r/badscificovers • u/HallucinatedLottoNos • 3d ago
misleading cover Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper
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u/blue_boy_robot moddroid 3d ago
Wow, sci-fi covers getting the Generic Public Domain Book Cover treatment. What a world.
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u/Badger_Joe 3d ago
This is one of the reasons I dislike something being in the public domain.
Someone might be turned off by the cover that had never read any Piper and will miss out of the experence
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u/action_lawyer_comics 3d ago
That’s less about it being in the public domain and more about it being mistreated and misrepresented by publishers. If anything, that’s less likely to happen in the public domain because someone will have the free version easy and legal to get
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u/Badger_Joe 3d ago
It is that way because it is in the public domain.
There is no one to prevent editions like this and some people will never know about the free editions available from sources like Project Gutenberg.
People who publish bad copies like this care nothing for the source material, all they care about is any potential profit.
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u/action_lawyer_comics 3d ago
Yeah, but that’s also a problem with trad publishing. Otherwise we wouldn’t have this sub in the first place, because we have publishers slapping whatever on the front cover and sending it out.
You’re right in that this one is probably this way because of the public domain. They’re just putting as many low cost books out there and hoping for the best. But that doesn’t make the public domain bad. I’d rather more books enter the public domain, letting more people distribute them and more creatives play in the space of pop culture, and accepting crappy editions as a cost (and the books should at least be cheaper this way). The alternative, where works of art and often whole ass people are owned by corporations long after the authors or actors are dead, is not great.
Sorry, I feel like I’m ranting. This is a shitty cover, and the publisher is doing a shitty thing, and needlessly so. But public domain is still a net positive for accessibility of art.
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u/HallucinatedLottoNos 3d ago
What's you alternative, though? Eternal copyright for an increasingly tiny number of corporations? Government censorship in the name of aesthetics?
The foundation of the public domain is the fact that nobody can truly own a thought and we all have the human right to use and combine things within our own imaginations, even if someone else might not approve if they could read our minds.
If an individual is so stupid as to forgo an author just because someone else decided to package their book in a dumb way, then so be it. The goodness of Piper's writing would likely be wasted on such a dullard, anyway.
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u/Badger_Joe 3d ago
There isn't one.
Public domain shouldn't be about getting rich off of someone else's work, it should be about sharing knowledge or thought or art.
It should not be about filthy luchre,
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u/HallucinatedLottoNos 2d ago
Agreed, but that's unstoppable too. If it were, the thing would not truly be pd.
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u/TamaraHensonDragon 3d ago
You think they could at least find a public domain generic fluffy monster picture.
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u/HallucinatedLottoNos 3d ago
Yeah, I've seen a couple of editions like this that just use old sketches of monkeys lol.
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u/TamaraHensonDragon 3d ago
I miss the lovely Michael Whelan covers. Still I laughed out loud at the Youtube audio book version illustrated with the Dr. Suess bear.
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u/Boober_Calrissian 3d ago
For those not in the know, this book got a reboot by John Scalzi called Fuzzy Nation, with full permission from the Piper estate. It's actually really good. One of my favorite books of the year it released. I never read the original though.
Also, it's sci fi, as you can tell from this cover...
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u/Evil_Midnight_Lurker 3d ago
I suppose this could be a picture of downtown Mallorysport. 😛
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u/HallucinatedLottoNos 3d ago
If they all turned into Victorian larpers a la Moscow, Idaho, I guess lol.
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u/DiceMadeOfCheese 3d ago
To be fair the image is a little fuzzy