{science fiction} – Page 2

Weekend links 845

Cover design by Jim Jupp, art by Arik Roper.

• New music: Sorcery by Belbury Poly, or “The Belbury Poly” as the credit on the cover art has it. The description of the forthcoming release says “it grew from [Jim] Jupp’s love of early to mid-80s electronic music and a rediscovery of how that music had soundtracked his childhood love of all things sci-fi and fantasy. It’s moody and melodramatic electronica rendered in bright and evocative 80s sounds.” And concerning the cover art there’s this: “Some may notice the typographical nod to Mayflower Books’ Michael Moorcock novels.” Indeed.

Cover art by Rodney Matthews, 1977.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827) by Jane C. Loudon, and The Place Called Dagon (1927) by Herbert S. Gorman.

• More new music: Materia by Julia Holter; Avaeken by Stephen O’Malley; Witchcraft & Black Magic In The United Kingdom by Various Artists.

• The Natural History Museum presents competition photos from Wildlife Photographer of the Year.

• This week I drew a new header design for the Endless Bookshelf website.

• At the BFI: Brogan Morris chooses 10 great films about screenwriters.

• At Dennis Cooper’s it’s Palimpsest Day.

• RIP Tim Curry and Yayoi Kusama.

• Sorcery #1 (1974) by Jack DeJohnette | Sorcerer (1977) by Tangerine Dream | Return Of The Sorcerer (2011) by The Wounded Kings

Weekend links 839

Imaginary Numbers (1954) by Yves Tanguy.

• “In all his writing, Ballard seems to embrace the opposed extremes of pulp genre conventions on the one hand and avant-garde experimentation on the other, while entirely rejecting the norms of conventional literary fiction that lie between these two extremes.” Steven Shaviro reviewing The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of JG Ballard by Christopher Priest and Nina Allan.

• The Naturalist’s Library: A complete digital edition of William Jardine’s 40-volume series on natural history published 1833–1843.

• New music: Cooked by Oren Ambarchi; Where Light Pauses In The Silence Of The Sun by Abul Mogard / Rafael Anton Irisarri.

• Richard Dadd: the painter whose fantastical vision was unconfined by his 43 years in an asylum.

• At Colossal: “Trompe-l’œil paintings by Jason Limon reveal a hidden skeletal world.”

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

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

• RIP Sam Neill.

• Curationist

• The Skeleton And The Roundabout (1968) by The Idle Race | Skeletal Framework (1981) by Eyeless In Gaza | Skeletal Remains (2002) by Bohren & Der Club Of Gore

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”