NH: sparked by both sue's and Michael's comments:
sue, I had much the same reaction as your students to Samuel Delany's
work. Read much of it completely oblivious to the race issues. Then
realised he was Black, and was in some cases addressing race. I re-read
more carefully; big difference! And as to the publishers' choices of
cover art, I seem to remember reading somewhere that some publisher had
determined that if they put non-White people on their covers, White
readers would assume the books 'weren't for them' and wouldn't buy them.
I don't believe that that's true of all White readers, or even necessarily
the majority of them, and even if it's so, I think it's because the
publishing industry has fostered that behaviour. Interestingly, non-White
readers (again, this is all my vague memory of something I read once)
didn't limit their reading to books with people of their own race on the
covers. Hmm, I wonder why that might be? [Tongue in cheek, for those of
you whose terminals don't have the emotion chip.] I did once buy the
Timescape pbk edition of Alfred Bester's _Golem 100,_ knowing nothing
about Alfred Bester, solely because there was a Black woman on the cover
who had - gasp! - African features, down to the onion butt (which was easy
to see, because she was wearing nothing but see-through panties and a gold
headband). I bought it, hardly daring to hope that the woman on the front
was actually the protagonist, and that the book would actually be good;
that would have been too much; identification and literary excellence all
occuring in one package. Well, I was in for a surprise. The two main
characters are a Black woman and a South Asian man. The book was
surprising, energetic, and experimental, blending text and visual art.
I'm glad I own it. (And I just noticed that the cover artist is a woman
-- Rowena.) Wonder if Warner could be interested in re-issuing the
Neveryona series with Butler-like covers? :)
-nalo
On Wed, 9 Apr 1997, Michael Marc Levy wrote:
> On Wed, 9 Apr 1997, sue hagedorn wrote:
>
> > --surprise,
> > >surprise--they actually put obviously black characters on the covers
> > >(which wasn't the case when the books first came out).
> >
> > Yes--It's very interesting, too, that when I had a class of freshmen read
> > Dawn, they were at first oblivious to any mention of race (that book
> > illustrator too obviously had not read the book itself)--when it was
> > pointed out to them, they changed some of their perceptions about the story
> > line. That helped me make a point (my "theme" was "What Does it Mean to be
> > Human?")--but I was a bit surprised at the reaction. (I guess I've been
> > reading SF too long--since my first Ace double back in the '50s!)
> >
> > Sue
> >
>
> The white character on the cover of the original edition of Butler's Dawn
> was not a result of the artist's failing to read the book, or failing to
> notice that the protagonist was actually Afican American. It was a
> conscious editorial decision designed to increase sales, based on the
> belief that having an African American on the cover of an SF novel would
> cost more sales by white book buyers than it would pick up sales by
> African American book buyers. Sad, but true.
>
> Mike Levy
>
"Starchild here. Put a glide in your stride, and a dip in your hip, and
come on over to the Mothership."
P-Funk, "Mothership Connection"
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