New Worlds Cover Gallery

For many decades the voice of British science fiction, New Worlds varied from being a fan-zine to a professional periodical to a series of paperbacks. It is perhaps most famous today for being the main publication for the British “new wave” of writers: J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss, etc.

Published from 1946 through 1979 (re-emerging for sporadic public in the 1990s), New Worlds provides a fascinating source for cover artwork. All the following images come from The Visual Index of Science Fiction Cover art, which hosts a variety of exciting SF artwork. Their New Worlds page is here and their main page is here. Enjoy.

 

 

Atlantic piece on the fake magazine covers in Blade Runner

In “The Fake Magazines Used in Blade Runner Are Still Futuristic, Awesome“, Alexis C. Madrigal, of the Atlantic, digs up the facts on the fake magazines featured in Ridley Scott’s sf classic Blade Runner:

In this case, clip art from a computer in the early 1980s was used to make magazine covers that were printed and then filmed in a classic movie. These things were forgotten for decades until sometime during or shortly before 2009, someone (Kevin) started to reconstruct them for his friends in an Internet forum about the movie. Some forumgoer used them as a Kindle screensaver; another was going to print them out and frame them, according to a forum posting.

“I need to talk to this Kevin!” I thought.

For the rest of the piece, click here.

For all of the covers, follow this link.

Richard Matheson

Another great Atlantic piece (this one by Scott Meslow) on Richard Matheson (famed script-writer of numerous Twilight Zone, Night Stalker, Night Gallery, and Star Trek episodes  as well as a pile of hardboiled and s/f short stories and novels, including the popular I Am Legend) and his deserved place in the history books.

“Steel” may not hold up particularly well, but Matheson’s contributions to The Twilight Zoneshouldn’t be denied: He wrote 14 scripts during the show’s original run, including all-time classic “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” which starred William Shatner at his hammy best. During the 1960s and 1970s, when the science fiction and horror genres were still in their television infancy, Matheson’s contributions included episodes of Star Trek, Night Gallery, and the first two televised appearances ofKolchak: The Night Stalker.

The rest of the article can be found here.

Space Cartoons to Space Psychedelia: How Sci-Fi Book Covers Evolved

Over at the Atlantic, Scott Beauchamp has an amazing post detailing changing trends in s/f book covers.

The phrase “pulp sci-fi” conjures images of rockets and men with ray guns landing on distant planets. That wouldn’t necessarily be wrong, but the classic images associated with science fiction literature usually refer to the Golden Age of sci-fi: the magazine-dominated epoch lasting roughly from the 1920s until the 1950s, when graphic artists like Frank R. Paul and Hugo Gernsback set the standard for speculative fiction cover art. Fun, simple, and very literal in its connection to the story that it accompanies, that kind of art was generally intended for a younger audience. But sci-fi cover illustrations evolved after the 1950s in near parallel with the other changes that transformed America in that time.

For the rest of the article, click here.