - especially when I can only hear the following conversation in my head :
Homely dwarven girl : Even though we’ve clearly been traveling together for quite some time, I have only just now realized that you’re a wizard! You know, despite being a detail-by-detail clone of Gandalf. Because of this, I’ll observe you bemusedly, as if I would a silly party clown, because the artist who painted me couldn’t get a decent photo reference of what an appropriate emotion would look like.
Gandorf : Please hush while I conjure us some delicious spaghetti and catch the brim of my hat on fire, all while I conveniently turn away from the direction we were traveling to gaze towards the prospective reader of this book. For some reason.
See? It just doesn’t work. And nothing detracts from a medieval-type fantasy story more than a cover featuring a 1980s hairstyle. I remain unconvinced that this disco queen is also a skilled warrior lass, what with all of the time she’s spent inventing aerosol styling mousse, using the vast expanse of medieval magic-science at her disposal. No more than a brief browse through the book and I stop at chapter thirteen, entitled ‘The Walking Trees’. And you know what’s in there? Walking trees.
We’ve been calling them Ents since the days of Tolkien. When he invented them. Originally. Without typing such painful phrases as “Hey! The tree hit me!”
So, not only am I a nerd, but I’m an embittered one - which is the worst kind. Give me books emblazoned with three-letter names of strange lands, like ‘GOR’ and ‘ZAL’ and ‘URT’! Give me wizards, but put them two thousands years into our future! Give me anything, but please shift the paradigm. Please don’t regurgitate the same fiction that’s already been written by more talented authors, decades ago. Please don’t expect me to swallow 15 different foreign character names, all of them poorly described, and all beginning with the letter K. Because I’ll write scathing blog posts about you, and then you’ll be ever-so-sorry.
And please, no more disco hair.
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Article Tags: , D&D, Dragonlance, Sci-Fi================
Gotta Collect? Then You Gotta Connect - Join our Collectors’ Community!
October 28th, 2007 at 1:26 am
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