The Stupendous Science Fiction Cover Art Collection!

Great Scott! What has happened to the Doctor's hand??

Oddly enough, there *are* hands in this book. Many of the principal characters have hands. Often they use them. But they are not what you might call an integral plot device. Great book though.

There Is No Such Building In This Book. The only thing the cover could possibly be is the Time Patrol HQ in the Oligocene. Except this is decribed as "a complex of long, low buildings". The birds and what appear to be crowds of watching people are then also a small puzzle. Nor am I sure why the sky, plants and clouds are so alien-looking, since the entire book takes place on Earth, mostly Earth of the remote past.

The blurb on this cover reads: "Earth has been murdered. And travelling by para-gravitic space ship, Carl Donnan and his companions are determined to find the culprits. A fast-moving space thriller by one of America's best known Science Fiction writers". There is nothing even remotely like this in "Guardians of Time", and I spent the first fifty pages waiting for the Earth to be destroyed. Eventually I realised that what I had taken for an attention-grabbing header was in fact the title for a completely different book, which presumably has the plot described. Maybe.

The Science Fiction Book Club (SFBC) is one of the most guilty in producing a particularly non-committal cover art. It's as if they are trying to say, "Well, I ain't telling you what this book is about, but you can be sure it's science fiction." I would say that the publishers name on the spine had probably given this away already. For the record, this is more about psychology than physics. There Are NO Bubble Chambers In This Book.

Lafferty is a hugely underappreciated genius, and the book is terribly funny, but there is nothing corresponding in any way to the cover art. Of course, with Lafferty, that might be deliberate...

This displays a prime example of another common type of cover. A Generic Spaceship (tm). Presumably the thought train of the artist goes like this: "Hm. Well, the title doesn't give much away. But it's science fiction, right? So it has to be basically about spaceships. So lets draw a spaceship. Lets gove it some rocket engines... good, and a cannon...yeah, like that...and lets add some angular interesting looking bits..done!" There are spaceships in Foundation, fairly useful spaceships, but they have no significance beyond getting people places.

Well, this isn't bad cover art. Nor is it science fiction cover art. It's Biggles. Biggles, Flying East, raking the dastardly Hun with his trusty Vickers machine guns, and thwarting the evil plans of his nemesis, Von Stalhein. How on earth will he get out of this one, you ask, as his two-seater plunges towards a certain death in the barren desert with the pilot unconscious, the propellor broken and the engine about to catch fire?

This cover isn't inaccurate per se, there *are* robots in the stories, they do play a pretty integral role, but to show a robot alone misses the whole point of the book, which is the relation of robot, dog and mutant to each other and to the lost creature which spawned them all; man.

This is my example of a really cool bit of cover art. That is clearly a depiction of Ender directing the fleet in his last game, down to hordes of enemy fighters fleeing the destruction.

Presumably the artist saw the title, extrapolated and mixed the result with the tendency of science fiction to involve unusual things. Doesn't look like the blurb writer has read the book either.

I don't know what this is about. Maybe they mixed it up with "Attack of the Space Hamsters!"?

Now, the important thing, the key point as you might say, about Invisible Men is that they are Invisible. Which presumably means that this is a picture of the totally unrelated Transparent Man. On the other hand, you *can* see the dilemma of the artist..."Right, what's this one. An invisible man. Right. How am I supposed to draw an invisible man? I can't just draw an empty street, that would be silly...Arrrgh." He frets for a moment, he paces...filled with despair he reaches for the gun in the bottom drawer of his desk...but as he braces himself for the ghastly deed, light dawns! "Eureka!", he says to himself and a cover is born.

I have a confession to make. I haven't actually done my research on this; the book was too awful for me to finish, so there might be a creature such as this in it. Even granted that, it's a truly bad piece of art.

This appears to be a comma excavated from some sort of ice-cream made of beans. I think.

A book completely lacking in asteroids with skulls on the side.

A book completely lacking in stories about dodecahedrons. Or icosahedrons either. In fact, no stories about any sort of Platonic solid.

"Help! Someone's welded a clock to my head!"

Convenient mist there.

Character: "O Wondrous! A spaceship the like of which we have never seen!"

Or, invasion of the one eyed flask beings.

So *that's* what a Star Fox looks like. I always wondered...

The blurb manages to be magnificently, stunningly wrong in every possible respect. This is a rather funny book, not in the least terrifying, and containing nothing which could possibly be life for the space traveller of the future. Also, there are three sirens. And they are described as the most beautiful women in all creation, not pasty-faced purple-skinned vampires. With no dress sense.

The question you have to ask is "why is the knight wearing grey tights, and not a lot else?"

This is rather notably not a knight, and thus not in the book.

The blurb is dead accurate, but the title is totally misleading. There isn't any time travel as it is normally understood. Except that he goes an instant in the past to escape a hanging at one point. Another case of guessing from the title and getting it wrong. :)

I haven't a clue what this is. Possibly a camping stove? Then, while the characters do go camping and thus presumably cook their food on some sort of...camping stove...it's not entirely integral to the plot.

Ah, yes, metal. Robots are often made of this. That must be the link.

Correct in every detail, except that "Our Side" is the Organisation. The disciples are definitely the Bad Guys.

What page of this nature would be complete without a Fanthorpe cover? Totally unrelated to the plot, of course.

Unfortunately, there are no dinosaurs upside down in space anywhere here. In fact, there are no dinosaurs at all, and none of the stories take place in space. A great pity.