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Golden Age Science Fiction Art 
From the first I always found the covers very influential in my choice of reading - having looked wistfully at the bookstalls on the stations I waited on when I was returning from school. Damp stations on dark winter evenings found me gazing in wonder at pulp covers - probably the work of people like Frank Paul and Leo Morey. But it was during my golden age that the art reached its peak. Reading Brian Stableford's In the Kingdom of the Beasts was coloured all the way through, for me, by the images of the beasts as painted by Kelly Freas. It was never clear in the book (which seemed to be a futurised version of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey) if the so-called beasts actually retained beast-like features. But without these hypnotically powerful renderings of the creatures on the Ace (1971) cover I don't think I would have bought the trilogy, or enjoyed it as much if I had. The names Brian Stableford chose for his modernised Greeks fitted perfectly with the Freas illustrations. I hope that the picture on the left is of Judson Deathdancer, who may have been Achilles alter ego in the story. Freas painted some much softer illustrations, and always managed to bring in a sort of compassionate humour as seen in the Analog cover on the right. His illustrations often appeared in Astounding Stories (which became Analog) in the fifties, making him pre-date my golden age by about ten years.  
An artist of almost the opposite type, who focussed on machines rather than people or monsters, was Chris Foss, whose illustrations began appearing on paperbacks in Britain in the mid seventies. He was a master of drawing fantastic and gigantic, yet realistic pieces of space architecture. By the introduction of intricate weathered detail, on structures seen in strange almost disturbing attitudes he created a compelling illusion of size that had never really been achieved before. It was obvious to any discerning observer that the first scene in the first Star Wars - where a huge space ship intrudes slowly and menacingly into the screen, apparently from over the audiences heads - that the influence of Foss was at work. The illustration on the left, on the cover of the Frederik Pohl Omnibus (Panther 1973) was the first one I saw, and I became hopelessly addicted for a while, until the impact wore off. I don't know whether Foss is still being published - I do remember the same
name attached to the illustrations for a book about sex (The Joy of Sex?). I
don't know if it was the same person, but the pictures were very well done, and
different though they were, there was the same feeling of getting things as they
should be, for the book concerned. He spent a lot of time sketching around in
scrap yards, getting the feeling of what metal artefacts are really like.
Sometimes one can perceive submarines and battleships in his mighty metal
molochs. The picture on the right captures the menacing feeling a machine can
take on when it has some active component, such as smoke. Click on Golden-Age at Booklovers logo to buy books with these covers Feedback to Golden Age |
