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from the In-just-over-three-months-it-would-be...-Mars-Ho-Ho-Ho! dept.
Want to read some books? Many of our users have shown interest in having a book club. Now it's finally time to kick it off.
Your soytyrant has pre-selected the first three books so that you have more time to read them, should you choose to do so:
September: Mars, Ho! by Stephen McGrew
October: Foundation by Isaac Asimov
November: The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin.
The plan is to read a book, and discuss it on the 1st of the following month. Suggestions for new books (of any genres, not just "science fiction") will also be collected at the same time. You can start listing some of your suggestions right now in this comment section. We'll pick up to eight of them and run a poll on September 15th to decide the book for December. And so on.
The first book is Mars, Ho! by Stephen McGrew, one of our more literary users (not to be confused with Mars Ho! by Jennifer Willis). The book is available for free on McGrew's website, although there are some purchasing options available if you want to support him. From the description:
Captain John Knolls thinks he's just been given the best assignment of his career -- ferrying two hundred prostitutes to Mars. He doesn't know that they're all addicted to a drug that causes them to commit extreme, deadly violence when they are experiencing withdrawal or that he'll face more pirates than anyone had ever seen before. Or that he'd fall in love. A humorous science fiction space novel, a horror story, a love story, a pirate story, a tale of corporate bureaucracy and incompetence.
All book club posts will be in the Community Reviews nexus, which is linked to on the site's sidebar. You'll likely want to click on that link once the posts fall off the main page.
(Score: 1) by Acabatag on Sunday September 02 2018, @03:39PM (3 children)
My paperwhite Kindle Keyboard does sort of a number on 'cover art' both in the Kindle store and in my library.
But I can remember in my youth wrapping SF books I was reading in plain white bookcovers, because the cover art and the back page summary often did a really bad job distorting the book inside. Not just so other people wouldn't 'judge' the book, also because it ran the risk sometimes of 'flavoring' my reading of the book.
Many authors would agree that the book cover artists at the pulp publishers were scum.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday September 02 2018, @04:17PM (2 children)
Like most of you, I've looked at books, decided to read them, then afterwards, looked at that "cover art", wondering what on earth it SHOULD have covered. Often enough, the "art" has no relationship at all to what's inside. I blame the publisher though. "I have a story about spaceships using ion drive, I need a pic!" Poor artist doesn't know the difference between ions, tachyons or a pteradactyl, so he draws a regular old rocket propelled space ship.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05 2018, @04:10AM (1 child)
If your theory were true, there'd be a lot more paperbacks with pterodactyl-drive spaceships on the covers.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday September 05 2018, @06:51AM
That may be fair. But, how many Sci-Fi and/or fantasy books have you seen with nearly naked women, with honking huge hooters? Remember, sex sells, and it sells a lot of science fiction books too.
I should probably also point out that the bullshit cover art applies more to pulp fiction and second/third/etc editions, than it does to first editions of works done by better known authors.