UK, 2009.
Newton leaned forward, putting his elbows carefully on the table. “Nathan. Nathan. I was afraid of you then. I am afraid now. I have been afraid of all manner of things every moment I have spent on this planet, on this monstrous, beautiful, terrifying planet with all its strange creatures and its abundant water, and all of its human people. I am afraid now. I will be afraid to die here.”
Before my recent rewatch of The Man Who Fell to Earth I decided to read the novel in order to spice up yet another viewing by comparing the film with its source. And as is often the case when reading books of a certain vintage, curiosity had me wondering how the book has been cover-designed over the years.
The Man Who Fell to Earth was published in 1963. Prior to this Walter Tevis had only published one other book, The Hustler, his first novel about pool-player “Fast Eddie” Felson. Such a debut wouldn’t have marked Tevis as a putative writer of science fiction although he had written a handful of stories for SF magazines before attempting anything at novel length. The Man Who Fell to Earth is artistically satisfying science fiction, and a good novel in a literary sense, something you can’t always expect from those writers of Tevis’s generation who seemed to read nothing but technical reports and fiction by other SF writers.
The story opens in 1985, presenting a future which isn’t too different to the 1985 that many of us lived through. Speculation is minor and mostly relegated to the background, with occasional mentions of monorails, food shortages and warring African nations who threaten each other with nuclear weapons. Into this world there arrives the alien who calls himself Thomas Jerome Newton (we never learn his original name), a clandestine emissary from the dying planet his people know as Anthea. Newton has been sent to Earth with plans to build a financial empire using his advanced technical knowledge. This will, he hopes, enable him to build a craft in order to ferry the remaining Antheans to a world where they can survive. Once they’re secure, the Antheans also plan to rescue the inhabitants of Earth from imminent nuclear destruction.
The US one-sheet of Vic Fair’s poster. After decades of illustrators and designers working with both the book and the film, Fair’s poster is still the most successful condensation of the story into a single, memorable image.
If you’ve seen the film then the broad strokes are all very familiar. Nicolas Roeg’s direction and Paul Mayersberg’s script treat the material elliptically but the film stays closer to the novel than you might expect, with Mayersberg even reusing some of Tevis’s dialogue. Both novel and film are very much concerned with portraying the Earth itself as an alien planet. For the first half of the novel, “1985: Icarus Descending”, we see our world through Newton’s eyes while he makes his way among the clever but dangerous primates. The second half, “1988: Rumpelstiltskin”, concentrates equally on Newton’s attempts to retain his sanity in a world that must never discover his real intentions or his true nature; and on the curiosity of Nathan Bryce, the chemist helping to construct Newton’s spacecraft, whose suspicions about his employer are eventually confirmed. Bryce believes that Anthea must be the planet Mars, but when asked about this directly Newton simply replies “Does it matter?”
Roeg and Mayersberg’s film received mixed reviews in 1976 but its cult status has grown thanks to its connection with David Bowie’s person and career. Bowie’s Newton has become a dominant motif for book covers even though Tevis’s Newton is a negative inversion of the screen alien, being six-and-a-half feet tall, with tanned skin and pure white hair. For art directors and illustrators the challenge since 1976 has been to present the novel in a manner which does more than merely repeat the imagery of the film. Not everyone succeeds in doing so.
USA, 1963. Cover art by Leo and Diane Dillon.
The first printing was as a paperback original with untypical cover art by Leo & Diane Dillon. Without reading the novel it’s hard to tell what this is about at first glance, but the figure on the left is supposed to represent Newton’s unusual lightweight skeleton whose height and shape are contrasted with its human counterpart. The eye presumably refers to the contact lenses that Newton wears to disguise his cat-like pupils.
Italy, 1964. Cover art by Karel Thole.
The few covers that pre-date the film are what you might call the innocent ones, free of David Bowie’s face or Bowie-like figures. Here the prolific Karel Thole also favours Newton’s diguises over any other imagery.
USA, 1970. Cover art by Howard Winters.
Continue reading “Icarus Descending”
