Category: {science fiction}

Science fiction

War of the Worlds book covers

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Continuing the cover art theme, here’s a whole gallery of covers devoted to one book only, HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds, from 1898 to the present. Once again it’s fascinating to see how styles evolve and how different artists and designers approach the task of providing art for the same book. The most common approach with this particular novel has evidently been to depict the tripod machines laying waste to the Home Counties. The samples here follow the pattern: the uncredited 1967 Penguin edition above was the one I read originally (I still have a copy); the other is a cover by Philippe Druillet from 1973 showing a particularly heavy-footed and tentacular Martian vehicle. The site also includes some great interior illustrations.

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Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

JG Ballard book covers

In a similar vein to the Burroughs cover gallery, Rick McGrath’s site does the same for one of Burroughs’ followers, JG Ballard. The covers below are two typical examples using Surrealist art as their illustration, The Eye of Silence by Max Ernst and City of Drawers by Dalí. I’ve always loved the pairing of Ernst’s painting (my favourite by that artist) with The Crystal World, a design that Panther carried over to their 1968 paperback edition.

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Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

A few thousand science fiction covers

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Seems that this has been around for a while but I’ve only just run across it. Jim Bumgardner has created a browsable “table-top” of thousands of sf magazine covers using minimal Flash and Perl scripting; unlike many Flash-oriented web toys you don’t have to waste valuable minutes watching a progress bar before it starts working. Rest your mouse anywhere on the picture and a cover lifts itself from the mass; double-click that cover and it grows larger. He also has a similar page for covers of Mad magazine and 1001 graphic novels and comics. And an explanation of how it all works.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Wasted Talent: A Scanner Darkly

scanner.jpgWasted talent

John Patterson
Friday July 14, 2006
The Guardian

If you’re making a serious movie about drugs, it doesn’t hurt to assemble a cast that knows whereof it collectively speaks. And for his adaptation of A Scanner Darkly, Philip K Dick’s unsettling 1977 masterpiece about drugs, fractured identity, paranoia and betrayal, Richard Linklater has found a quartet that runs the full gamut of the drug experience. You’ve got Keanu Reeves – who for all we know has never even smoked a single joint, but whose name is a byword for stoner inarticulacy – playing Dick’s addict- cum-narcotics-detective Bob Arctor. As Arctor’s dealer-addict paramour Donna, we have Winona Ryder, all grown up since her apparently pill-induced moment of shoplifting madness. Hemp activist Woody Harrelson plays one of Arctor’s drug-addled housemates, while the other is played by no less august an imbiber of chemicals and sacred roots than Robert Downey Jr, who has what one might call an embarrassment of riches in this field.

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