Products of an Idle Mind one-man trackless think-tank

Awkward Book Covers

A long hallway that ends in a closet.

I recently ordered a couple of used “Like New” books from Amazon.com, and I must say the covers were ruined and covered with disgusting filth. I can stand a dog-eared leaves or a slightly foxed jacket or even some severely dingoed babies, but this was just unforgivable. This isn’t to say the covers were overly worn; no, sadly they were in excellent condition.

If I was still an ignorant 12, I might call them “extremely gay” or even “faggy”, but that would demonstrate a distinct lack of bigoted stereotyping. Everyone knows the prototypical homosexual has a fantastic sense of taste. These appear to have been produced as homoerotic pulp fiction marketed towards aggressively heterosexual pubescent boys. They make Harlequin Romance look like Penguin Classic. Boris Vallejo would call them trashy.

This guy beat up the Atlas Shrugged guy.

I won’t mislead you, they are a little trashy, a little pulpy. Tolkien or Clarke these aren’t. But they aren’t as bad as their covers depict; Niven is a Nebula and Hugo award-winning author. The Magic Goes Away takes the realm of pointy hats and beards and gives it a jump start by taking that annoyingly fungible energy source “magic” and making it a finite commodity (it was written during the 1970’s oil crisis). This appeals to the annoying nerd in me who can suspend disbelief enough to allow a 10-ton dragon to fly on paper-thin wings, but wonders why, if the Great Wizard Rinkydink can consume the castle Horble in a ball of gelatinous treacle, a couple of young guard recruits with blunt swords could take him captive.

It only looks like The Magical Trevor wants to give you some “mystical” pills and then take you down to his “fabulous cave of unearthly pleasures”.

Bio of a Space Tyrant is indefensibly campy (the main character’s name is Hope Hubris), but it is written by master-in-the-field Piers Anthony and fairly guaranteed to entertain. It is cheesy, but the cover needlessly tarts it up. It’s like wrapping Havarti in Limburger (joke for my cheesemonger friends).

A tale of forbidden love. And wizards.

I am no stranger to embarrassing book covers, as I’m sure any fellow readers of speculative fiction circa 1970 — 2000 can attest. One of my favorite lite-fantasy reads, The Legend of Nightfall, actually looks like a romance novel. (It is good, I swear. A little like X-men with wizards, and the titular Nightfall takes the role of the outsider Wolverine… where are you going?)

I’m not sure why it bothers me so much. I’ve never apologized for my love of terrible horror movies or New Wave. Nerd hipster is still in, and I’ve even seen some suits on the bus ride home reading “graphic novels”. But I am a strange man, often hiding behind a pillow during socially-awkward scenes on TV sitcoms and laughing hysterically during the goriest b-movie deaths. I’m more afraid of waitresses than I am of snakes or spiders.

The kind of people that read this dross don’t need help to look even more pathetic. It shouldn’t look like we’re carrying around coffee table books of The Most Fantastic Airbrushed Van Art of 1989. If anything, the books should look like an aggressive work of graphic design, all Helvetica and abstract shapes and for god’s sake don’t put any shirtless men or pedo beards on the cover. The covers should shout “I’m intelligent and creative” not shriek “I never wish to have sex, ever”.

At least it gave me a chance to exercise my greatest strength: solving non-existent or completely unimportant problems:

This is how I hide my shame.