Covers Unbound

M'learned colleague Adam has already posted a couple of times here about surrealism in sf art, most recently in covers for Christopher Priest. As he suggests there, the surreal may be an especially appropriate way to illustrate authors whose work puts in doubt the nature of consensus reality. Which means that we really have to talk about Philip K Dick: in the 80s, Granada published a huge number of his works - sometimes with covers using hyper-detailed spaceships by artists like Chris Foss; and sometimes with art more specific to the book, like these. That last cover for A Maze of Death is so overloaded with symbols (cross-bow, get it?) that it reminds me of the worst classical music cover ever: But looking at these, particularly the one for The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch , put me in mind of a slightly different tendency in art, towards abstraction per se. Here are the two jackets (by Richard Powers and Ralph Brillhart respectively) for the Library of America's antholog...

  Chris Moore produces a type of science-fictional art that represents imaginary objects in a hyper-realist style; or more precisely, represents a mix of actual objects, real people—his cover-art very often includes human models, many of which are carefully painted portraits of friends and neighbours—combined with fantastical or extrapolated-technological objects. Above, for instance, is the cover Moore created for the HarperCollins 1997 reissue of Philip K Dick’s Our Friends From Frolix 8 (1970). Though the tower is a recognisable human structure, the bizarre, seemingly upholstered giant spacecraft hovering in the sky are purely imaginary. Of the young woman in the foreground Moore says ‘the model for this image was a friend that I met through the Preston sf group. Her name is Sarita. I’ve used her a couple of times in different paintings. I’m told she’s thrilled with it—almost as thrilled as her father was, because he’s also a huge Philip K Dick fan’ [Stephen Gallagher, Journey...

One game to play with really popular or influential titles is to see how different artists and publishers have responded to the same text. As an example, here's the Ace first edition of William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984).  Obviously it's a bit constrained by the Ace Specials template, but adjectives for James Warhola's artwork might include....psychedelic? Sinister? Walrus-y? Neuromancer was, of course, an immediate success (commercial and critical) and before long Ace had reissued it with different cover art by Rick Berry. This has been described as the first computer-generated sf cover, though I'm not completely sure about that. Visibly computer-generated art was very much in-fashion in the mid/late 80s, but then seems to have vanished. (Entirely separate, of course, is the use of Photoshop or similar tools to tweak manually-created art - or, later, AI generated images feeding on past sf art.) Meanwhile, in the UK, Neuromancer was treated as follows: Gollancz...

  Two paperback covers for Christopher Priest's first published novel Indoctrinaire (1970): on the right the 1971 New English Library paperback (art by Bruce Pennington ), and on the left the Pan paperback edition from 1979, a cover by Welsh artist Terry Oakes . The images inhabit the logic of surrealism, something I have talked about before on this blog : ‘André Breton's surrealism was predicated on the idea that art should relax conscious and rational control, access the dreamwork and conceptual punning of the unconscious, and portray illogical and dreamlike scenarios, to (in Breton’s phrase) ‘resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality, or surreality’. There are obvious parallels with science-fiction, which often departs from familiar or conventional ‘reality’, and which deals in strange, dreamlike juxtapositions: as when a bone thrown by an apeman abruptly becomes a futuristic spacecraft. At the same time,...