{science fiction} – { feuilleton }

Quiet Apocalypse

More monochrome cosmic horror. Quiet Apocalypse is a short black-and-white film by “Insolitum”, a combination CGI with stock footage that nods to Cloverfield, Ishirō Honda’s monstrous menagerie, and the last few minutes of The Mist, if that particular film had continued beyond its abrupt ending. “Made using Blender, Zbrush, Substance Painter, After Effects and Davinci Resolve. Stock footage provided by Envato, Pexels and Pixabay,” says the YT note.

Most of the visuals are self-explanatory and could easily get by without the narration that enters later on. Sublime horror is seldom enhanced by excessive explanation. HP Lovecraft made the point succinctly in The Call of Cthulhu: “A mountain walked.” Sometimes that’s all you need to know.

(Another tip from Scotto Moore’s This Newsletter Cannot Save You.)

Weekend links 835

Kites of Fukuroi and Distant View of Akiba in Totomi Province, from the series One Hundred Famous Views in the Various Provinces (1859) by Utagawa Hiroshige II.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: International Freak: Robin Farquharson and the Dream of Psychedelic Revolt by M. Syd Rosen.

• At the Daily Heller: the Brooklyn Botanical Garden looks back at the psychedelic Sixties with Flower Power.

• At the BFI: Sophia Satchell-Baeza selects 10 great queer American underground features of the 1970s.

• At Colossal: “Surreal Figures Step from Leonora Carrington’s Paintings into Shape of Dreams”.

• At Unquiet Things: The Surreal Paperback Visions of Richard Powers.

• The Reinvention of the Guitar in 13 Albums by Simon Reynolds.

• At Public Domain Review: The Art of Kite Flying (1430–1929).

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – June 2026 at Ambientblog.

• New music: Cloud Machines by Berndt / Schmidt.

• Kites (1967) by Simon Dupree And The Big Sound | Kites I (1999) by Brian Eno | Nuclear Kites (2023) by Hawksmoor

The art of Atelier Heinrichs & Bachmann

Who were Heinrichs and Bachmann? That’s a good question because neither I nor anyone else who’s written about their book covers can offer any more information beyond their names and the dates when they were active. What we do know is that from the mid-60s to an unspecified point in the 1970s Heinrichs and Bachmann’s studio was credited with many cover designs for books published by Heyne in Germany. By the 1980s the studio was still working for Heyne but with a credit now changed to Atelier Heinrichs & Schutz.

The designs featured here date from 1969 to 1971, and are part of a longer run of Heinrichs & Bachmann covers for science fiction titles published from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. I’d run across a few of these in the past but hadn’t gone looking for more until this weekend. I always enjoy seeing unusual approaches to SF illustration, and I especially enjoy anything which adopts this kind of post-psychedelic Pop-collage style. The influence of Heinz Edelmann’s art is evident in places, in particular the Edelmann look as it was filtered through the artists who worked on the Beatles’s Yellow Submarine. The Frank Herbert cover above could easily be added to the Sea of Heads. Also evident are faces that look as though they’ve been lifted from film stills. I’d guess that most of the figures in these collages were clipped from magazine pages then run through a photocopier once or twice to give that posterised effect.

Continue reading “The art of Atelier Heinrichs & Bachmann”

The art of Helmut Wenske

A Tab in the Ocean (1972) by Nektar.

This is another post in which I refer to Franz Rottensteiner’s The Fantasy Book: The Ghostly, the Gothic, the Magical, the Unreal (Thames & Hudson, 1978) as a source of discovery. Rottensteiner is Austrian which no doubt explains why his study of fantasy and horror in art and fiction had a broader reach than you would have found in a similar study from a British or American editor. Some of the writers whose work he discusses—Stefan Grabiński, for example—hadn’t been translated into English at that time. Among the artists whose work appeared as illustration Helmut Wenske was one of several whose paintings were seldom seen in Anglophone publications, although a few album covers that featured Wenske art—those for Nektar in particular—were a common sight in British record shops in the 1970s.

Remember The Future (1973) by Nektar.

Wenske is a German artist with a penchant for Dalí-like Surrealism that might have been strained through a psychotropic filter. Most of his work in the 1970s was as an album cover designer for the Bellaphon label, and most of those covers are designs rather than paintings. There are a number of book covers, however, some of which are recycled from his album covers. From 1971 to 1975 Wenske painted the covers for a series from Insel Verlag, “Phantastische Wirklichkeit: Science Fiction der Welt”, a collection of reprints edited by Franz Rottensteiner. Wenske’s ISFDB credits list a few horror covers along with these, a small percentage of which are Lovecraft-related. In the past I’ve drawn attention to many different Lovecraft illustrators but Wenkse is one of a small number of these to have also written Lovecraftian fiction of his own (Die Krypta von Shaggay’h, 1974). He enjoys the work he’s being asked to illustrate, in other words, which isn’t something you can always expect from illustrators.

Electric Silence (1974) by Dzyan.

The covers below aren’t the best quality but better copies have proved hard to find. For those who’d like to see more Wenske art there’s at least one German catalogue that collects his work from the early 70s on.

Horizonte (1977) by PSI.

Continue reading “The art of Helmut Wenske”

Weekend links 833

Tony Hyde’s original artwork for the front cover of Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music by Hawkwind. The painting is being auctioned later this month.

• At the Daily Heller: Steven Heller reprints his 2012 Atlantic review of The Graphic Canon, a three-volume collection of visual adaptations of works of literature. The collection was edited by the late Russ Kick, and includes my own condensation of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Bill Hsu presents…21st Century Nightmares: Dark Animations by Cristóbal León/Joaquín Cociña, Hugo Covarrubias, Christiane Cegavske, John Frame, Saori Shiroki, Joe Hsieh, Phil Tippett, Robert Morgan, Shengwei Zhou.

• At Colossal: In Los Angeles, 70 artists transform a vacant hospital into a sprawling art experience.

What we were doing was rooted in that specific moment, but looking back, it also seems to resonate strongly with the present—particularly in terms of how we understand media, perception, and reality itself. This is something I’ve been thinking about again recently, especially with the renewed activity around Cabaret Voltaire. It brings into focus the extent to which earlier work now reads almost as a form of prefiguration. At the time, though, much of it was intuitive. We didn’t necessarily have a fully formed theoretical framework for what we were doing—we were artists, and we were working instinctively. It’s really only in retrospect that some of those ideas begin to take on a clearer shape and meaning.

Stephen Mallinder talking to Nicolas Ballet about Cabaret Voltaire, the group’s history and working methods

• New music: The Endless Dance by Hannah Peel; Helt by Fjall; Air Signs by Anthéne.

• Adam Rowe is writing a new book about science fiction art.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Brutal Types.

• Mix of the week: Isolatedmix 135 by Aspetuck.

• Brute Reason (1983) by Bernard Szajner | Let’s Get Brutal (1986) by Nitro Deluxe | Brutal But Clean (1994) by Cabaret Voltaire