Note – this isn’t referring to theactual stories, there are plenty of good stories out there, I’mtalking about the visual appeal of the sci-fi shelf in bookstores.

When I was in my teens, if I had a fewminutes to spare on my way to catch the bus home from school I’doften drop into one of the bookstores I passed. I wasn’tparticularly looking for something to buy, I would simply feast myeyes on the cover art on display. These were the days of Asimov,Heinlein, Doc Smith, Herbert et. al.

The covers were bright, vibrant,thought-provoking, and above all – imaginative. They beggedquestions – what’s happening here? Who are these people? Whatwould it be like to live there? These images, decades later, stillserve as inspiration for my own art.

Recently, I had half an hour to killwaiting for a picture frame to be put together, so I wandered acrossthe road to a bookstore. I walked out a little while later despairingfor the future of my chosen genre, because there was nothinginspiring in sight.

Most of the traditionally-publishedcovers on show seemed to fall into one of three common groups.

Stylized to death: Maybe I’m just outof touch, but I can’t forgive what Jim Tierney did to the Duneseries. He isn’t alone, though. There were other covers consistingof plain geometric shapes that IMO do nothing to entice a potentialreader. Boring and pretentious.

Wishy-washy: While keeping close inappearance to traditional covers, these have had the life sucked outof them as if the artist was afraid to commit to a clear picture.Distant ships and space stations obscured in an airbrushed pastelhaze. A kind of Disneyfied view of space – no hard edges or nastyharsh vacuum here!

CGI perfection: Also close totraditional, these go to the other extreme. Ships and assorted spacehardware rendered too perfectly to be true. And always against theobligatory backdrop of sun peeping over the horizon of a planet.Boring and sterile.

But my biggest complaint across theboard was a lack of imagination. All three groups come across asgeneric and dull. After the first few in each group, they all blendedinto each other, nothing unique or distinctive about them.

Am I just imagining it? Am I being tooharsh?

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