Retro Sci-Fi: GIF Edition Featuring art by or inspired by Chris Moore, Terry Hoff, Philippe Caza, Mike Hinge, Heinz Edelmann, Moebius, Ralph McQuarrie, and others.
Looking Out of Spaceships Shusei Nagaoka's cover for the 1978 Deep Purple rock album When We Rock, We Rock And When We Roll, We Roll is a great way to exemplify the microgenre of retro science fiction art I'm taking a look at today. We're looking at views
Best 70s Annual Reports What's more culturally meaningful than the cover art to corporate annual reports from across the 1970s? Don't answer that.
Odds and Ends: September 2026 Featuring weird paperback taglines, Call of Cthulhu's first fanzine, The Man Who Folded Himself, and the Moist Towelette Museum.
book notes Book Notes: Spectrum 19 Featuring James Gurney, Fred Fields, Peter Diamond, Stephan Martiniere, Emily Fiegenschuh, and more.
Alice in Sci-Fi Wonderland Alice in Wonderland: The 1865 Lewis Carroll story isn't just one of the most well-known kids books ever, it was a trippy inspiration for generations of hippies, stoners, and pop culture icons, to say nothing of Jefferson Airplane. Science fiction loves swiping Alice in Wonderland iconography, from
Earth From Orbit We're used to seeing Earth from the ground level, and it's easy to picture the pale blue dot version as well. Today, we're taking a look at the Goldilocks zone between those two extremes of visual interest: The view of Earth from within its
Giant People I mostly picked this theme because I really love the image below. It's Howard V. Brown's cover art for the June 1924 issue of Scientific American, depicting "The world in miniature: Model makers at work on a huge relief map." In other words, it&
Frogs It's finally time to cover the humble frog's presence in retro speculative fiction art. Moistorized. Flourishing. Occasionally rising up for eco-terroristic revenge. Science fiction artists don't have quite the same collective love for frogs as they have demonstrated for cats. Still, frogs are
Odds and Ends: July 2026 I posted these two iterations of the same Chris Foss canvas on Tumblr a while back. Foss had a habit of painting over his previous work to create a new scene (Frank Frazetta would do something similar). In its science fiction form, this one was the 1973 cover art for
Weird Galaxies I'm still not entirely sure if Wojtek Siudmak is intentionally making a "wormhole" visual pun with his 1985 cover to a French-language edition of Jack Vance's The Blue World. On one hand, English isn't his first language. On the other hand.
Surface Reflections I wrote about space helmet reflections in this newsletter back in 2020, a topic that I later turned into one of my favorite sections in my 2023 art book Worlds Beyond Time. However, seven years later, I still haven't written about other types of reflections in retro speculative
