Our book tells the story of science fiction through its most iconic, beautiful, interesting and (sometimes) crass cover art: from the earliest days of publishing in the 19th-century, through the glory days of Pulp magazine covers and the Golden Age, into the endless visual experimentation of the New Wave and so to the post-Star Wars era, when a 'visual logic' comes to dominate not just science fiction but culture as a whole.
With over 350 full-colour images and more than 50,000 words of text this is more than simply an anthology of famous science fiction covers--it is an ambitious attempt to tell the whole history of the genre in a new way, and to make the case that science fiction art, from the sober future-visions of Chesley Bonestell, to the garish splendours of Hannes Bok, from the Magritte-like surrealism of Richard Powers, Frank Freas, Judith Clute, and Ed Emshwiller to the amazingly talented designers and artists of the 21st-century, exists as a vital and neglected mode of modern art as such.
Through much of the twentieth-century it flowed like a subterranean river, influencing artistic Modernism, surrealism, abstraction, op-art and postmodernism, creating a heritage that directly informs the global visual texts of today in cinema, TV, graphic novels and video games. There has never been a book quite like this one.
We want this book to be a visually beautiful artifact, although as far as that is concerned we have a head start since so much of the art we want to reproduce is so gorgeous. From the intense, inky detail of Virgil Finlay’s illustrations to the extraordinary visions of Paul Lehr; from the cool wondrousness of Moebius to the gorgeous grotesqueness of H R Giger and the amazing cityscapes of Kirsten Zirngibl.
There will be three main types of entry. Firstly, there will be several hundred key covers: one or sometimes two images + plus 150-200 words of text, of the ten (or more) most iconic and recognisable covers from each decade of our history: from Wells and Verne to H Rider Haggard's Barsoom and E E 'Doc' Smith's Lensman, from Arthur C Clarke's Childhood's End and Asimov's Foundation to Leigh Brackett and Joanna Russ's Female Man, from Cyberpunk masterpieces by William Gibson and Pat Cadigan to dystopias by Octavia Butler and Cormac McCarthy, to twenty-first century SF.
Second there will be more extended visual comparative studies, one or two page spreads that compare multiple covers for the same book, to see the way different artists and publishers have approached the task of visualising some of the most famous novels in the history of the genre: The Day of the Triffids; Dune; Left Hand of Darkness and more, as well as surveys of the work of famous illustrators, or publishing houses.
Third there will be milestone entries: examples of groundbreaking or unusual covers, usually the first example of (among other things) a fine late 19th-century illustrated binding for a SF title; a garishly coloured SF magazine cover; a Golden Age fix-up paperback, a psychedelic 1960s New Wave title, a movie-tie-in; a graphic novel adaptation of a classic: Shelley's Frankenstein as first SF novel; Auf Zwei Planeten as first Martian invasion; Time Machine as first time travel; Orphans of the Sky as the first Generation Starship novel; Leo and Diane Dillon's illustrations for Ellison's Dangerous Visions; early computer-generated SF art; and Metal Hurlant revolutionising the potential of SF comics.
Every visual entry will be accompanied by text, and the whole will threaded together to tell a new story about this important and beautiful mode of art.
H G Wells's first published novel, The Time Machine (1895), effectively invented the time-travel genre, and remains one of the most famous of all science fiction titles. Of course, when William Heinemann took the project on they had no idea it was going to prove as enduring, and their original cover, with a low-key line drawing (by Ben Hardy) of the ‘sphinx’ Wells's time traveller encounters in the year 802,701 could hardly be more low-key. Since then it has been reprinted in hundreds of different formats, and a wide range of designers and artists have faced the task of covering the story.
Here's a Brazilian edition from c. 1930; artist unknown:
This illustrates the very beginning of the first chapter, where the time traveller is explaining his invention to his friends. Given the exotic wonders the later sections of the tale contain, it's puzzling that the publishers would go for something so mundane.
The success of the 1960 movie adaptation, directed by George Pal, meant that, for many readers, visual imagery from the film tended to overwrite the pictures generated by their own imaginations. It's a perennial problem with film adaptation, and cover artists have the choice of either collaborating with this visual hegemony or challenging it.
It doesn't surprise us that this 1980 sequel, written as it was by director George Pal himself (in collaboration with screenwriter Joe Morhaim), reproduces the machine as visualised in the movie. Indeed, the novel is a treatment of a story-idea Pal and Morhaim had tried, and failed, to get made into a movie: Christopher Jones, an orphan, is born in the Blitz with no knowledge of his parents and raised in the US. You will be no more surprised than I was to discover that his Dad (of course) is Wells's Time Traveller, and his mother Weena; and that they both died under the 1940 bombs. Christopher builds his own upgraded Time Machine and hurries millions of years into the future where father is helping humanity in a war against giant insects. "He knew then he must follow his father into the frightening worlds of the future," the back-cover blurb tells us: "He must warn them not to return. They must not die...though it meant, perhaps, that he might never live!" The resulting novel is best described by the two words very bad. That said, it does not have the worst cover of any unauthorised sequel to Wells's Time Machine ever published. That honour surely belongs to the following Pablo Gomez opus:
That hurts my eyes. Think what it would do to the Morlocks! That said, Burt Libe's 2005 sequel runs it close, cover-design-wise.
Self-publication, and the deprofessionalisation it enables where book design is concerned, has certainly lowered the bar. Commercial presses would never greenlight something so clumsily made.
Well ... not many presses, at any rate. (And to be fair to that Scholastic Press 1969 edition of the novel, there was a higher tolerance for psychedelia in the sixties. Although what's stopping the traveller falling through the hole in the base of his machine, why there's a giant multicoloured spoon behind him, and to whom he is (it seems) surrendering, are questions that could puzzle the best minds. This Bengali translation of the title has a pretty good cover, although the publisher's book-reading yellow smiley logo looks rather out of place in among that angry Morlock mob.
Finally the poster to Robert Lloyd Parry's dramatic adaptation.
A nice design, that; but it also brings out a detail about which the novella is explicit (the diminutive size of the Eloi: they are only four-feet tall) that in turn casts a rather queasy light upon what is implied in Wells' text, and made manifest in many of the sequels: that the Time Traveler has sex with the literally child-sized Weena. Urgh.
John Wyndham's 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids manages the impressive task of making vegetables scary. It requires a degree of contrivance, but Wyndham pulls it off. First he posits bioengineered carnivorous plants that can walk about on three stumpy legs and sting their prey with whip-like tentacles. Then he adds-in a second disaster: a spectacular meteor shower, which may actually be an orbiting weapons platform, that blinds all who watch it, leaving whole populations helpless before the perambulating plants. The result is one of the masterpieces of British ‘cosy catastophe’ science fiction. The original Michael Joseph cover by Welsh artist John Griffiths imagines the triffid as a sort of giraffe-shaped artichoke on tuberous legs. Since ‘gigantic artichokes’ rather undersells how tense and scary Wyndham's novel actually is, Griffiths has superimposed spiraling green lines to convey alarm. Still, his conception of triffid was iconic enough for it to be copied across to the 1961 Penguin first paperback edition with only minimal changes:
There's something about the neatness of Penguin's orange-and-white livery that adds menace to the clear-line drawing of the plant in the middle; an effect enhanced by the way the penguin logo itself appears to be giving us an alarmed side-eye at the proximity of the monster. The cover art for the first US edition (1951), by New York artist Whitney Bender, reworks the British cover by adding turmoil in the sky:
The splendour of the rendering of city and sky rather dwarfs the poor little triffid, who looks more like an overgrown lampost than a monster. Bender was in his day a respected painter for whom book illustration was a sideline, and there's something a little too stately about his terror-plants. By way of contrast this Earle Bergey cover for the ‘Popular Library’ paperback of 1959 is much more kinetic and vivid, even if it relies for its effect on the titillation of partially undressing the books' heroine:
‘Revolt ...’ was clearly considered a grabbier title than ‘Day ...’, although that shout line is a little strange. Hard to read it, now, without inserting a tentative pause between the first and second words. ‘An ... unusual science fiction novel’. Still the triffid itself is painted with impressive force and dynamism.
Wonders and Visions: A Visual History of Science Fiction
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Our book tells the story of science fiction through its most iconic, beautiful, interesting and (sometimes) crass cover art: from the earliest days of publishing in the 19th-century, through the glory days of Pulp magazine covers and the Golden Age, into the endless visual experimentation of the New Wave and so to the post-Star Wars era, when a 'visual logic' comes to dominate not just science fiction but culture as a whole.
With over 350 full-colour images and more than 50,000 words of text this is more than simply an anthology of famous science fiction covers--it is an ambitious attempt to tell the whole history of the genre in a new way, and to make the case that science fiction art, from the sober future-visions of Chesley Bonestell, to the garish splendours of Hannes Bok, from the Magritte-like surrealism of Richard Powers, Frank Freas, Judith Clute, and Ed Emshwiller to the amazingly talented designers and artists of the 21st-century, exists as a vital and neglected mode of modern art as such.
Through much of the twentieth-century it flowed like a subterranean river, influencing artistic Modernism, surrealism, abstraction, op-art and postmodernism, creating a heritage that directly informs the global visual texts of today in cinema, TV, graphic novels and video games. There has never been a book quite like this one.
We want this book to be a visually beautiful artifact, although as far as that is concerned we have a head start since so much of the art we want to reproduce is so gorgeous. From the intense, inky detail of Virgil Finlay’s illustrations to the extraordinary visions of Paul Lehr; from the cool wondrousness of Moebius to the gorgeous grotesqueness of H R Giger and the amazing cityscapes of Kirsten Zirngibl.
There will be three main types of entry. Firstly, there will be several hundred key covers: one or sometimes two images + plus 150-200 words of text, of the ten (or more) most iconic and recognisable covers from each decade of our history: from Wells and Verne to H Rider Haggard's Barsoom and E E 'Doc' Smith's Lensman, from Arthur C Clarke's Childhood's End and Asimov's Foundation to Leigh Brackett and Joanna Russ's Female Man, from Cyberpunk masterpieces by William Gibson and Pat Cadigan to dystopias by Octavia Butler and Cormac McCarthy, to twenty-first century SF.
Second there will be more extended visual comparative studies, one or two page spreads that compare multiple covers for the same book, to see the way different artists and publishers have approached the task of visualising some of the most famous novels in the history of the genre: The Day of the Triffids; Dune; Left Hand of Darkness and more, as well as surveys of the work of famous illustrators, or publishing houses.
Third there will be milestone entries: examples of groundbreaking or unusual covers, usually the first example of (among other things) a fine late 19th-century illustrated binding for a SF title; a garishly coloured SF magazine cover; a Golden Age fix-up paperback, a psychedelic 1960s New Wave title, a movie-tie-in; a graphic novel adaptation of a classic: Shelley's Frankenstein as first SF novel; Auf Zwei Planeten as first Martian invasion; Time Machine as first time travel; Orphans of the Sky as the first Generation Starship novel; Leo and Diane Dillon's illustrations for Ellison's Dangerous Visions; early computer-generated SF art; and Metal Hurlant revolutionising the potential of SF comics.
Every visual entry will be accompanied by text, and the whole will threaded together to tell a new story about this important and beautiful mode of art.
H G Wells's first published novel, The Time Machine (1895), effectively invented the time-travel genre, and remains one of the most famous of all science fiction titles. Of course, when William Heinemann took the project on they had no idea it was going to prove as enduring, and their original cover, with a low-key line drawing (by Ben Hardy) of the ‘sphinx’ Wells's time traveller encounters in the year 802,701 could hardly be more low-key. Since then it has been reprinted in hundreds of different formats, and a wide range of designers and artists have faced the task of covering the story.
Here's a Brazilian edition from c. 1930; artist unknown:
This illustrates the very beginning of the first chapter, where the time traveller is explaining his invention to his friends. Given the exotic wonders the later sections of the tale contain, it's puzzling that the publishers would go for something so mundane.
The success of the 1960 movie adaptation, directed by George Pal, meant that, for many readers, visual imagery from the film tended to overwrite the pictures generated by their own imaginations. It's a perennial problem with film adaptation, and cover artists have the choice of either collaborating with this visual hegemony or challenging it.
It doesn't surprise us that this 1980 sequel, written as it was by director George Pal himself (in collaboration with screenwriter Joe Morhaim), reproduces the machine as visualised in the movie. Indeed, the novel is a treatment of a story-idea Pal and Morhaim had tried, and failed, to get made into a movie: Christopher Jones, an orphan, is born in the Blitz with no knowledge of his parents and raised in the US. You will be no more surprised than I was to discover that his Dad (of course) is Wells's Time Traveller, and his mother Weena; and that they both died under the 1940 bombs. Christopher builds his own upgraded Time Machine and hurries millions of years into the future where father is helping humanity in a war against giant insects. "He knew then he must follow his father into the frightening worlds of the future," the back-cover blurb tells us: "He must warn them not to return. They must not die...though it meant, perhaps, that he might never live!" The resulting novel is best described by the two words very bad. That said, it does not have the worst cover of any unauthorised sequel to Wells's Time Machine ever published. That honour surely belongs to the following Pablo Gomez opus:
That hurts my eyes. Think what it would do to the Morlocks! That said, Burt Libe's 2005 sequel runs it close, cover-design-wise.
Self-publication, and the deprofessionalisation it enables where book design is concerned, has certainly lowered the bar. Commercial presses would never greenlight something so clumsily made.
Well ... not many presses, at any rate. (And to be fair to that Scholastic Press 1969 edition of the novel, there was a higher tolerance for psychedelia in the sixties. Although what's stopping the traveller falling through the hole in the base of his machine, why there's a giant multicoloured spoon behind him, and to whom he is (it seems) surrendering, are questions that could puzzle the best minds. This Bengali translation of the title has a pretty good cover, although the publisher's book-reading yellow smiley logo looks rather out of place in among that angry Morlock mob.
Finally the poster to Robert Lloyd Parry's dramatic adaptation.
A nice design, that; but it also brings out a detail about which the novella is explicit (the diminutive size of the Eloi: they are only four-feet tall) that in turn casts a rather queasy light upon what is implied in Wells' text, and made manifest in many of the sequels: that the Time Traveler has sex with the literally child-sized Weena. Urgh.
John Wyndham's 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids manages the impressive task of making vegetables scary. It requires a degree of contrivance, but Wyndham pulls it off. First he posits bioengineered carnivorous plants that can walk about on three stumpy legs and sting their prey with whip-like tentacles. Then he adds-in a second disaster: a spectacular meteor shower, which may actually be an orbiting weapons platform, that blinds all who watch it, leaving whole populations helpless before the perambulating plants. The result is one of the masterpieces of British ‘cosy catastophe’ science fiction. The original Michael Joseph cover by Welsh artist John Griffiths imagines the triffid as a sort of giraffe-shaped artichoke on tuberous legs. Since ‘gigantic artichokes’ rather undersells how tense and scary Wyndham's novel actually is, Griffiths has superimposed spiraling green lines to convey alarm. Still, his conception of triffid was iconic enough for it to be copied across to the 1961 Penguin first paperback edition with only minimal changes:
There's something about the neatness of Penguin's orange-and-white livery that adds menace to the clear-line drawing of the plant in the middle; an effect enhanced by the way the penguin logo itself appears to be giving us an alarmed side-eye at the proximity of the monster. The cover art for the first US edition (1951), by New York artist Whitney Bender, reworks the British cover by adding turmoil in the sky:
The splendour of the rendering of city and sky rather dwarfs the poor little triffid, who looks more like an overgrown lampost than a monster. Bender was in his day a respected painter for whom book illustration was a sideline, and there's something a little too stately about his terror-plants. By way of contrast this Earle Bergey cover for the ‘Popular Library’ paperback of 1959 is much more kinetic and vivid, even if it relies for its effect on the titillation of partially undressing the books' heroine:
‘Revolt ...’ was clearly considered a grabbier title than ‘Day ...’, although that shout line is a little strange. Hard to read it, now, without inserting a tentative pause between the first and second words. ‘An ... unusual science fiction novel’. Still the triffid itself is painted with impressive force and dynamism.
From the intense, inky detail of Virgil Finlay’s illustrations to the extraordinary visions of Paul Lehr; from the cool wondrousness of Moebius to the gorgeous grotesqueness of H R Giger and the amazing cityscapes of Kirsten Zirngibl.
About the author
Updates
Dear all, Working on Wonders and Visions has been a long journey, but we think we’re finally nearing the end. The book was originally conceived before the Covid pandemic, but only reached its funding ...
19.08.2024
