Compositeface

 


Australian author Andrew Tomas wrote what we might call SF-adjacent books; like Erich von Däniken or Graham Hancock, he speculated about pseudo-scientific, alien-contact and what amount to alt-historical accounts of human chronology. We Are Not The First: Riddles of Ancient Science (1971) is a less outlandish book than many in this idiom, arguing as it does only that what we think of as modern science—atomic theory, heliocentrism, electricity and so on—were all known to the ancients, which is mostly true (there's some further-fetched argumentation in the book too, including the claims that the ancients had anti-gravity tech and could transmute base metals to gold). But I'm interested here in this striking cover-art for the 1972 paperback edition, artist unknown. The surreal blending of multiple faces into one UFO-shaped flying head, such that faces overlap, sharing noses and eyes, is a rebus of alien compositeness, implying perhaps a harmony to which we, separate and forked-creatures, are excluded. It is not possible to be sure of direct influence, but the concept was reused by Queen (previously discussed on this blogpreviously discussed on this blog) for their album The Miracle (1989), designed by Richard Gray. Here there is a play on the four constituent members of the band as individuals who are also a kind of gestalt entity as Queen; although it is worth noting that Freddie Mercury, the lead singer and most famous member of the band, gets to keep both his original eyes.



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