This book looks promising. The cover certainly has all the right elements:
[ul][li]Oiled-up muscle guy… Check.[/li][li]Cowering, well-endowed woman in scrap of loin cloth with a conviently placed vine/dagger/tentacle surreptitiously covering nipples… Check.[/li][li]Sword/axe/laser gun prominantly displayed… Check.[/li][li]Unspeakable creature with unorthodox number of eyes/tentacles/horns/claws/teeth menacing girl and/or oily muscle guy… Check.[/li][li]Oily muscle guy stabbing/hacking/spearing/death ray-ing said creature, or said creature stabbing/hacking/spearing/death ray-ing oily muscle guy… Check.[/ul][/li]Then you read the book, and the scene depicted on the cover is nowhere in there. This seems like a common theme in pulpy Sci-Fi.
So, is the cover artist pulling a fast one to make the book look as dramatic as possible? Do the artists only read a nutshell treatment of the story and characters and draw their own conclusions? Does the book’s editor care if the cover is deceptive?
This used to happen a lot with British science fiction paperbacks. It didn’t seem to matter what the book was about; there’d be a Chris Foss Big Spaceship on the cover.
American SF started makng a definite effort to have to cover art match the material by the 1970s. before that they often just threw any “weird” art onto an SF book, regardless of whether it made sense or not. Larry Niven’s The World of Ptaavs first came out with a cover that featured an impressionis silhouetted thing (with two eyes s it wasn’t a thrint). This was followed by a cover showing quasi-human creatures repeated in a “wallpaper” pattern. I’m not sure if it as ever released with a relevant cover.
Lots of covers in the 50s and 60s featured abstract artwork (like that by Robert Powers), which could be used for anything. In the 1980s Powersw did a coupole of covers for Heinlein books (the hardcover edition of Friday and The Number o the Beast) that were relevant.
They still do it every now and then. I have a British dition of Jules Verne short stories that just came ut last year. But the cover is obviously one that originally ran on Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous wth Rama. he cover for Philip Jose Farmer’s edited Quest for Riverworld is just the cover of his Tales of Riverworld flipped around. I read Quest first, and couldn’t figure out hat the cover had to do with the stries – it was only when I read Tales that I realized that the cheapskate publishers wouldn’t spring for new cover art.
Just my WAG, but a commercial artist probably doesn’t have the time to read every book/story/magazine issue that he/she’s commissioned to create cover art for. If I recall an interview with a (name now forgotten) artist in the sci-fi/fantasy field, most of the time the artists only get a brief synopsis of the scene to be depicted.
A half-decent piece of cover art takes a lot more than a couple of hours to do, and unless we’re talking big names like Michael Whelan, Boris Vallejo or Robin Wood, they’re not getting enough per piece to be able to create at whim. If they had to read every book or story they’re hired to illustrate, their productivity would go down so far that it wouldn’t be worth their while to even bother taking commissions.
Another thing you see is when the publishers will choose to have a scene depicted that is not representative of the entire work, but is in the book. An example is the cover for Charles Sheffield’s ‘Brother to Dragons’. If you judged the book from the cover you’d think the story was a fairly futuristic book with giant robots playing an important role. The book is actually set in the near future and follows the life of a deformed street kid who grows up in a run-down and chaotic U.S.A. The robots on the cover only show up near the end of the story in a toxic waste disposal site, they were basically advanced forklifts.
.