Covers Unbound

  Cover for E E ‘Doc’ Smith’s ‘Skylark of Space’ (1946) Prolific American artist Charles Schneeman (1912–1972) produced a great deal of work for newspapers and magazines, of all kinds; but it is for his work on Astounding , providing black-and-white interior illustrations to a variety of authors' works, for which he is remembered (he also produced some notable cover art). For the last installment of E E ‘Doc’ Smith's Grey Lensman , originally serialised in Campbell's Astounding in 1939-40, Schneeman produced what Brian Aldiss [ Science Fiction Art , 1975 ] somewhat dithyrhambically, calls ‘one of the most famous of all sf illustrations’: Smith's hero, Kimball Kinnison, striding along, accompanied by his strange Alien allies. That might over-state matters, but Schneeman's command of form and line was impressively direct and vigorous. This, from the same Astounding serialisation of Smith's novel: Schneeman's chops as an illustrator are on display in his cove...

  In 2013, the Royal Academy staged a comprehensive exhibition ‘Constable, Gainsborough, Turner and the Making of Landscape’. The argument of the display, elaborated in its catalogue, was that the development of landscape painting in the 18th century was dominated by a variety called ‘topography’, and sometimes ‘strict topography’, committed to ‘the accurate recording of particular places’: artists like Paul Sandby (1731-1809), who began as a map-maker, and carried a cartographic precision of representation over into his accomplished landscape watercolours; or Michael Angelo Rooker (1746-1801), who worked scrupulously in oils and watercolours. But in the early 19th century, however, topographical art was ‘transcended by something much more serious and more powerful, a sublime style of painting that sought to represent the grandeur of nature’ rather than accurately to reproduce it, and by exaggerating, distorting, or augmenting and inventing, to produce in viewers ‘feelings of aw...

  Alan Gutierrez cover art for the collection of short-fiction edited by Harry Harrison and Bruce McAllister:  There Won't Be War  (1991). The title marks this as a reaction to Jerry Pournelle's series of anthologies of military science-fiction short stories:—the success of There Will Be War (1983), led to Men of War (1984), and then the unironically-titled There Will Be War Volume III: Blood and Iron (1984), and on through to the exclamatory-marked There Will Be War Volume VII: Call To Battle! (1988), a piece of titular punctuation repeated in There Will Be War Volume VIII: Armageddon! (1989), the rather anticlimactic-sounding There Will Be War Volume IX: After Armageddon! (1990) and finally, somewhat belatedly, There Will Be War Volume X: History's End! (2015).  Harrison and McAllister commissioned and collected short-fiction that eschewed the gung-ho militarism of Pournelle's series, exploring a variety of pacific future possibilities. Alan Gutierrez , a Te...

  American artist Leonard Dworkins (?1905-1983) took over from  Zack Mosley  (1906-93), the original artist on the popular Buck Rogers magazine (which ran continuously from 1929 to 1967), in the mid-1930s. He continued Mosley's style: a simplified, vigorous cartoon idiom of strong outlines, simple colouration, scenes of action or character rendered foresquare, without foreshortening or exaggerated perspective. It is a rather stiff, winningly dated visual idiom. Here, Buck (a 20th-century pilot whom, trapped in a strange mine, sleeps for five centuries and awakes to a science-fictional world of adventure and romance) and 25th-century Wilma Deering fly rather stubby-looking rockets through a sky that, for some reason, includes a prominent ringed planet. Given their evident altitude, Wilma's unclothed legs must be really feeling the cold, though they are at least wearing helmets, which would surely protect them if they were to fall off their precarious rocket-mounts a...