8/23/2019 The Gulf Between Tom Godwin
Science fiction has become so central to our culture that it can be easy to take it for granted, but its modern form arose at a specific historical moment. During the genre’s golden age, which is conventionally dated from 1939 to 1950, its ideas were refined by a relative handful of authors, editors and artists — and its most immediate impact came through its illustrations. Out of the pulps emerged an entire visual language that relied on striking painted covers to attract newsstand buyers, and while it took years for the stories inside to live up to readers’ dreams, the pictures were often unforgettable from the beginning.
This evolution is clearly visible in the magazine best known as Astounding Science Fiction, the most influential title in the history of the field, and in its sister publication, Unknown, which played much the same role for fantasy. Most of the art was produced by commercial freelancers in New York who collaborated closely with editors. The interior drawings tended to strictly follow the text, but cover artists could let their imaginations run wild. Thanks in large part to their work, science fiction in the midcentury achieved its enduring sense of wonder, and its images from this period may turn out to be the genre’s most lasting contribution to our collective vision of the future.
The Gulf Between ( Analog (Astounding), October 1953) Available as part of this collection. Also available on this freely distributable CD. Reddit gives you the best of the internet in one place. Get a constantly updating feed of breaking news, fun stories, pics, memes, and videos just for you. Passionate about something niche? Reddit has thousands of vibrant communities with people that share your interests. Alternatively, find out what’s trending across all of Reddit on r/popular.
H. W. Wesso, “Monsters of Moyen” (Astounding Stories of Super-Science, April 1930). For the first three years of its existence, Astounding was edited by Harry Bates, who ran the magazine for the pulp publisher William Clayton. The covers from this period were all painted by the German artist Hans Waldemar Wessolowski, better known as Wesso, who produced 34 paintings of widely varying quality. His best work was more memorable than any of the stories that it illustrated, including Arthur J. Burks’s “Monsters of Moyen,” in which an Eastern warlord deploys a fleet of gigantic submarines and “aero-subs” in an attack against America.
Elliott Dold, “Twilight” (Astounding Stories, November 1934). After Astounding was acquired by the publishing firm Street & Smith, it fell into the hands of the editor F. Orlin Tremaine, who worked hard to attract a more mature readership. One of his most noteworthy artists was Elliott Dold (sometimes spelled Elliot), who had served as a Red Cross volunteer in World War I and lived with his father, a psychiatrist, at the River Crest Sanitarium in Queens. Dold’s work was deeply influenced by Art Deco, which lends its geometric forms to the city of machines in “Twilight,” the story by John W. Campbell — writing as Don A. Stuart — that inaugurated the modern era of science fiction.
Howard V. Brown, “The Shadow Out of Time” (Astounding Stories, June 1936).The most prominent artist of the Tremaine era was Howard V. Brown, a graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago who contributed over 50 covers to Astounding. Brown’s painting for H.P. Lovecraft’s nightmarish “The Shadow Out of Time” offered an almost clinical portrayal of the “Great Race of Yith,” a species of time travelers described as “immense rugose cones 10 feet high, and with head and other organs attached to foot-thick, distensible limbs spreading from the apexes” and “enormous claws or nippers.”
Charles Schneeman, “The Legion of Time” (Astounding Science Fiction, May 1938). In 1937, the editorship of Astounding passed to John W. Campbell, who became the most influential editor the field had ever seen. One of his first orders of business was to improve the art, and after conducting a contest among the magazine’s interior illustrators, he selected the Staten Island native Charles Schneeman to paint the cover for Jack Williamson’s “The Legion of Time.” Williamson’s serial was a cosmic Betty-and-Veronica story, with the hero torn between women from two very different possible futures. Schneeman vividly depicted both the virtuous Lethonee and the sinister but enticing Sorainya.
Graves Gladney, “Black Destroyer” (Astounding Science Fiction, July 1939). The artist Graves Gladney was best known for his dramatic work for the mystery pulps, especially The Shadow, but he also contributed several excellent paintings to Astounding, including one of its most famous covers. The July 1939 issue is widely considered to have marked the beginning of the golden age of science fiction, with debut stories from Isaac Asimov and A.E. van Vogt, whose “Black Destroyer” inspired Gladney’s powerful image of a savage, catlike alien that stalks the crew of a spacecraft.
Hubert Rogers, “Grey Lensman” (Astounding Science Fiction, October 1939) and “The Roads Must Roll” (Astounding Science Fiction, June 1940). The most acclaimed artist of this golden era was Hubert Rogers, a Canadian painter who became an overnight favorite with fans. His greatest achievement was a portrait of Kimball Kinnison, the protagonist of E.E. Smith’s “Grey Lensman,” the second installment in a series about a corps of galactic law enforcement officers. Smith’s space operas would soon give way to more sophisticated stories by authors like Robert A. Heinlein, but Rogers’s cover still captures all the excitement of the science fiction of the ’30s.
H.W. Scott, “None but Lucifer” (Unknown, September 1939). In 1939, Campbell founded Unknown, a magazine that tried to do for fantasy what Astounding had done for science fiction, with logically consistent stories that often took place in everyday surroundings. H.W. Scott, who was best known for his dynamic human figures in the western and sports pulps, was the ideal artist for this more realistic approach, as reflected in his cover for “None but Lucifer,” by H.L. Gold and L. Sprague de Camp, a version of the Faust legend set in contemporary New York.
Manuel Rey Isip, “Martian Quest” (Astounding Science Fiction, February 1940). Manuel Rey Isip was born in the Philippines in 1904, and he immigrated as a young man to Washington Heights. Along with his younger brother, Pagsilang, he became a successful commercial artist, contributing drawings to several landmark stories, including Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation.” In 1940, Isip illustrated a key scene from “Martian Quest,” a space western that marked the debut of Leigh Brackett, the Queen of Space Opera, who achieved even greater fame decades later for her work on “The Empire Strikes Back.”
Edd Cartier, “But Without Horns” (Unknown, June 1940). As a teenager, Edd Cartier painted the murals for his father’s speakeasy in New Jersey, and he studied under H.W. Scott at the Pratt Institute. He drew hundreds of illustrations for The Shadow, with an expressive style balanced by a dark sense of humor, and his frightening cover for “But Without Horns,” by Norvell W. Page, was the last of its kind ever to appear in Unknown — Campbell worried that the art was driving away mainstream readers, and in the next issue he eliminated the cover paintings entirely.
William Timmins, “The World Is Mine” (Astounding Science Fiction, June 1943) and “Giant Killer” (Astounding Science Fiction, October 1945). After Hubert Rogers temporarily left the magazine during World War II, most of the cover duties went to the artist William Timmins. He found a bold graphic representation for the multiple timelines of “The World Is Mine,” by the married authors Henry Kuttner and Catherine L. Moore, who wrote together as Lewis Padgett. He also contributed a striking cover for “Giant Killer,” by A. Bertram Chandler — although it also gave away the ending, in which the characters are revealed to be mutant rats on a spaceship.
Alejandro Cañedo, “Untitled” (Astounding Science Fiction, September 1947). Some of the most unusual covers ever to grace the magazine were by Alejandro Cañedo, who was born in Mexico City in 1902. On a visit to the artist’s studio, Campbell became fascinated by Cañedo’s evocative paintings of male nudes set against cosmic backdrops. Several of these “symbolic” covers, which were unconnected to any specific story, were published over the next few years, although Campbell — who thought that homosexuality was a sign of cultural decline — seems never to have noticed their homoerotic overtones.
Walt Miller, “Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science” (Astounding Science Fiction, May 1950). In 1949, Campbell worked closely with L. Ron Hubbard on the development of dianetics, the mental therapy that later evolved into the doctrines of the Church of Scientology. The first article on the subject featured drawings in the classic pulp style by the New Jersey artist Walt Miller, who illustrated Hubbard’s claim that he had studied “the medicine man of the Goldi people of Manchuria, the shamans of North Borneo, Sioux medicine men, the cults of Los Angeles and modern psychology.”
Frank Kelly Freas, “The Gulf Between” (Astounding Science Fiction, October 1953) and “Immigration” (Astounding Science Fiction, March 1954). Of all the illustrators who worked for Astounding, Campbell was the closest to Frank Kelly Freas. His haunting debut cover, which was inspired by “The Gulf Between,” by Tom Godwin, caught the eye of Roger Taylor, the drummer for Queen, who approached Freas to paint a modified version for their studio album “News of the World.” Freas thought even more highly of his iconic painting for a story by Clifford D. Simak, which expressed the dream that mankind would one day leave its childhood behind for the stars.
Alec Nevala-Lee’s book “Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction” came out in October.
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