Don't even get me started on this. I bought a friend of mine one of my all-time favourite books, Vance's Tales of the Dying Earth, as a birthday present but, a year later, he still hadn't read it. Being the subtle person I am, I asked why, and he said it was because he only read fantasy, not hard sf, so he hadn't gotten around to it. I was WTF over this. After all, this is considered a fantasy classic: I mean, it's where the idea for the D&D spell memorization system came from, FFS. Then I looked at the cover:



Talk about horribly misrepresenting a book. There's not a single spaceship to be found in the Dying Earth milieu: it's a fantasy world where magic is real. The cover is amazingly inappropriate, and managed to single-handedly persuade someone not to read the book.