Spaceships and Unicorns

The February 6, 2006 issue of Publisher's Weekly has an inside the back cover article in which Patrick Henry Bass laments the sameness of covers for African-American literature, with examples, and with the observation that it is difficult to tell if a book is a new one or a rehash.

Science fiction and fantasy have suffered from this problem for so long it's hard to be as sympathetic as I would normally be to a frustrated would-be buyer. If it's science fiction, it has a spaceship; Fantasy, a unicorn. No, I'm not counting the little logos on the back...

Of course, occasionally, Here There Be Dragons, or, even now, BEMs.