Orbanitude

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 representational, regularly placing faces or figures over geometrical abstractions and using bold cross-hatching; it was always competent and sometimes more.

This is a little damning-with-faint-praise: Orban's work, signed just with his surname, is very often striking, memorable, with bold, arresting compositions, and a real knack for creating atmospheric Chiaroscuro effects. The illustration at the head of this post is an Astounding image from 1949: a gigantic robot, planetary-sized, holds a glowing globe that, from the American continents, is clearly Earth, whilst other worlds swirl and orbit around him, along with a number of scintillant stars and the spread of the Milky Way. Why the robot is so intent upon our world is not clear, nor why it is aglow, the light illuminating his blank-eyed, Y-nosed, mouthless robot-face. Is he judging us? Is the light spiritual rather than material, such that he is looking into our humanity? 

David Saunders spoke to one of the editors on the Winston Science Fiction series, who said: ‘Paul Orban is a pleasant, soft-spoken man with a deep enthusiasm for the difficult job of visualizing the vague descriptions of writers.’ You can't, in terms of SF art, say fairer than that, I feel. 

Orban died at age seventy-seven in April 1974.

There is, as yet, no catalogue raisonné of Orban's art, although it's clear that the majority of his work is black-and-white illustration. But he also worked in colour, for book and magazine cover-art. Here is his painting for Lester del Rey's Marooned on Mars (1952), the first of several titles del Rey wrote in the 1950s for the John C Winston series of science fiction adventures aimed at younger readers—what we would nowadays call YA. Teenage Chuck Svenson, a citizen of the Moon, is too young to join the first manned voyage to Mars. Determined to be part of the mission he stows away, aboard the rocket ship Eros. The expedition discovers ruined Martian cities, mobile plants, monkey-like Martians that ransack the ship leaving it marooned on the red planet. But everything works out in the end: Chuck connects with the indigenous population, who help repair the damage they have done, and at the novel's end the Eros launches back home, looking forward to a treaty between Earth and Mars.

Martians mob the Eros, as young Chuck (in the red space-suit) and another character (possibly Dick Steele, although in del Rey's novel Steele is an African) look down upon the chaos. The strong vertical of the space-ship running up the left side, links the bright-lit crater floor, with its busy action, to the cool, inviting dark-blue starry sky above.

There's more to say about the place of chiaroscuro in science-fiction art. It is, after all, a mode that lends itself particularly well to the subject matter of space-travel: the endless blackness of cosmic vacuum, the bright, direct sources of light from stellar bodies, or artificial light sources, the sharp-cut shadows and brilliantine psots of illumination. Stanley Kubrick uses chiaroscuro brilliantly in 2001: A Space Odyssey (also in Dr Strangelove and Barry Lyndon), and Chesley Bonestell's paintings very often construe landscape in terms of chiaroscuro.

There is a starkness and angularity to chiaroscuro that can visually articulate the extrenities of outer space. As a visual style it works in terms of affect or mood, but also as representing a specific kind of optical estrangement, a structured extrapolative fictionality integral to SF as such. These intense chiarscurio lighting schemes spell-out in visual terms the topographic extremity of cosmic distances, a correlative of the sublime.