Covers Unbound

 . American artist Manzel Bowman (b 1985) works with collage to create digital images of Afrofuturistic vitality and range. The stylisation and recombination of prior elements construes faces, often masked, with cosmic vistas, ancient monuments and traditional, largely East African dress and manner. The juxtaposition of originalist past and imagined high-tech future is the point of the art, a challenge to the clichés of SF Art not just in terms of centring the Black subject, but as a formal repudiation of the pseudo-realist, conventionalised composition and framings. Here the female subject's lip-plate (a form of body adornment particularly associated with the Surma and Mursi people of Ethiopia) is, wittily, a flying saucer, and the woman's headdress a domed city. This kind of mannerist playfulness is common in Bowman's art, although a more comprehensive collage and assemblage is more typical than this kind of visual pun, A fluent organicism is often combined, cyborg-style...

  This 1969 Ballantine edition of Clarke's celebrated 1953 novel is a curio. The cover art (the artist is uncredited, but may have been  Dean Ellis ) has taken the actual subject of the book—the coming of mysterious aliens to Earth to oversee a utopian new age, in order that a generation of ESP-gifted children can be born and grow safely to adulthood, so as to usher-in the next phase in human evolution—and combined it with, as the tagline under the author's name reminds the readers, the huge success of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey . The globular spacecraft is a recognisable plagiary from that movie: it is the ship that travels from the orbital space station to the lunar base.  Presumably the suggestion is that the alien ‘Overlords’ from Clarke's story descend to earth in this craft, although it looks incongruous. In the book the Overlords' craft is described as more of a saucer, which is more often how cover artists have portrayed it. Pan paperback edition of the...

  Happy indeed! A joyous confection of SF-art cliché: the handsome space captain, wearing a version of the Superman costume, though with a rocket-ship rather than an ‘S’ on his chest; the beautiful spacewoman, kneeling and for some impenetrable reason wearing a cape (what good is a cape in vacuum? we may ask); the bizarre glass cookie-jar helmets; the way their spacesuits are tucked into their boots without any kind of vacuum seal. They both have air-hoses feeding into their helmets, but neither of them are wearing any kind of backpack or air-cylinder, so perhaps these hoses simply open into emptiness. The spacewoman has unrolled a blueprint of whatever structure they have come to the moon to build, but since the spaceman is pointing back where they came, it looks like they've travelled to the wrong bit of the moon to start building. Or perhaps he is simply pointing at the gigantic silver spaceship in admiration: ‘look, it's like the design on my costume! Cool!’ She is armed,...

I'm typing this on the way back from the Glasgow Worldcon, to record some Wonders and Visions impressions & observations from wandering round the Dealers' Room, looking at the art show, and chatting to folk with expertise in the field. 1) I feel much more secure in my sense that in the last decade or so, sf cover art per se is being supplanted by covers where the overall design leads, the typography plays a bigger part, and any art is much more subsumed to the overall whole. My initial thought was that this was caused by the rise of internet bookselling and the need for covers to work well at smaller sizes on Amazon etc pages. A further reason was suggested to me at Glasgow: an e-book will now almost always be released at the same time as the first print edition, but publishers will want one cover across both - partly for cost, partly so that an e-book spotted online will look the same if a customer wants a physical copy. 2) It was really striking how much of the Dealers...

Carol Emshwiller, a notable writer of science-fiction and magical realism, was married to artist Ed Emshwiller, and very often served as his model. Above is a 1957 portrait of her by Emsh. Here are the two of them together in the early 1960s. Her face is all over the art Emsh produced for magazines and book-covers through the 1950s and 1960s. Here is Carol, and her daughter Eve, in the background of a festive cover of Galaxy (though the cover dates this to January 1957, issues of magazines were typically released weeks before, which makes this a timely Christmas illustration) This 1968 portrait of Carol Emshwiller, again by her husband, was used as the cover art for her Collected Stories (New York: Nonstop Press 2016).  

Paul Orban (1896-1974), Hungarian-born artist, lived most of his life in the USA becoming a naturalised citizen in 1918. He worked extensively illustrating Pulp magazines in the 1930s and 1940s (among them Golden Book , Clues , Detective Novels , Doc Savage , Exciting Western , Giant Detective , Horror Stories , Popular Detective , Popular Baseball , Popular Western , Rodeo Romances , Thrilling Mystery , Thrilling Ranch Stories , Thrilling Sports , Top-Notch and Triple Western ). He also illustrated a great many science fiction Pulps: in John Grant and Peter Nicholls' words : The sf magazines he contributed to include Amazing Stories , Future Fiction , If , Infinity Science Fiction , Space Science Fiction , and Thrilling Wonder Stories , but he is mostly associated in readers' minds with John W Campbell Jr's Astounding , where he did many of the interior illustrations from 1934 to 1954. His black-and-white work was often symbolic of a story rather than directly representat...