Interesting Links for 6-7-2011

[andrewducker]

• Why Did L.A. Noire Take Seven Years to Make? (Enough to put you off ever working in the games industry)
  (tags: games work)
• Cutting down on salt doesn't reduce your chance of dying
  (tags: health salt)
• Conservative MEPs defeat new climate change targets (against instructions too - want to bet if they get punished?)
  (tags: politics conservatives climatechange europe)
• C.S. Lewis reviews Childhood's End (He liked it. I agree.)
  (tags: CSLewis ArthurCClarke review)
• Amazon just bought The Book Depository
  (tags: books amazon uk)
• Google's lack of decent testing on Android makes it unfit to be used in the enterprise
  (tags: google android testing email EpicFail)
• A collection of awful sci-fi book covers
  (tags: scifi art books)
• Chinese coal blamed for global warming er... cooling
  (tags: china globalwarming environment coal)

Comments

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure a lot of those covers are fair to include in a worst sci-fi/fantasy covers list. Many of them are not sci-fi but simply works of genres that couldn't be marketed as what they were at the time (erotica, fetish fiction, white power fiction) and had to have a cover that pretended the book was sci-fi while also letting readers know what it was.

I mean, of course, a vintage Gor book is going to have an insane cover - but that doesn't make it a sci-fi or fantasy book, it's still porn for DomBoys and PetGirls.

Other covers - the Phillip K. Dick one for example - simply represent the artistic design trend of their time.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I'd say that if it takes place on a planet on the other side of the sun from earth and has an ongoing invented culture, it's sf. It's not good sf, it might even be evil sf because of the generalization to all men and all women, but I don't think we only get to claim the relatively good stuff.

[doubtingmichael.livejournal.com]

My experience was usually the opposite - you got some SF book with a racy looking cover, and then the contents were much tamer. Of course, I was looking for SF/fantasy, not porn.

I think the publishers liked to have salacious covers to draw people's attention on the shelves, and maybe to draw in people who were after some porn. But it often wasn't truth in advertising.