We should stress that authors don't customarily get much input into their book covers, so this image is by no means a reflection on the work of science-fiction romance author Jacqueline Lichtenberg. And any novel that features vampires fighting on the Moon, where an alien vampire spaceship has just crashed, automatically meets our criteria for awesomeness. (Somehow, I'd gotten the impression this book was newly published, but after double-checking just now, I realized it's been out in paperback for six years. And it won the Romantic Times Award for best SF novel. Weirdly, Amazon has a version of the book cover where the woman suddenly has long, flowy hair and a more doll-like face.)

Here's a description of her book, from one of the Amazon reviews:

Dr. Titus Shiddehara is a human/vampire hybrid alien from the planet Luren. Titus, an astronomer has been sent to Project Station on the moon the stop his nemesis and vamphyric father, Dr. Abbot Nandoha from contacting the home world of Luren.

Titus is a Resident - a Luren who does not drink blood from the human source. Instead, he drinks a cloned, dried blood mixed with heated water. Abbot, on the other hand, is a Tourist. He feels justified in not only drinking blood from humans, but also in their domination. To Abbot, humans are just like cattle - or orl. If Abbot succeeds in sending his message to Luren, humanity will be doomed.

Abbot and Titus, as vampires, have incredible telepathic powers. They are able to bend others to their will and create believable illusions. Using these skills, Abbot does everything he can to try contact Luren. Titus is forced to struggle to thwart Abbot and stay alive. This power struggle, set against a conflicted Earth, creates a refreshing and fascinating world with unexpected twists and turns.

Here's the full cover art, which I guess is from the 2003 paperback edition. Click to enlarge:

Once again, we got Cyriaque Lamar to track down the most awful covers with the biggest heads. Here are the 20 most horrific selections, with Cyriaque's commentary. And seroiusly, what is with those Italians?

Additional reporting and writing by Cyriaque Lamar.

Our research intern, Cyriaque Lamar, pored over the most wretched and bizarre book covers that ever defaced the bookshelves, and came up with the absolute worst and most inappropriate. Normally, I feel a little trepidation about saying we've collected the cheesiest or wrongest "of all time" — but in this case, it only feels right. So here are Cyriaque's picks, with his erudite commentary.

Cheesiest Book Covers:

Most Inappropriate Book Covers (Maybe NSFW):

Additional reporting by Cyriaque Lamar.

We've collected various book covers from a number of classic science fiction novels to see how different artists have interpreted the same book. The covers are sometimes surprisingly pulpy, others are elegantly minimalist, and still others are variations on the same theme. Some of these are actual covers from various editions of the books, and some are concept designs created by individuals — on spec, for a class project, or just for fun. Bear in mind that a few of the actual book covers may not be work-safe.

1984 by George Orwell:

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley:

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury:

Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham:

The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham:

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick:

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick:

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein:

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood:

I, Robot by Isaac Asimov:

John Carter of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs:

Neuromancer by William Gibson:

We by Yevgeny Zamyain:

The Space Merchants by by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth:

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess:

War of the Worlds by HG Wells:

Schongut is still working, providing illustrations for everything from book covers to the New York Times and children's books. You can see more of his amazing, eye-melting work on his website.

via A Journey Round My Skull

After having just tracked the most popular fantasy book cover art elements, Holman has turned his eye to urban fantasy's rise among speculative book genres. Using sales data from Nielsen/Bookscan, Holman shows that urban fantasy accounts for only 14 percent of the genre's titles — but it claimed 45 percent of SF/F bestsellers.

This chart shows the rise of urban fantasy among fantasy (not SF/fantasy) bestsellers in the last several years:

So if a large number of urban fantasy books are outselling all other science fiction and fantasy books, but publishers are still putting out relatively few urban fantasy books, it doesn't take a marketing whiz to see what comes next. Says Holman:

The rise of urban fantasy has without any doubt been the biggest category shift within the SFF market of the last 10 years in the US...

How does this affect SFF publishers? Naturally, publishers respond to trends (and publishers tend to spend more time and energy trying to follow trends than setting them). If, for example, higher sales can be expected from an urban fantasy debut than a hard-SF debut, more publishers will be more inclined to publish more urban fantasy debuts than hard-SF debuts. More authors being published in one category will generally mean fewer authors being published in another. Particularly when the alpha category starts to dominate bestseller charts...

It's up to individual publishers, of course, to determine the balance of their lists, and thankfully we don't all end up with the same strategy. However, publishers are still likely to reconfigure to some extent when there is a significant category shift in the market. For example, editors with expertise in the urban fantasy field are likely to be in higher demand (others less so). Why hire an editor with a brilliant publishing instinct for hard SF if hard SF only makes up 2% of the publisher's business?

Holman concludes that urban fantasy may not always be on top, and there may be another seismic shift down the line. And his company, Orbit, has made a strategic decision to focus on other types of science fiction and fantasy in addition to urban fantasy. He winds up hopeful that the rise of swords-and-skyscrapers lit is indicative of a surge of interest in speculative fiction generally. Here's hoping that these books are reaching a new audience, and might serve as a "gateway drug" to other kinds of stories that use our world as a departure point for journeys into the fantastical and the bizarre.

Bigger versions of the charts are at the link. [Tim Holman via MediaBistro]

And not surprisingly, swords are pretty much required if you want to let people know that they're about to read a novel set in a fantasy world. Or the present day with fantasy elements. I like that "glowy magic" is a close second to swords - anyone who has ever browsed a fantasy book aisle at the bookstore knows what that is. A blop of photoshopped shininess, often streaming from a sword or from the hands of a nubile creature in flowing robes. Or perhaps enveloping a dragon?

What remains to be done is an economic analysis of these cover elements, charting which ones tend to sell better.

Tim Holman, publisher of Orbit Books, writes:

I wonder if [this chart] will prove that glowy magic, while prevalent, might not guarantee glowy sales? Or if unicorn-lovers represent a vast untapped market? It wouldn't surprise me. More research is clearly needed, but this is an important starting point and I'd be prepared to devote literally minutes to the task if that's what it takes.

via The Publisher Files

According to Orbit, here are the five titles from which the absolute worst will be chosen:

• The Thing with the Glass Buttock
• Rise of the Fallen, Book Seven, The Pre-Antepenultimate Battle
• A Stain Upon The Vastness
• Across a Trembling Sea the Cyborg Fairies Dance
• An Old Dragon, A Dead Witch, and a Fat Guy: The Third Book of Stories that Go Nowhere.

I really hope they don't screw up the Old Dragon, Dead Witch and Fat Guy book — that was one of my favorite series growing up. The winner will go on to have a stunningly terrible cover created for it, and we can't wait to see the end result. Click the link to vote for your favorite. [Orbit Books]

Orbit is seeking suggestions for a title and blurbs, to come up with the worst book cover of all time, and I bet we can help:

Over the next few weeks we'll be asking for your help coming up with the most ridiculously bad high-concept SFF book cover in the universe – think Wyvern II: The Wyverning, or Martian Under the Doormat. (We know you can do better) Once we've settled on the titles we'll work out the reading line, the blurbs, and cover elements. And then, with your help, our fearless Orbit US Creative Director Lauren is going to design a cover for it that will present it in all its mad glory.

I have great faith in the ability of the internet to spawn some truly awful science fiction book ideas. But just in case someone is lacking for inspiration, here are some truly hideous covers to make your eye-sockets bleed:

Commenter PatZ points us to a site, Punk Rock Penguin, with a shrine of hideously awful book covers, many of which come from science fiction or fantasy. They include some classics (two of the original Dune covers? really?) but also some little-known gems. Here are some of the greatest:

Apparently the cover to Slow Train To Arcturus, by Eric Flint and Dave Freer, really does feature a guy whose space helmet sports a big condom. But the version that got posted online sanitizes out that little detail. In the process, though, they changed Arcturus to "Acturus." Oops. (Does anybody have a hardcover of this novel and a scanner? No high-res version of the actual cover is available online!)

And then there's this gem, which elicits the following description from the "Judge A Book" crew:

Giant robot chipmunks battle it out on Endor surrounded by, yes, lasers. Whosoever is shooting these lasers is a REALLY BAD SHOT! Of course, you probably can't kill your main character on your cover, where will you go from there?

Needless to say, we have a new favorite blog, especially now that we've bookmarked the "science fiction" tag.

Book cover scans from Martin Isaac, J Levar, and Kyle Katz and Gojira2012 and Martin Prine.

The books are part of the "Penguin On Design" series, and include Bruno Munari’s 1965 book, Design As Art (a futurist artist's exploration of modern high tech absurdities); Marshall McLuhan’s 1967 classic, The Medium is the Massage (an analysis of how mass media shape consciousness, which famously predicted the internet); John Berger’s Ways Of Seeing from 1972 (about the hidden political meanings in Western art) ; and Susan Sontag’s 1977 essay, On Photography (which explores how "realistic" photography manipulates rather than reflects reality - her concerns seem eerily prescient after the rise of reality TV).

My favorite of these books is probably McLuhan, partly because he embraced the typo on the cover of his original book, saying The Medium is the Massage more aptly conveyed the idea behind his original title, The Medium is the Message. The typo title stuck. Though subsequent reprintings sometimes fixed the error, Penguin has restored it to full glory here.

The cover of Ways of Seeing reproduces the first page of the book, which was also a feature of the first edition cover.

YES Design is responsible for the understated eccentricity of the new book designs, which all use a popular 60s font that reminds me of New Directions' books of modernist poetry. They manage to look very smart and slightly kooky at the same time.

All these books are also packed with art, and many contain long sections of photo and design illustrations that were intended to be essays in themselves. So each of these books is not only about looking at the world, but is also full of images for you to look at. These books are a terrific way to learn more about what's going on beneath the surface of things - and to celebrate the ambivalent power of design and media.

Penguin on Design [CR Blog via Design Sojourn]

Image via YES design.

I love when he combines two books, as he does in several of these photographs. You can see the genres literally reaching out to interact with each other.

You can see more of Thomas Allen's amazing work on his site. Thanks, Grey_Area!