Paperback Art
Romance, surrender, rescue. The girl in the boy's arms. The girl in the robot's arms or the monster's fist. Screaming, swooning, terror, ecstasy. The very stuff of movies, harlequin novels, trashy drama. Guilty pleasures.
Book cover, 1950 and Movie Poster, 1956
Why is the Asimov cover image (seen above) uninspiring, whereas The Forbidden Planet poster is fun, saucy and weird? The tilted perspective, the grinning face, the bathing beauty–is she an astronaut or an extra from a Tarzan movie who walked onto the wrong set? No pretence at realism here. Enter loveable Robbie the Robot, stick in a Chinese pagoda, fainting women, Grand Canyon rock forms, and it is, as advertised, amazing. The movie sadly does not live up–how could it?
Cover art: E. Gorinstein
Compare this delightful cover illustration by E. Gorinstein from the 2002 J'ai Lu edition of Les robots (I added the English title pun). Here we see robot not as alien monster but rather robot as funky car. Its eyes serve as headlights, antenna as steering wheel/ gear shift, chin plate as pedal. The astronaut looks bored for a space cowboy, which adds to the humour. This is not an astonishing adventure but something he does every day. Like operating a backhoe. The purple Ziggy Stardust spacesuit adds a note of style. The illustration depicts one of the early stories in Asimov's vision of human-robotic symbiosis and delightfully conveys Isaac Asimov's humour of robot psychology.
Expedition_to_earth.BallantineEdition 1953, Cover Art Richard Powers
Illustrator Richard Powers
The most versatile and experimental of science fiction illustrators. A complete illustrated list of his book covers can be found on the invaluable site, Internet Speculative Fiction Database. Early work owes a debt to surrealism. Later work makes use of paint splatter and collage. This 1953 cover illustrates Clarke's story The Sentinal, the starting point for the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. A monolith, depicted as an irregular undulating pyramid, is shown on the surface of the moon with the Earth in the distance beyond. The monolith raises the question: is it a natural form or a manufactured object? An ant-sized human figure throwing a giant shadow appears on the horizon under a hovering blimp-like eye.
Case of Conscience, 1958. Cover Art by Richard Powers
Starship Troopers, 1959. Cover art Paul Lehr
Here is another cover by Richard Powers. In the story, missionaries and scientists establish a colony on a remote planet with few natural resources valuable to humans, except for a substance used in the making of nuclear bombs. The colonists debate whether they should reveal the truth to other humans or suppress it.
Abstract expressionism, atomic structures in a novel obsessed with Cold War posturing. Both an anthropological approach to SF, and a religious fable, James Blish's A Case of Conscience is cited by Orson Scott Card as a strong influence for his novel Speaker for the Dead.
Cover art Paul Lehr
The insect-like space craft with its dark cavernous shadow, monumental in scale next to the uneven line of waiting figures, produces a bizarre effect, as in the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch. We ask what is it, in this confrontation with the unknown. The green sky with blue clouds suggests an alien atmosphere. The yellow fire on the horizon is all that distinguishes sky from ground. The luminance of the wash, the hard sheen of metal, the contrast of scale, all give this design a graphic punch that matches the drive and gusto of Heinlein's writing.
Cover Art by Bob Pepper
Illustrator Bob Pepper
Just how do you illustrate a Philip K. Dick novel anyway? Using a Pop Art approach, as in this illustration by Bob Pepper, is not a bad idea. Pop Art is linked to the mass consumption of a consumer society. Pop Art is often produced using similar methods of mass reproduction like Andy Warhol's silkscreen prints. Other artists mix Pop icons with Op Art, using bright colours, bold semi-abstract patterns suggesting psychedelic material or attitudes of mind, as well as an ecclectic sensibility that is as open to comic books as it is to Eastern mysticism. In this illustration, Pepper shows the mask-like features of a face barely covering a skeleton and robotic gears, from which seem to pour a parade of clone-like sheep. It immediately makes one think: does a robot have a mind and if so how human is that mind? What exactly are we looking at here? Man or machine? This is the very ambiguity that underlines Dick's novel.
Album Cover Art by Bob Pepper
Remember a time when people got pleasure just looking at an album cover? More on artist Bob Pepper can be found here.
Popular movies, books and art share ideas and strategies for conveying other worlds. Experiments with visual styles, such as surrealism and Pop Art, unite books of the future with the period in which they were created. The references to Fine Art push a once-marginal genre to new levels of respectability. Pulp art is fun, pushing proprieties of tastefulness. Modern art is innovative, pushing boundaries of aesthetic experience. Science fiction cover art draws on both, adopting visually daring designs to match the unconventional ideas found inside the covers.
Cover art: Richard Powers
Women Reinvent Science Fiction
A woman gave birth to Frankenstein and his monster, opening the door for a new imaginative literature. Strangely, this literature, dealing with the future, with alternate worlds, with technology and its societal effects, became an exclusive all-men's club. All this began to change with the emergence of a group of brilliant novelists in the late 1960s and early 70s: Ursula K. LeGuin, Doris Lessing, Kate Wilhelm, Marge Piercy and Margaret Atwood, to name only a few. This blog contrasts Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, 1977, with Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, 1985 and discusses their contribution to the genre of SF.
Woman on the Edge
Marge Piercy. Woman on the Edge of Time, 1976. Summary: Consuelo (Connie) Ramos is placed in a mental hospital after trying to intervene in a violent family dispute. No one believes her side of the story because she is a poor Chicano woman. While in hospital, Connie begins communicating with a person from the future, Luciente, who asks her for her help. Connie answers that she is a person without power, mislabeled as insane, with no resources and no prospects. Why was she chosen? Connie is told that she has a receptive mind and that she is the only one the future people were able to make contact with. Connie is given a tour of a Utopian future world, but it is a fragile world, only attained if it is fought for by the people of the present.
In a perceptive review, Michelle Erica Green notes: "Woman on the Edge of Time is an angry text. The utopian yearning cannot disguise its rage … Yet the prose, in both the science fiction segments and the fatalistic present, has the compelling flow of poetry, and the bluntness of Connie's self-expression keeps her grounded even when she questions her own sanity. Like her main character, Piercy labels the effort to transform the world a war. Known for her radical political activism in the 1960s — particularly for her involvement with groups which advocated armed struggle — Piercy favors violent insurgence in many of her poems and novels. Yet she chooses writing, not violence, as her means of insurrection. Connie's violence may not be able to safeguard the future, but Piercy's unshrinking commitment to finding radical solutions to age-old problems itself offers hope for the strength of the human spirit."
A few things that impressed me about this novel:
Piercy contrasts a brutal, gritty depiction of poverty and prejudice in present-time America with the communal-minded future utopia. Class, gender and race merge together as issues crucial to SF and any imagined future community. What makes the story so effective is the likeable but unheroic character of Connie. She has no superpowers apart from her channeling ability and struggles throughout the story to try to understand how one without power can–and must–resist those who oppress her. She is told: "There's always a thing you can deny an oppressor, if only your allegiance. Your belief. Your co-opting. Often even with vastly unequal power, you can find or force an opening to fight back. In your time many without power found ways to fight. Till that became a power." (p. 317) The reader reacts to this awakening conscience with a considerable degree of ambiguity: is the heroine suffering from madness or does she have a kind of visionary revelation? This ambiguity breathes new life into the theme of medical experiments and forceful confinement, making for considerable suspense while deepening the sense of a problem that must be answered.
The Handmaid's Tale, 1985
Margaret Atwood. The Handmaid's Tale, 1985. Summary: A diary-like account by an enslaved surrogate mother detailing the regime of a newly-installed totalitarian state, a theocracy in which women have no freedom and no voice. The handmaids wear awkward burqa-like uniforms that hide their figures and restrict their vision. It is a familiar story of a fundamentalist religious society that banishes love, told from a woman's point-of-view. Most characters are so demoralized that they submissively accept their fates. The heroine, Offred, named as the possession of the Commander who she sexually serves, is plagued by memories of a former time spent with her husband, daughter and lively friends, none of whom she can now locate or account for. The commander takes advantage of his privileged position to indulge person whims and attempts to turn his slave into his mistress, with unsatisfactory results. Out of a desperate need for some genuine human contact, Offred has a clandestine love affair with another servant. She does not know if she can trust this lover and lives in fear that she will be betrayed at any moment.
Atwood shows how quickly a society can form which removes basic rights and privileges from women. It starts when women are not allowed to hold jobs or to own property or to access bank accounts. In this way, women become economically dependent on men. Loss of economic power, loss of autonomy.
The women who are breeders are treated like cattle, prisoners–this does not sound terribly original. What is original is that their prison guards, their disciplinarians, are other women–the oppressive and hateful aunts. On a day-to-day basis, it is women who most diligently enforce inequality and loss of self-respect, loss of personhood. Women who buy into and safeguard the system of oppression against women are one of the most serious problems posed by the novel. As for the men in the novel, they get their own special treatment as rapists, power-mongers, zealots and religious hypocrites. The oppression of women is all performed in the name of religion. This hardly seems like SF, more of a commentary on Christian fundamentalism and Islamic extremism.
The heroine does not believe in the system she is forced to live under, but she doesn't know how to act against it. A turning point for her comes when she meets a once-fierce rebellious friend who seems to have given up. "'Moira,' I say. 'You don't mean that.' She is frightening me now, because what I hear in her voice is indifference, a lack of volition. Have they really done it to her then, taken away something–what?–that used to be so central to her? But how can I expect her to go on, with my idea of her courage, live it through, act it out, when I myself do not? I don't want her to be like me. Give in, go along, save her skin. That is what it comes down to. I want gallantry from her, swashbuckling, heroism, single-handed combat. Something I lack." (p. 261) Denied this vicarious resistance, Atwood's heroine finally attains the courage–or despair–the feeling of nothing to lose–to throw caution to the wind, setting in course a chain of events that transforms her life.
Both Atwood and Piercy are outspoken poets who write novels in many genres, including science-fiction. The works discussed above could be described as feminist or political SF novels. In her depiction of the future, Piercy addresses the problem of over-population, harmful attitudes toward environment and technology. Atwood is concerned with the breakdown of democracy, the erosion of basic human rights and the exploitation of women.
Both novels are concerned with the non-chalance with which we judge and mistreat others different from ourselves. In Piercy's novel, Connie meets a person of the future who boasts of going mad twice. Jackrabbit describes his madness: "I'm jealous of everybody's gifts. I want to be everybody and feel everything and do everything. Wherever I am, where I'm not plagues me. As long as I don't have to get up too early in the morning to do it all…" Connie answers, speaking out about her own experience with mental illness: "Do you tell everyone you meet that you've been mad twice?" She resented his casual, almost boastful air. She lugged that radioactive fact around New York like a hidden sore. To find out she had been in an institution scared people–how it scared them. Not a good risk for a job. They feared madness might prove contagious." (p. 117)
A fear of difference, with no true sense of collective. Reading these novels, one feels a growing sense of protest and a need to revisit social positions. This is not science fiction as escapism or science fiction as technological wonder or technological horror. It is science fiction grounded in political realities, calling for the decent treatment of others through an awakened political conscience. I'd like to end on a vision of a committed life in this poem by Marge Piercy from the collection, "The Moon is Always Female", published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1980.
The Low Road
Alone, you can fight, you can refuse, you can take what revenge you can but they roll over you. But two people fighting back to back can cut through a mob, a snake-dancing file can break a cordon, an army can meet an army. Two people can keep each other sane, can give support, conviction, love, massage, hope, sex. Three people are a delegation, a committee, a wedge. With four you can play bridge and start an organization. With six you can rent a whole house, eat pie for dinner with no seconds, and hold a fund raising party. A dozen makes a demonstration. A hundred fill a hall. A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter; ten thousand, power and your own paper; a hundred thousand, your own media; ten million, your own country. It goes on one at a time. It starts when you care to act, it starts when you do it again after they said no, it starts when you say We and know who you mean, and each day you mean one more.
Art is like an armchair
Henri Matisse. Ballerina Seated in an Armchair, 1944
It is Henri Matisse's most controversial saying. "What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject-matter, an art which could be for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue." Critics pounce on this quote, arguing that Matisse's concern for beauty leads to comfort on the part of the viewer, indulgence, complacency. It is no way to change the world. But let's be fair to Matisse. The artist took up art relatively late in life–at the age of 20–while recovering from an operation. Art was a form of therapy. The armchair simile may be Matisse's way of saying that art has healing or restorative properties. Restful as the chair may be, in the charcoal drawing above, the ballerina in it seems to dancing. She is at once at rest and in motion, limp but graceful. As a dancer, she is also an artist, so Matisse may be commenting on his own process. Art involves both activity and its opposite.
How else is art like an armchair? Art needs a viewer–an armchair with a body in it. Art makes us stop and comtemplate. Art takes time–it takes time to make, it takes time to digest, to sink in. At some point, the viewer engages with the work and changes the work.
Max Ernst. collage, La Femme 100 Tetes, 1929
In a collage for Max Ernst's collage-novel, La Femme 100 Tetes, 1929, a man falls asleep in an armchair and dreams of phallic shooting jets and flooding waters. He is the respectable bourgeois man whose unconscious reveals unspeakable desires, chaos, fears.
Other artists use chairs to challenge our understanding of media. Robert Rauschenberg is an artist famous for merging large three-dimensional objects with flat canvases in a way that blends painting and scultpure. In one work, Pilgrim, 1960, a paint-splattered chair sits beside a paint-splattered canvas. Conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth does something similar by placing a real chair beside a photograph of a chair and a dictionary definition of a chair. Chairs are at home in surrealist art, abstract expressionist art, conceptual art. They take on meanings that range from bourgeois to anti-bourgeois. They are even political.
Doris Salcedo. Installation for the Istanbul Biennial, 2003
Colombian artist Doris Salcedo makes artwork using chairs she collects from the families of the victims of state violence. These victims have been abducted and made to disappear from the political scene. Salcedo displays their chairs as symbols of voices that have been silenced. In the installation at right, the chairs are stacked in an urban crevice like bodies in a mass grave. In other works, Salcedo encases chairs, writing desks and other pieces of furniture in blocks of cement. They function like repressed memories; vanished people whose presence continues to haunt us.
Dawn MacNutt. Man in a Black Coat
Dawn MacNutt is a Canadian artist who merges craft and fine art sculpture. Her Man in a Black Coat, 1985, made of woven rope and willow, creates a fusion of half-man, half-chair. Here we feel the identity of a ghost-like being struggling to come to life. MacNutt depicts a world of flux and metamorphosis, embracing human frailty in her frequently bowed and hollow figures and in her use of discarded materials like ditch-growing weeds and cast-off rope.
Art is like an armchair. Matisse's simile takes us from the notion of comfort and luxury to that of therapy, self-healing and contemplation. The simile suggests the role of the viewer in completing a work of art. It evokes dreaming and the unconscious, expanding traditional media into realms of multimedia and conceptual art. It marks the place and memory of missing persons and serves as a lingering political protest. It also merges boundaries of art and non-art, where the possibility of transformation and the energy of imagination engage in a productive interaction.
Armchair Collage
Ed McKean. Artist's Studio, 2012. Collage and oil paint on paper
I cut an image of an armchair from a magazine and placed it on top of paint-smeared scraps of paper used to clean my brushes. The result: a portrait of my studio.