Notes from a Worldcon

I'm typing this on the way back from the Glasgow Worldcon, to record some Wonders and Visions impressions & observations from wandering round the Dealers' Room, looking at the art show, and chatting to folk with expertise in the field.

1) I feel much more secure in my sense that in the last decade or so, sf cover art per se is being supplanted by covers where the overall design leads, the typography plays a bigger part, and any art is much more subsumed to the overall whole. My initial thought was that this was caused by the rise of internet bookselling and the need for covers to work well at smaller sizes on Amazon etc pages. A further reason was suggested to me at Glasgow: an e-book will now almost always be released at the same time as the first print edition, but publishers will want one cover across both - partly for cost, partly so that an e-book spotted online will look the same if a customer wants a physical copy.

2) It was really striking how much of the Dealers' Room was taken up with self-publishing stands - ie those hosted by an author who just put out their own works. (This feels like another big change from a decade ago - there was a corresponding fall in the number of "general" sf book dealers, especially second-hand.) Frankly, the cover art for a lot of the self-published works is either non-existent or bad. But we probably need to find at least one non-terrible example to use to demonstrate the trend.

3) More subjective than 1) or 2): it feels like certain classic sf tropes - the alien, the robot, the strange landscape - are much less represented on covers these days. Partly because of the typography stuff mentioned in 1), partly....well, I'm not sure. But this seemed to be the case both for what was on book covers and for what art show participants were doing (except when they were directly referencing tropes from an existing franchise, like Star Wars or Doctor Who).

4) Exception to 3): there was still quite a bit of "space and planets" art, with or without spaceships. I have the sneaking suspicion that a driver for this is the sheer quality of images we've had from Hubble, JSWT etc.

5) Finally, and without wanting to sound like one of those paranoid "The mainstream hates us" folks, it did feel like more and more sf (particularly the growing genre of near-future thrillers) was getting covers that did't require the buyer to register, "This is sf." So maybe we're just in a time of less high-profile sf art full stop.

In short, to steal from Brian Aldiss, sf art is in crisis, where it belongs.

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