I might possibly read a science fiction novel or two if its visual trapping weren't so embarrassingly awful.
Vintage science fiction book covers, for example, bring to mind Salvador Dali with a headache illustrating Alfred E. Neuman's masturbatory fantasies. Women either wear goatskin bikinis or skin-tight lycra. Men are either Flash Gordon clones or just brains in jars attached to electrodes. Sometimes there are lizard people and aliens with dome-shaped skulls.
H. R. Giger changed all that, but not necessarily for the better. His influence merely meant all colors faded from the book covers except black, cobalt, steel-gray, and gray-green.
Modern science fiction book covers, however, appear to have opted for minimalism in a bid to be taken seriously: a black expanse of starless space punctuated by a small red planet which is illuminated by a cosmic light refraction emanating from nowhere in particular. Is this a new Zak Eldritch novel or a reprint of Carl Sagan's memoirs? You need to check the tiny lettering on the spine to be sure.
Call me conceited, but I could never bring such humiliating paperback specimens to a bookstore cashier without also purchasing a birthday card, thereby insinuating that my garishly bound choices are actually a gift for somebody else. Nothing to do with me.
That's a trick I always pulled when clandestinely buying 'How-To' books about practical matters a man of my age should have mastered long ago. It worked every time. At least, I hope it did.
Nowadays, of course, I can anonymously order those types of book on the Internet.
"Delivered in two days via Amazon Prime!" Which is another type of science fiction, since it usually seems to take three.
