July 1, 2018

Slice of PIE: Science Fiction Book and Magazine Covers and What They Mean To ME…


Using the Programme Guide of the World Science Fiction Convention in Helsinki Finland in August 2017 (to which I will be unable to go (until I retire from education)), I will jump off, jump on, rail against, and shamelessly agree with the BRIEF DESCRIPTION given in the pdf copy of the Programme Guide. The link is provided below…Image ©2018, Mary VanAlstine

Aesthetics of the SF Covers – The panelists discuss the evolution and aesthetics of science fiction book covers around the world. Can any local or time-related trends be discovered?

Elin Fägerlind: 32 year old undergraduate of engineering mathematics and dynamical systems…studied French, Arabic and Russian.
Nicolas Krizan: Swedish graphic designer, illustrator and comic artist, fan since the late seventies, worked professionally since the early eighties.

The undergrad has a link: http://sfcovers.blogspot.com/ that’s really quite good, and I can only imagine that the covers he displays not only reflect the history of the aesthetic of paperback SF covers, but also ones he might actually LIKE.

His site is full of paperback covers, which is fun to drift through. It’s a good thing for me that there’s no commentary, because it would most likely be in Swedish…

So, if he can do it, I can, though for me I’ll be sharing the most memorable covers – magazine and paperbacks – in my history of reading SF.


I love these covers because they inspire me. I love them because they do something to my mind. I’m currently reading Lisa Cron’s WIRED FOR STORY. If you haven’t yet, run out right now and get it. Make sure you don’t check it out form the library like I did. I’m using post-it notes until I can buy my own copy.

But these covers are exactly what she’s writing about when she says, “Evolution dictates that the first job of any good story is to completely anesthetize the part of our brain that questions how it is creating such a compelling illusion of reality…Simply put, we are looking for a reason to care. So for a story to grab us, not only must something be happening, but also there must be a consequence we can anticipate. As neuroscience reveals, what draws us into a story and keeps us there is the firing of our dopamine neurons, signaling that intriguing information is on its way. This means that whether it’s an actual event unfolding or we meet the protagonist in the midst of an internal quandary or there’s merely a hint that something’s slightly “off” on the first page, there has to be a ball already in play. Not the preamble to the ball. Not all the stuff you have to know to really understand the ball. The ball itself.” (Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence)

These covers do that for me. They signal me that there’s something GOOD coming, but that the good will not arrive without self-sacrifice. Sacrifice is a very naughty word in this second decade of the 21st Century; I think the concept is what Humans are fleeing from when they say that religion is dead, or God is dead, or gods were never alive, or it’s not relevant to today. I think it’s the core of the Human penchant for mass slaughter which also might be called OTHER-sacrifice – be it through a governmental regime or individual pique over imagined slight.

My daughter is an artist (you can check out her site here: http://www.dreamingincolor.blog/), so I know that art tells story as words do only in more compact form. I suppose I would say that where poetry tells story more precisely than prose does, the best art tells story more precisely than poetry does. (The image above is ©2018, Mary VanAlstine.)

I’m not an artist, so I need to use words to paint a picture. Cron’s book, based as it is solidly in neuroscience, is revealing the brain science of story.

I look forward to learning enough to become a better writer.


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