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Incredible collection of Chute Libre's pop-art French SF paperback covers. I'd never seen all of these. I'd love to have this kind of design aesthetic on today's genre stuff—it still looks compelling and transgressive, while also appealing to the collector's instinct for uniform editions. It's an audacious use of stock art, since clearly none of the art was created for these editions (ie. the tentacle-prOn Moebius pic above). I like the visceral nastiness of it all, which was a great appeal of New Wave science fiction to me as a teenager, so much more style than substance.
From another perspective, it's a mere iteration of the same old paperback art tropes designed to lure you into buying the book on the quality of the cover. Here, rather than busty Frazetta babes or sensawonda spaceporn, you get a distinctly French perspective: shock the money out of the customer's pockets—doesn't matter what you put on the cover, just make it confrontational and vaguely modern-arty. The same old bullshit, targeted to a different consumer mindset, rather like a lot of the New Wave writers' work, now that I think on it.
Anyway, I find it all much more appealing than the computerized or self-consciously retro stock art that bedecks most tripe published today.
amused
I've got the entire image in one of my Moebius artbooks (it's cropped for the book cover) and it's a lot less outwardly "erotic" and a lot more totally creepazoid. I can't even believe they slapped it on the cover! Outrageous!
I think Science Fiction cover art could probably use a little MORE creepazoid and a little less stately at this point, to be honest.
err, sorry for shouting...
yeah, well, given the food shortages hitting and oil prices going up, maybe more people will start buying books again
and then eating 'em.
Yeah, people are going to start buying more books HAW HAW HAW. More like watching more Footballer$ Wive$.
I wonder what people at my office would have thought if they'd spied me looking at dirty Cream of Wheat man?
"Breakfast will never be quite the same again"
or
oh duh, i should have just asked you this to begin with
Dangerous Visions (ed. Harlan Ellison) is always pegged as the most crucial New Wave anthology, but I think it's harder to defend that position from an experimental writing perspective. There are tons of great stories in there, but most aren't "experimental" in a Ballard or Robbe-Grillet or Burroughs vein. It was more about using the SF tropes in a shocking way, in a way that would have been regarded as inappropriate to publish in the more polite SF magazines of the time, etc. I think it's a great anthology, but maybe not what you're looking for.
I'd seek out the Quark volumes (there were at least four—eds. Samuel Delany/Marilyn Hacker), which are pretty weird and verrrry sixties. Might be tough to find, though.
England Swings SF (ed. Judith Merril) was a seminal collection, but you don't hear much about it any more. A great collection and I believe it contains Ballard's first condensed novel. I'd have to look it up on Wikipedia or something, but I believe that's the story.
The New Tomorrows (ed. Norman Spinrad) is a good one, good writers and good stories.
The Orbit (ed. Damon Knight) series is worth seeking out. There were at least two dozen of those, and the earlier volumes are pretty strong.
New Worlds Quarterly (ed. Michael Moorcock) was, I believe, meant to replace the New Worlds magazine (which went out of business, because few people are truly interested in experimental SF). New Worlds was the flagship New Wave mag after Moorcock took it over, and these paperbacks contain a lot of that kind of material.
I think you'd be off to a good start with a few of these.