Covers Unbound

  Golubkov is a Russian artist, or ‘artist’: moderator of an online forum for SF Art called SCI-FI AND SPACE ART which hosts AI-generated imagery of a science-fictional bent. So Golubkov has not exactly created this artwork. The impact of these new technologies of visual representation has been enormous, over a relatively short space of time, but it remains to be seen how significant or shaping such ‘artwork’ will be going forward. Here Golubkov has typed-in the parameters for what he wants, and an AI visual generator (it is not clear which one: there are several) has produced this image by triaging gigantic datasets of visual imagery, scraped from publically accessible online content, and confecting elements together. Millions of works of art are generated this way annnually; and impossible number with which to keep up. It is one of the distinctive styles or, we could say, schools of art of the 2020s. The works of art created in this way can possess a superficial vividness and pan...

  In Robert Heinlein's ‘Sky Lift’ a plague breaks out amongst the human colonists on Pluto. There is a cure, but it is on Earth, a long way from where it is needed. Two ‘Torch Pilots’, rocketeers who are prepared to fly extended missions at extreme accelerations, despite the dangers to their health of such exertion—the story makes it clear that this unprecedented flight, all the way to the outer edge of the solar system under immense g-forces could easily kill them—are summoned to Earth Satellite Station, to fly the medicine in time to save everyone on Pluto. The cover art from the November 1953 issue of Imagination , where the story was first published, is by American artist Willis E Terry (1921-2009) and shows the opening moments of the tale. The rocket bringing the two pilots up to the Satellite Station is a slender crimson craft, trailing its fiery rocket exhaust in two curving trails that lead the eye back down to Earth itself. It is a decent but rather run-of-the-mill piece o...

  Here, probably, is  The Probability Man (1972) and Kelly Frea's art thereunto. So: in Ball ’s 29th century future, humanity has conquered the stars, but billions of people are extremely bored. They are entertained in ‘Frames’: not immersive virtual realities, but technology that alters actual reality, and which uses whole planets to re-stage and mash together wars from human history in which people take part, and so escape their ennui. They may die, but that's a small price to for Entertainment. Ball's premise enables a whacky mangling of human forms, different epochs, aliens, monsters and oddness. For example: the human protagonist has been remade as a devil, with horns and a prehensile tail. The female lead has gigantic butterfly wings. There is a robot, who belongs to the protagonist. Our hero has forgotten his actual name and former life, so calls himself Springan. He is fighting in a Frame-y recreation of the 1340 Siege of Tournai when he begins to recover his memor...

Fredric Brown (his name misspelled on the cover of this issue of Astounding , there) is perhaps best known today for this novella, serialised in three instalments in Campbell's magazine: Martians, Go Home starts with an on-his-uppers science fiction writer, Luke Devereaux, hoping for inspiration. He sees a Martian, an actual little green man, bald and elf-eared. Soon more Martians appear, and then a great many more, a billion or so, plaguing all the people of Earth. They cannot be harmed and killed (they teleport instantly away from any threat or danger) and they intrude into every aspect of human life: annoying people, mocking, blowing raspberries, spoiling poker games by revealing everyone's cards, leaking government secrets, larking about disgustingly in the food when people try to eat, and voyeuring people trying to have sex. Frank Kelly Freas 's art represents one such Martian, leaning through a keyhole, a sardonic expression on his face. It is a fine artwork, one of...

  We think of Ray Harryhausen as a model-maker, animator and film-maker, which of course he was. But he was also an artist. Here is a watercolour sketch he produced for his planned film of The Adventures in Baron Munchausen , from late 1949 or 1950. In the event the movie was never made, but the designs, paintings and models Harryhausen created remain. The above is a fine image in its own right, owing something compositionally to Caspar David Friedrich's Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’, 1818), although all fog has been blown-away from Harryhausen's scene—even the Earth, looming larger-than-life and displaying the Americas, is entirely cloud-free—and the Baron stands on his barren eminence, looking across the unobscured lunar wilderness. A breeze appears to be blowing his coattails back. Another sketch sees the Baron fleeing, on a penny farthing bicycle, across the same landscape, pursued by a giant three-headed eagle. The monstrous eagle is in...

  Planet Plane (1936), by ‘John Beynon’, concerns a British rocket to Mars. There it is, in cover-art by Russian illustrator Serge Drigin (1894-1977), who moved to the UK in the 1920s, and provided a range of artworks for 1920s and 1930s books and magazines (as, variously, Sergie, Sergey, S, S R, or Serge R Drigin). In fact ‘John Beynon’ is one of the pseudonyms by which John Wyndham originally published (John Wyndham’s birth name was “John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris” and he rearranged this elaborate moniker variously to mine pen-names for his work). The novel was originally serialised as Sleepers of Mars ...   ... then reprinted as Stowaway to Mars , as by John Benyon (cover below); and then once again, after his later 1950s fame, as Stowaway to Mars by John Wyndham. There’s something charming, if edge-of-comical, about the chubby lines of Drigin’s rocket, almost penguin-like in delineation, and requiring a variety of extra rockets in addition to the main thruster...