Covers Unbound

  This image, by Chinese artist Enzhe Zhao, illustrates a scene from Cixin Liu's novel The Three Body Problem (2008): ‘Doomsday War’. It portrays a battle in space: serried ranks of blocky spacecraft fly near a cratered world, or moon. Ballistic weaponry hurtles through the field of vision, and in several cases these bullets are crashing through the ships. The image sets one diagonal, the perspectivised left-to-right array of ships, against a conflicting diagonal, the blue space-cannon-ball that crashes through the largest ship from top-right to bottom left. It is, formally speaking, an energetic and dynamic composition, although the blackness of the outer-space background englooms and tragedizes the whole. What strikes me about this work of art is how formalised it is, how far it travels from the pseudo-photographic representation of its (imaginary) topic towards a study in shapes, lines, a grid patterning that draws out the shaping force of horizontals, verticals and diagonals. ...

  Most SF art (though not all of it, of course) is commissioned to be used in specific production contexts: as a book or magazine cover, a film poster, a video-game casing. To that end the science fiction artist must adjust his or her image-making to the exigencies of the lettering: a title, author's or authors' name(s), perhaps a blurb. Above is the cover for Andre Norton's edited collection of short-fiction Space Police (1955), painted by Virgil Finlay : a dynamic image, dominated by the near-by figure of a space policeman climbing near the top of a vertiginous alien cliff-face, which leads the eye down, along a plunging pulled-perspective, to his colleague far below him, and further still two more officers of space-law beside their silver spaceship. Finlay has left the top third of the image undetailed, with just the intimation of the far side of the crater wall visible, so that the title of the volume, the editor's name and a brief blurb (‘thrilling tales about int...

This image is by Anton Kurka. Born in Vienna Austria 1899 Kurka emigrated to the USA, probably in the 1920s. By the 1940s he was working as a commercial artist in New York, and was in demand. He produced many images for adverts, created a number of popular American Civil War-themed illustrated maps and, occasionally, on commission, he made science-fiction art. This painting, which Kurka called ‘The Ultimate Re-sowing of the Human Race—4,000 AD’, was used as the cover for If: Worlds of Science Fiction (Jan 1953) . It does not relate to any of the stories in the issue (it has nothing whatsoever to do with Miller's cold-war satire, named in the bottom left hand corner). A gigantic, cyclopean robot is sowing the bodies of human beings like seeds into a ploughed field. The humans are naked and, it seems, alive. Although the fall from such a height would presumably kill them, they seem unconcerned, even happy, as they tumble and freefall through the sky. The robot’s single red eye gl...

   Here is Darrell K. Sweet 's cover-art for the 1977 1st edition of James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars . Two living space-suited astronauts have come upon the corpse of a fellow spaceman. He has been dead so long that sand has half-buried him, and his flesh has rotted away from his face. It's a striking image, a way of condensing long stretches of time. The spacesuit makes us think of the future, but the state of the occupant leapfrogs us far beyond that, past his death and slow decay. It's a sort of temporal pull-focus, It is also extremely popular, so much so that it has become something of a visual cliché in sf art. There are more examples than can be accommodated here. The art here is not illustrative: none of the stories in this 1966 Ace Books selection of Heinlein's short fiction concern a skeleton in a spacesuit. But that's the image. A soace-jet swirls through a turquoise sky filled with scintillant stars, exceot that the stars are also in front of the ...