Adam Rowe's new book Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s pays tribute to this fertile decade for sci-fi art, a time when artists fully embraced the wildness of their imaginations and before digital tinkering robbed a good deal of sci-fi cover art of its texture and soul. Rowe plays a most amiable tour guide, peppering his brief artists bios and analyses of their styles with good-natured wisecrackery. While his focus is mainly on the artists, he also takes detours to discuss odd recurring tropes in sci-fi art, such as depictions of figures frozen in cryosleep, skeleton astronauts and skeleton planets, giant worms, and space cats.
Of course, the art itself is the top draw of a book like this, which presents its menagerie of bizarre images in full color. I was taken with a number of artists with whom I wasn't previously familiar, particularly Paul Kirchner, Rodney Matthews, Mike Hinge, Phillipe Caza, and Ian Miller, whose one work represented in this book looks like something Ralph Steadman drew after binging on Lovecraft. If that doesn't sound awesome to you, I don't think we can be friends.
