Alan Gutierrez ‘There Won't Be War’ (1991)

 


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 Texas-based artist, began working commercially in 1983, producing cover-art and illustrations for Analog magazine and Asimov's Science Fiction, as well as work for Tor Books, Baen Books and other publishers. His style is clear-line, realist, with a focus on detailed technology and futuristic machinery, although latterly he has branched-out into more stylised art, often illustrating Fantasy (he retired from commercial art in 2018). This image is, in one sense, indicative of SF art more generally, in that it is clearly derivative of the orbiting space-station famous from 2001: a Space Odyssey, down to the fact that portions are unfinished and consist of scaffolding open to space, and the shuttle flying in to dock with the central hub. Gutierrez has augmented the 2001 original, somewhat over-busily, adding what look like commercial logos (‘ONI’, ‘Sphere’, ‘Synergy’), extra struts, and some rather illogically-positioned extra domes. Given the spin of the station, wouldn't the circular-lawn in the larger dome and the garden in the smaller be, in effect, upside down, where the simlated gravity of centrifugal force is concerned? Perhaps it is to flee such discomforting space that the space shuttle on the left is blasting, full power, and heading back to Earth.

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