Or so reports the Guardian blog. Don’t they do this survey about once every eighteen months? Surprisingly, this time sf doesn’t seem to feature in the list of turn-off genres (and not only that, the picture in the post is of someone reading a fantasy novel. A Booker-longlisted fantasy novel, admittedly, but even so). There is this rather good story about a third of the way down the comment thread, though:
My worst ever literary experience came from re-reading Asimov’s I, Robot. The film had just come out; I hadn’t read any sci-fi since I was 14 and I wanted to go back and see if there was anything to it.
Obviously I took great care on my morning commute to shield the book from the view of the several attractive women sitting near me. However this was a Routemaster (no. 12), and when the conductor came to check my ticket he spotted the cover and launched into a 20 minute conversation/monologue about the merits of various sci-fi authors and novels, in the course of which I was compelled by politeness to admit familiarity with several of those authors, in full view of girls.
Astonishingly, the exact same thing happened the next day with a different conductor. I did not mourn the advent of the bendy bus.
Maybe they have a reading group.
vector-bsfa.com 
Sexy, sexy reading.
See, this is why I read the latest issue of Asimov’s, or books with covers like this on public transport. Nobody in their right mind would think I was reading such things to look cool, therefore I must actually be cool. Right?
No one has ever flirted with me on the Tube based on my choice of reading material. Going by that blog thread, mabye I should have been reading Never Let Me Go instead of The Da Vinci Code – I could be missing out on all sorts of excitement.
I only flirt with guys reading books with sexy space bunnies on the cover.
On the tube home last night there was a brunette with a full sleeve tattoo reading Iain M. Banks’s Use Of Weapons. It doesn’t get much better than that.
From the article:
Turn-offs, on the other hand, include… any book with a cover based on a recent film or TV adaptation.
True that.
Turn-offs, on the other hand, include… any book with a cover based on a recent film or TV adaptation.
True that.
Really? What about, say, Bleak House, Tom Jones, Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch, Our Mutual Friend, and Wives and Daughter (to name just the first six which come to mind out of dozen or so TV adaptions of classic novels over the past decade)?
Really?
Yeah. Not that I’ve seen a tie-in cover for any of those.
Not that I’ve seen a tie-in cover for any of those.
At least three of the titles I named — Tom Jones, Pride and Prejudice and Wives and Daughters — saw editions with photographs of the actors on the covers following their TV adaptations. I can’t believe that this somehow made them less readable, or less worthy….
I was assuming it was the Johnny-(or Jane)-come-lately overtones attached to reading a tie-in edition that were the problem.
I can’t believe that this somehow made them less readable, or less worthy….
In the past I’ve hunted around for a copy of James Jones’s The Thin Red Line without Nick Nolte’s name on the cover just because tie-in covers are so utterly lame.
I merely drop in to note that reading the (bright pink) proof of Nobody Loves A Ginger Baby probably made people think it was some kind of bizarre self help book rather than a good bit of fiction.
Natch.
Of course, no-one spoke to me – I was on the tube.