Spacesuits and Bones

  

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 space-suited figure, as if falling through the sky, and one glints at us from the empty eye-socket of the deceased spaceman. It's an image that manages a surprising and unusual combination of kitsch and creepy.

Here is the artwork Angus McKie painted for Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison's The Year's Best Science Fiction No. 8 (Sphere Books, 1976). It's listed on his website as ‘Untitled’.

The implication is that the dead man was within inches of reaching the medical pack, or device, that could have saved his life, but never got there. His body has evidently been there for some time, as the weather erodes the fabric of his suit, and his flesh desiccates. Presumably that is his spaceship, crashed, in the background, similarly decaying in the hostile environment. The sharpness of the contrast between the body, very close to the field of view, and the distant spaceship, very far back in it, actualises the focus-pull I mention above: the jarring conjugation of the far future technology and the skeleton, redolent of the distant past. 

The image has been repeatedly reused. Here, despite not relating to any scene or event in the novel, it appears on the France Loisiers 1983 translation of the book into French:

And here it is not reused but clumsily plagiarised on the poster for the Candian movie Def-Con 4 (directed by Paul Donovan, 1985):

  

Alex Schomburg's cover for the December 1954 issue of Fantastic Universe shows a spaceman encountering a corpse:

He might be looking down upon himself. The uncanny doubling here emphasises the creepy element of memento mori inherent in any skull- or skeleton-image. It evokes the Renaissance sense of Death as (in Michael Neill's words) ‘a threatening Other, or a morbid anti-self – the one we are each born to meet, an uncanny companion we carry with us through life, a hidden double who will discover himself at the appointed hour’.  

That death turns on science-fiction itself in this Stephen Fabian image from the cover of the November 1973 issue of fanzine ‘The Alien Critic’. SF author Barry N. Malzberg is the rather cross-looking space skeleton in this 19896-launched, but presumably further-off future, capsule.

This is a commentary upon Malzberg's writing as well as a work of art. Brian Stableford: ‘The first sf novels to appear under Malzberg's own name were sceptical commentaries on the Apollo programme: The Falling Astronauts (1971), Revelations (1972) and Beyond Apollo (1972). The third caused some controversy when it won the John W Campbell Memorial Award despite its sarcastic and negative attitude to Space Flight. The three novels feature astronauts as archetypes of alienated contemporary humanity, struggling to make sense of an incomprehensible world and unable to account for their failure.’

Peter Gudynas’s image for the Granada paperback edition of Ian Watson's The Martian Inca (1978) is a little puzzling.

Gudynas, from the title, has imagined a mummy on Mars, in a space-suit with a broken faceplate. In fact Watson's novel is not set on Mars, but in the Bolivian Andes, where a probe, returning from the red planet, has crashed, spreading a strange alien infection among the local human population. But this image implies that a dead human, or Martian, had been first mummified and wrapped in bandages and then placed in a spacesuit which has, over a long period, begun to fall apart. That this figure is standing up perhaps suggests the mummy has become animated, after the manner of the classic horror movie trope. 

Richard Corben's art for Anomaly #4 (November 1972) shows a quasi-canine alien beast looking in puzzlement at the skeletal remains of a human astronaut.

In this Jim Starlin cover from 1981, the aliens are more enthusiastic. Whether they have set a dead body as an object of worship, or whether they enthroned a living astronaut and then preventing him from leaving, such that he died and has now decayed, is unclear.