Case in point:
The Hundredfold Problem.
The title here is in the ambiguous category. I might lean a little towards hard sci-fi with the title suggesting a mathematical puzzle to be explored through the text, but I'm going to need more clues.
So we turn to the blurb:
"Four million years ago a Dyson sphere was built on the fringes of our solar system."
Okay, we're a single sentence in, but it's pretty safe to say that once we start exploring long term time scales and Dyson spheres, we are fully ensconced in hard sci-fi.
But let's read on a little bit more:
"...secretly sending its most dangerous criminals through a matter transmitter to the sphere nicknamed Big Dunkin Donut. But now arch-villain Dennis the Complete Bloody Sadist is threatening to destroy the sphere.."
Ah. That would be the part where the blurb takes an utter right hand turn and the book finds itself hauled post-haste out of hard sci-fi and plonked in the zany bucket.
When it comes to blurbs, however, The Hundredfold Problem is a mere lightweight. Whilst the more lettered may be able to rattle off a hundredfold blurbs before breakfast, the rest of us may want to consult Ghastly Beyond Belief. Which, I must say, deserves the award for least appropriate title. It should also win an award for least appropriate tag line: "Sterilize yourself with fear...". Finally, it does have a starred sentence on the cover exclaiming "The Science Fiction and Fantasy Book of Quotations", which is in fact highly accurate and descriptive.
The early chapters contain a wealth of blurbs, scraped, stripped and exposed, with a little commentary for those who haven't read the contents of the book that the blurbs are attempting to sell.
Some are highly inaccurate; some appear to be deliberately misleading (A Handful of Silver?). But blurbs are meant to stand out. Here are a few that stood out for me:
"The truly amazing story of a world much like our own, only startlingly different."
"He had to be stopped, for all women were his playthings and all men his pawns!"
"Free drugs! Easy sex! No job hassles! Some people just don't know when they're being oppressed!"
"It was love - between a mad scientist and a degenerate speck of hypermatter"
"She was all woman - ask the men who made her!"
"He was a destroyer from another planet, bent on the destruction of the world"
"Fluids running out of my brakes." - (this is the entire blurb)
"Only an intergalactic guerrilla force of pigs could destroy the monsters of the Ghost Plateau!"
And of course the one I most want to read:
"Harder than human! A bionic man with a computer crotch satisfies the lust cravings of a super feminine world! More than Mortal Meat!"
With so many great blurbs, where's the time to read the damn contents?
I would have to read the whole of the blurbs you listed to hopefully get a better idea of what the story is. Most of them sound like comedies, I wonder if they are? I'm not much into reading comedy - prefer the serious exploration of a theme or idea. I generally buy on subject (like time-travel and apocalyptic fiction - so the blurb better be relatively clear), reviews (by critics, not anonymous readers) and author. I am particularly inclined to buy Australian authored spec fiction.
ReplyDeleteAlas, the blurb bits I posted are pretty much the only bits described in Ghastly Beyond Belief, so I can't add much more other than the titles.
ReplyDeleteI don't know that many of them are comedic.
"Free drugs" is from Spacetime Donuts, which sounds comedic, but both that and the degenerate speck of hypermatter (The Sex Sphere) are Rudy Rucker books. They may be a little whimsical, but they certainly sound from writeups like they keep the science in science fiction (a review for the latter mentioned that "You do have to have some comfort with multiple dimensions").
Two are sci-fi porn.
One is Harry Harrison (the guerrilla pigs one) so that's going to be a humorous one.
And the remainder appear to just be bad writeups for general space sci-fi.
I must confess that although I buy on the three points you list above, I've also bought/read based on cover art.
The Naked God cover by Jim Burns sold me on Peter F Hamilton.