I think I’ve found it. It’s the dust jacket for this version of Isaac Asimov’s The Gods Themselves. You might not be able to tell from the picture, but the words have odd shadows that create the blurry effect. My eyes cannot even remotely focus on the damned thing.
Bring out your bad book covers if you think you can top this one.
Ok. That is pretty bad now, but check out the German version of the cover for the Warriors Apprentice, here http://www.dendarii.co.uk/Covers/German/twa_de.jpg or this cover for Niven’s Protector (darn, I can’t find the image, but it’s truly weird - frog-like aliens wearing brain-hats) (or the back cover blurb I talk about in this thread Horribly bad blurbs - Cafe Society - Straight Dope Message Board)
Was that designer blind? Maybe they looked at the Asimov book too long and lost the ability to see straight. 
The Asimov book looks like a color plate misalignment. But if I recall, the story involves an alien planet where the natives have three sexes, which somehow merge to create families. Perhaps the designer deliberately misaligned the three colors to illustrate this “merging” as it is happening?
Just a thought. It’s still annoying to look at, though!
Yes, that’s almost certainly what the intention was, but it makes my eyes hurt.
It’s just a bad image capture. I have the original book and I think Tim R. Mortiss has it just right: the off-placement register symbolizes the off-placement sexes. It’s more obvious on the spine, where instead of red and blue on a white background, the letters are red and white and blue interlaced. The spine is harder to read than the front, but I wouldn’t say that the cover itself would be described as blurry. I can’t find a good image online so there must be something about low-res scans at work.
I have one of the worst covers of all time on one of my books, but I’m afraid I’m going to play the anonymity card and not show it to you. Authors don’t get to see covers ahead of time, with rare examples, and I first saw it only when the finished book was shipped to me. I was crushed. It didn’t help that they changed the title, too, without telling me.
That German cover is unfortunate. I had a [different] book appear in several European countries and I was amazed at how much more compelling and imaginative the covers were than the American one.
My eyes give me the effect as blurry. They try to force the colors back together and it just doesn’t work!
Well, it’s a good thing that you can’t judge a book by it’s cover. (somebody had to say it!)
For a long time, there was a trend with sci-fi books to just take a random sci-fi-y picture and slap it on the cover, without regard to any of the actual content of the book. Thankfully, this seems to be abating, nowadays.
I’ll go with this cover for Robert Heinlein’s Friday. I would have included the original cover for The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, but a slight coloring error seems to have been made. Persons who have read them will understand why.
I don’t know what you mean by “ahead of time,” but I have always seen my cover 8-9 months ahead of the release.
Annoying in a different way: Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia is one of my all-time favorite science-fiction works. It’s set on a materialist planet with a moon colonized by anarchists, and the protagonist is from the moon, which is the titular ambiguous utopia. She uses each society to explore its counterpart, but Le Guin’s sympathies clearly lie with the anarchists.
So the book jacket has a blurb on the back. They describe the materialist world as the utopia, with a dystopian moon.
Guys, did you not read the book? Or are you Objectivists who just couldn’t keep quiet?
Here it is:
Majorly wrong plot point there…
You’re referring to the protagonist’s skin color? That’s something that I can see someone missing on a quick skim through the book-- The only reference is something like “permanent suntan”. It’s a relevant plot point at that moment, admittedly (because her “family” are racist against Maori), but it doesn’t tie into the main story much. In any event, it’s at least an attempt at a relevant cover illustration: It’d bother me a lot more if they used that picture for, say, Podkayne (whose skin color is never specified, but would never be caught dead wearing that top).
It bugs me. It buys into the notion that “white” is the default, that white women are the standard of beauty, that an attractive dark-skinned woman on the cover would not sell books. I’d keep going but it ends in a RhymerRant and nobody wants that.
And an attractive “copper skinned” young wizardwouldn’t sell books either. This bigotry spilled over in the the TV adaptation as well. It was a big part of the book that the only pale skinned peole were the Kargs from the north who didn’t practice magic and sure as hell wouldn’t be attending the school on Roke for another few books at least.
For another example of “whitening” the protagonist, compare the two covers of CJ Cherryh’s The Paladin. Keep in mind that it’s set in what is essentially alternate-China.
Or for sexploitation, we have this cover variant for Diane Duane’s The Door Into Fire (click for a closeup), which makes it look like a pornographic Conan ripoff. I actually own this version, unfortunately.
I actually was going to mention this book as having one of the ugliest covers I’ve even seen on an SF novel (for the original hardcover).
And the people who write the blurbs usually haven’t read the book – they don’t have time. They’re guided by the editor, who gives them a quick rundown. It’s easy to get that garbled, and to have it be missed.
Other ugly covers was the series of books published by Doubleday in the 60s. To save money, they did all their covers in only two colors, which made the look cheap and unappealing.
This is a pervasive issue in teen fiction, with the argument (and some data to support it) that books with non-white characters don’t sell. A few high-profile books with non-white characters just in the last couple of years were given white characters or had their racial features so minimized they were neutral-looking brunettes.
I should have added that Le Guin has been a vocal opponent of whitewashed covers in that world.
I read that it typically happens when the author is white. Makes for a can of worms, there.
