The best SF covers that aren’t Penguin SF covers.
You can spot a Bruce Pennington cover a mile off. His Dune cover is one of his most iconic. It is also an example of how he illustrates the story on the cover. The medieval garb of the Fremen is more figurative than a literal interpretation of the book. It works, conveying the idea of their materially more simple existence. And the ornithopter is cartoonish. But where Pennington nails the narrative is in the eyes—those blue-in-blue eyes. No one has done it better.
The American artist Frank Frazetta also has an instantly recognisable style of illustration. He’s surely best known for his fantasy illustrations, and his be-muscled heroic warriors and his curvacious heavily breasted maidens, often clinging to the aforementioned men (to be fair, some of his women are also warrior). He also illustrated sci-fi books, with that of Wyndham’s The Secret Poeple showing admirable restraint.
The first strange thing about the British artist Chris Foss, whose illustrations adorn many classic sci-fi book covers, is that he apparently does not like science fiction. Thus, he does not read the books he illustrates, explaining why his cover art is generally not related to the book content. And yet he has created some truly iconic SF book covers. A second strange fact is that he illustrated The Joy of Sex, in a necessarily quite different art style.
Richard M Powers was an American artist and illustrator who was responsible for many of the Ballantine book covers in the 1950s and 1960s. He adopted a classical surrealist style which give his book covers a highly distinctive look that melds well with the genres of sci-fi and fantasy he was working in. They perhaps look a little dated now, wearing their influences perhaps a little too heavily on on their sleeve.
English artist Ian Miller creates striking and often sureal and sometimes nightmarish images that have an intensly tactile look to them. His art can incorporate a brutal angularity, the false geometry drawing you into the nightmare image and then trapping you there, with no way out. You certainly don’t forget a book with one of his covers.
American artist Frank Kelly Freas best known illustration was for Astounding Science Fiction magazine, a towering robot holding an injured or dead man in the palm of one hand, his angular metal middle finger of the other hand stained with blood, persumably the man’s blood. There is an anguished expression on the robots face. This image has become iconic in SF. Freas’ typical SF book covers have a gentle, lyrical, almost pastoral feel to them, which feels very much of their time, now.
Peter Jones is another English artist and illustrator working in the sci-fi and fantasy fields. His art has a vivid retro feel, as if the crazy over-the-top SF of the 1950s somehow got mashed together with the slick modernity of the 1990s. The images are always eye-catching and hover on the boarder of pastishe, and always bring a smile to my face.
Wayne Douglas Barlowe is an American sci-fi/fantasy artist whose book covers ofteb feature a diverse menagery of alien creatures. Indeed, his own book Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials won the Locus awared for Best Art or Illustrated Book. He also worked as a concept artist on films including Galaxy Quest and Avatar.
Peter Tybus is a somewhat enigmatic artist and illustrator, born in Germany, but working in London, who created a series of distinctive sci-fi book covers. He has a soft airbrush style coupled to a vivid imagination and design sense. There is an exchange between people who knew Peter here. A list of some of his book covers can be found here.
Patrick James Woodroffe was an English artist and illustrator who worked mainly in fantasy and sci-fi. He produced many book covers for Corgi in the first half of the 1970s, including The Seedbearers. His art was often fantastically surreal, with a touch of whimsy. He also worked with various rock bands on album covers, and worked various media, including etching and sculpting.
Davis Meltzer was an American artist and illustrator born of two fine art artist parents. As well as designing sci-fi book covers, David also worked for National Geographic for decades, designed US Postal Service stamps, and also created illustrations for NASA. His best covers have the feeling of being cut-away diagrams, not unlike his work for NatGeo and NASA.
Bob Haberfield was an Australian who lived in the UK (principally Wales) and is perhaps best known for his instantly recognizable surreal, colorful, and pyschadelic illustrations for Michael Moorcock’s series of books published by Mayflower and Panther books. He also worked as a commerical illustrator. You can visit his website (maintained by his son) to learn more about his life and art.
The Bristish painter Tim White worked in a couple of advertising studios before receiving his first commisions to design, first, SF magazone covers, and then book covers. He later went on to design record sleeves and even jewelry. His book cover illustrations have been desctibed as “Hyper-realistic,” often featuring highly detailed landscapes featuring alien plants and animals, as well as the usual futurist vehicles and cityscapes. You can learn more about his life here.
The husband-and-wife team of Leo and Diane Dillon created many truly gorgeous fantasy and science fiction book covers. Leo (1933-2012) of Trinidadian decent, and Diane (1933), from California, were American artists and illustrators, whose often lyrical art won them Caldecott Medal, twice. Two examples here have a more pop art vibe, together with a riff on Egon Schieler. There is an interesting discussion of their art here. and some more great covers here.
David Bergen was born in Perth, Australia, and now lives in Gouda, South Holland. You can follow him on FaceBook here. He has illusted many sci-fi and fantasy covers for Sphere, and Pan. He has a lush, attractive, painterly style, but he says “one aspect of [The Shipwreck and other] commissions which rankled with me is that I was never in control of any typographic design…and both typography and design were the two subjects for which I achieved honors in my Associateship (I only scored an average ‘C’ for painting!).“ Regardless of his teachers’ assessment of his painting, he was twice nominated for the World Fantasty Award for his work.
Paul Lehr (1930-98) was an American artist and illustrator whose early SF book covers had a somwhat stylized, painterly style, sometimes with surrealistic underpinnings, as in the Edmund Cooper cover, here. He tended to let a single colour dominate his palete early on, while later his images become more lush. There are more covers here, and a biography here.
