Boyd's Atwoods

Having been rude about Margaret Atwood recently, I should point out that the current Vintage UK editions of her books are absolutely gorgeous: they use paper-cutut artwork and illustrations by Florence Boyd.

Apologies for the gap between posts, by the way: I had a nice big one on the tedium and lack of originality in modern fantasy novel covers, which boiled them all down to 3 categories (bloke with sword, chick with dogs, flying blob in the sky), and then Blogger ate it, and it was all too boring for me to redo. So, basically, modern fantasy covers suck.

Theftpad

Having recently read a pretty bad novella by Margaret Atwood, I found myself wondering whether my fond memories of her earlier work would stand up to re-reading. And then I saw that she's co-writing a zombie novel with a video game designer, and posting it on one of the silly semi-high-tech things she gets periodically  excited about: not that stupid long-distance remote-controlled biro, but a site called Wattpad, where people serially publish their books online.

Never having heard of it, I investigated Wattpad. What it seems to be is yet another nest of fan-fiction and related nonsense. What I found most interesting, browsing the "hot" titles, was how many of them have blatantly nicked their covers from films and TV shows. Here are a few examples.

Maya_2011's 'Dragon's Prize' pinches a promo phot of Aidan Mitchell from TV series Being Human

Tulipgardens' 'Hunting You, Hunting Me' pinches the movie poster for Norwegian horror film Thale

Steviekc's 'Aryan Nation' steals one of the famous images from the excellent Nazis-win-WW2 mockumentary It Happened Here

Almost everything else on the 'hot' list has as cover images pictures taken from Deviantart--I assume stolen, but can't prove it. If the covers are this shameless--not even derivative, but outright thefts--just how original and interesting are the books themselves going to be?

I think the remote-controlled biro was a better idea.

And speaking of tiresome zombie fiction, I see that these two books, first published in the UK...

..have been released in the US. But heaven forfend that a US-published book should have anywhere foreign on it...

Burton Atwoods

Nathan Burton is something of a favourite round these parts (see his work on Patricia Highsmith, Pat Barker and Edith Wharton, for example), so it was great to see his Margaret Atwood redesigns for Virago finally appearing in Australian bookshops recently. Atwood is an odd case. I like some of her work immensely, but her science-fiction (which she goes out of her way to pretend isn't science-fiction) is usually awful: it has the self-satisfied unoriginality of somebody who hasn't read anything in the genre from the last 50 years, and so thinks that their daft cliches are new and exciting.

Anyway, I'll get off my hobby horse: here are the covers.

 

(NOTE: This post originally criticised an element of Oryx and Crake that was, in fact, entirely a product of my faulty memory, and not something Atwood had actually written: my apologies!)