Covers Unbound

The cover illustrates Ray Cummings’ ‘The Man on the Meteor’ in Future  (October 1941). The artist is Hannes Bok, pseudonym of American artist Wayne Woodard (1914 –1964). His teachnique involved glazing his colour-work as he built up his work, and the shimmering, textural effects of this are evident in this image. The story concerns a human astronaut who crash-lands on a meteor. Despite there being no air (‘Air, you say! Air on a meteor like that! Do you call yourself an astronomer? If so, you show your ignorance by such questioning! Yet at least something that served my purposes of breathing was there and that I am here alive to tell it must be your proof.’) He survives, mates with a local woman, starts a family, and experiences various garish and improbable adventures, which Bok's art well captures.   Here is one of the many covers from DC Comics' Mystery in Space series, that ran from 1951 to 1966 (this is issue 40, November 1957). Art by Murphy Anderson (1926–2015). The sp...

  Born in the same year (indeed, within a few days of one another) on different US coasts, American artists Leo Dillon and Diane Sorber met at Parsons School of Design in New York City in 1954. Their collaboration became a relationship and, in 1957, a marriage, and decades of artistic production followed, for a variety of outets and publishers. In the 1990s Leo Dillon noted: ‘people often comment on the “Dillon style.” I think that someplace, the two of us made a pact with each other. We both decided that we would give up the essence of ourselves, that part that made the art each of us did our own. And I think that in doing that we opened the door to everything.’ They are particularly associated with award-winning cover-art for children’s literature. Their SF and Fantasy art is a major part of their oeuvre not least because they designed the covers of a number of classic genre titles. Above is their cover for the first edition of Harlan Ellison’s seminal collection Dangerous Vision...

  American artist John Schoenherr (1935-2010) began producing SF art in the latter 1950s, working for a variety of magazines: Amazing , Fantastic and Infinity Science Fiction and especially Astounding / Analog , where he created 75 covers and many hundreds of black-and-white interior illustrations. He also worked for paperback publishers, including Ace Books and Pyramid. His most famous work is undoubtedly the art he created for Frank Herbert's Dune stories in Analog (1963-1965), and then for later book editions. Notable art on its own terms, these visualisations have also exerted considerable influence on later visualisations of Herbert’s imaginary universe, by other artists, in video games and movies. Frank Herbert said ‘I can envision no more perfect visual representation of my Dune world than John Schoenherr's careful and accurate illustrations.’ [ The Illustrated Dune (Berkley Windhover, 1978): cover above ]. Here is the cover for the initial instalment of Dune , publi...

 American artist Michael Whelan (born 1950) was inducted into ‘ The Science Fiction Hall of Fame ’ in June 2009, the first living artist so honoured. His Hall of Fame citation describes him as ‘one of the most important contemporary science fiction and fantasy artists, and certainly the most popular. His work was a dominant force in the transition of genre book covers away from the surrealism introduced in the 1950s and 1960s back to realism.’ In demand, copiously productive, Whelan has produced a deal of work for DAW books, and much for other imprints too: SF, Fantasy and Horror. His run of awards is particularly impressive: he won the Hugo for Best Professional Artist in seven consecutive years—1980 to 1986—and only didn’t win again in 1987 because he declined the nomination (he subsequently won the same award six further times, also receiving the 1988 Best Nonfiction Hugo award for his compilation, Michael Whelan's Works of Wonder ). Whelan has also won many Locus Awards, Chesl...

  Cover for E E ‘Doc’ Smith’s ‘Skylark of Space’ (1946) Prolific American artist Charles Schneeman (1912–1972) produced a great deal of work for newspapers and magazines, of all kinds; but it is for his work on Astounding , providing black-and-white interior illustrations to a variety of authors' works, for which he is remembered (he also produced some notable cover art). For the last installment of E E ‘Doc’ Smith's Grey Lensman , originally serialised in Campbell's Astounding in 1939-40, Schneeman produced what Brian Aldiss [ Science Fiction Art , 1975 ] somewhat dithyrhambically, calls ‘one of the most famous of all sf illustrations’: Smith's hero, Kimball Kinnison, striding along, accompanied by his strange Alien allies. That might over-state matters, but Schneeman's command of form and line was impressively direct and vigorous. This, from the same Astounding serialisation of Smith's novel: Schneeman's chops as an illustrator are on display in his cove...

  In 2013, the Royal Academy staged a comprehensive exhibition ‘Constable, Gainsborough, Turner and the Making of Landscape’. The argument of the display, elaborated in its catalogue, was that the development of landscape painting in the 18th century was dominated by a variety called ‘topography’, and sometimes ‘strict topography’, committed to ‘the accurate recording of particular places’: artists like Paul Sandby (1731-1809), who began as a map-maker, and carried a cartographic precision of representation over into his accomplished landscape watercolours; or Michael Angelo Rooker (1746-1801), who worked scrupulously in oils and watercolours. But in the early 19th century, however, topographical art was ‘transcended by something much more serious and more powerful, a sublime style of painting that sought to represent the grandeur of nature’ rather than accurately to reproduce it, and by exaggerating, distorting, or augmenting and inventing, to produce in viewers ‘feelings of aw...