From pulp, through pop art to post modern, sci-fi artists have stumbled valiantly…
Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C Clarke has never had a truly good book cover. Many of the book covers have been indifferent, and some have been downright bad, but this one, which I believe was for a hardcover HBJ book club edition, is so bad it’s good. What, exactly, does the image have to do with the story? When I look at the illustration, I see a washed-out purple-and-yellow spaceman nestling in the cleavage of a 50-foot+ woman wearing a polka-dot dress. The artist is Hal Siegel, who seems more comfortable with contemporary fiction book cover design. You can see some of his (rather stiff and uninspired) book cover work here.
Oddly, the artwork for the Commodore 64 video game of Rendezvous with Rama from Trillium (released in 1984) is by far the best visualization I have seen for the inside of Rama, but does require a triple gate-fold to do the alien ship justice. Apparently, “the game allows players to explore the mysterious alien spaceship Rama and uncover its secrets.” However, a quick purusal of game playthroughs (e.g. here) will pursuade you that the game package artwork is far superior to the in-game artwork, which, to be fair to the game, is not unsurprising for software released in 1984.
The artist John Schoenherr is credited with this cover for The Flying Eyes. His son, Ian Schoenherr, has written a touching blog post about his father and his life as an illustrator and artist here. (He was much more than merely a pulp sci-fi illustrator) I presume the brief for this book was pretty straightforward, and what else could be on the cover, really, for such a campy piece of pulp SF?
I have not yet identified the artist who generated this superbly over the top, superbly eye-catching cover for John Wyndham’s first novel, published under his pen name John Beynon. As with many of Wyndham’s covers, this does not do justice to what is a fun and sometimes gripping galavant through a hidden subterranean civilization under the Sahara desert.
I feel the unknown artist who created this cover tried too hard. Or perhaps his/her brief was just too demanding. Yes, Bill Masen is for a moment in handcuffs. Yes, Josella does have her garments partially rent from her body (her back, not her front). Yes, London is the initial focus of the book. Yes, most people are blind, but do not have seering headaches. Yes, the triffids stalk about on three “legs” but they do not have grass skirts. Oh, and the title is wrong (but they do put the correct one in brackets).
I had to venture to the “Teller of Weird Tales” blogspot (here) to find any information about the artist credited with this cover of the first in the CS Lewis Out Of The Silent Planet trilogy. Bernard Symancyk seems to have been an American commerical artist. This is a delightfully painted rending of the imagined surface of Mars in the novel, with a spaceship surely modeled on a Christmas tree bauble. (To be fair to the artist, I seem to remember the spaceship was described as a sphere, so, why not a Christmas baubel?).