70s Sci-Fi Art

Fish-People

Sea monsters are an enduringly popular subject for speculative fiction stories, and they come in a few different general categories: Huge serpents, Loch Ness-type plesiosaurs, or Krakens with masses of tentacles. I could do an entire post on each of those, and probably will, but right now I want to

Overgrown Ruins

Science fiction has strong roots in early 1900s adventure pulp magazine stories, and a handful of story tropes reflect that. Add a few extra limbs to the giant tiger attacking your explorers, and you're suddenly on Barsoom; Remove the spacesuit from that skeleton in your ancient temple, and

Odds and Ends: July 2025

First things first: Check out this sick John Berkey illustration, an interior illustration in the Sept 1994 issue of Science Fiction Age. It's the perfect size for a phone lockscreen. Here's one more artwork that I just really loved and wanted to highlight: Michael Booth’s

Sci-Fi Medics and Doctors

My roundup of red crosses on space hospitals was a lot of fun, but the vein runs deep with medical sci-fi. This time around, I want to get a lot closer up, to focus on the human side of the craft. And the alien side, and the robot side. Let&

More 'Epic' Sci-Fi

Okay, time to get back to the basics. This issue, I won't be trying to convince you to care about a corporate report or a bunch of grass-themed art. This is a sequel to a post from last year. The only theme connected the works of art below

The Argentina Sword-and-Sorcery Movie Poster Collection

In the late 70s, Arnold Schwarzenegger was looking to break into Hollywood, with the help of the handy bodybuilder-to-comic-adaptation pipeline established by Lou Ferrigno's Incredible Hulk show. At the same time, National Lampoon had successfully taken the French comic Métal hurlant to the US market as Heavy Metal

Ocean Outposts

I just ran across this great retro illustration. It's by Colin Hay, and is apparently titled “Robotvendor Rex.” It appeared in Omni magazine’s February 1986 issue, and was just scanned and uploaded to the r/RetroFuturism subreddit last week. I've seen it before – it features

Grass

"Touch grass." It's a now-classic internet insult for telling anyone who's getting too worked up online that they need to go outside. But is it also good advice for an era of science fiction art that focuses too much on sleek white iPhone-branded future

Red Cross Space Hospitals

In 2020, the video game Among Us got in trouble for accidentally violating the Geneva Conventions Act. On its med bay, the sci-fi game had displayed "the emblem of a red cross with vertical and horizontal arms of the same length on, and completely surrounded by a white ground,

Arno Sternglass

US commercial illustrator and fine artist Arno Sternglass (1926 - 2007) is known for his work from the 1950s to the 1970s. He didn't do science fiction, but he is the artist behind my last post: He did all the illustrations for CONDEC's 1969 annual report.

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The Condec Annual Report 1969

"Hidden gem" is an overused (and therefore inaccurate) turn of phrase these days. It's an algorithm-driven world, and no one can optimize for hidden anything. You can decide if the art here qualifies as a "gem," but I'm very sure that it

Doors

Doorways are a simple way to create a frame-within-a-frame in a photo or artwork. This can direct the eye of the viewer towards a subject, and it can create an emotional context – isolation, distance, a sense of being locked out. Filmmakers love this trick, with the final shot of John

David Schleinkofer (1952-2025)

American science fiction artist David Schleinkofer died in April 2025, of Lou Gehrig's Disease. If you've been following this blog for even a few months, you've seen plenty his work. His career began in the 1970s, although he didn't get into science

Groovy art

Most 70s sci-fi art doesn't fit the stereotype for the pop art trends of the time. No bell-bottoms, no Peter Max Astrologicalendar inspo, and no yellow submarines that aren't airbrushed into hyperrealism. But there's an exception to everything. Here's a roundup of

Europa

You might have missed it if you're not on Twitter as much these days, but there was a fun new trend there a couple weeks back: Everyone started posting satirical micro fiction from a reality in which they were all soldiers in the far future, fighting a pointless

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Plants and Animals of the Retrofuture

Jean-Léon Huens

As a kid, I spent quite a while staring at my family's tattered paperback cover for Lloyd Alexander's The High King, the fifth and final book in the high fantasy kid's book series 'Chronicles of Prydain.' It's a visceral scene

Odds and Ends: April 2025

All right, I've done a whole year of science fiction art themed roundups. I've earned a weird collection of all the irregular stuff that doesn't fit into a theme. Enjoy. Sometimes, the very act of posting a collection of sci-fi art centered on some

Alien Landscapes 2

Detours into the tiny corners of science fiction art history are great for learning more about gas masks or vikings, but sometimes we need to take a beat to appreciate the basics: Gorgeous planetary scenes with forbidding towers, glowing pyramids, and two purple suns. Desktops in need of backgrounds rejoice:

Lookcaitlin Is The Coolest Resource of 70s-90s Tech Magazine Illustrations on the Internet

Two firefighters resuscitating a giant cartoon keyboard. A photograph of a burger containing two giant floppy disks. A beautifully garish abstracted illustration of a TV and clock beside a bed. A cow on a computer. What do these striking images have in common? I found them all after five minutes

Coffee, Tea, and Drinks

This week's topic comes from this gorgeous illustration I stumbled on recently when it was posted on Twitter by @doberes. It's by Gage Lindsten, and it's actually from a 2020 book by Healing Tales. It looks straight out of the 90s, though! Love it.

Atlantis

Much like the Bermuda triangle, Bigfoot, and the psychic powers of plants, serious discussions of Atlantis seem to have dwindled down to nothing since the '70s and '80s. But maybe it would be more fair to say that they've gotten less fun because, much like any

Cloudscapes

Sweeping landscapes and planetary marvels are mainstays of science fiction illustration, so it's little wonder that clouds and cloudscapes are a reoccurring theme. Big billowing clouds can add depth and texture to any landscape, and in science fiction or space art, they're just as likely be

Trains of the Past

I wrote about the trains of the future last week. That post was originally just going to be about all trains in science fiction, but a strange revelation hit me during the process: There's a sharp distinction between future trains and past trains. Futuristic trains are all about