Blue Skies

The alien planets that retro science fiction cover artists tend to feature in their landscapes are often weird colors: Trees don't always have to be green and water doesn't have to be blue.

Other artworks, however, retain the comforting, natural colors of Earth. Sometimes, adding a sci-fi city or spaceship to a bright blue sky just looks refreshingly futuristic. And with all the climate-change-powered natural disasters we're getting these days, a nice calm sky is getting even more science fictional.

Okay, now that I've done a normal introduction to today's theme, I have a confession: I actually just searched my Tumblr recently to see if I had posted about my new account on the social platform Bluesky, and the process of that search has revealed to me that I have a lot of posts I've tagged with "blue" and "sky" over the years. So now I'm rounding them all up! And yes, this the weirdest justification for a newsletter theme I've stumbled on so far.

Here's Tim White's September 1990 cover art for Interzone #39.

This artwork also appears in the 1994 Tim White Fantasy Art Trading Cards with the title "Stars Like Dust," which seems to imply that it was used for the cover to an edition of the Asimov book with the similar title, but I couldn't actually confirm that. I can confirm that it is very blue.

Here's a 2003 John Harris cover artwork, used for Saturn, by Ben Bova. Harris has really emerged as possibly my favorite science fiction artist over the years (although I still have a dozen others that might qualify as my favorite, depending on the day). All his works muster up a wistful, dream-like sense of wonder at a far-off future.

This particular one has a great example of the subtle dream logic that Harris employs: How can that ship and tether rope be floating without gravity if this scene still has the atmosphere needed for those clouds to be blowing around the watch towers?

Okay, time for some art that's actually from the 70s: Here's a Frank Kelly Freas, done for the 1975 cover to The Big Black Mark, by A. Bertram Chandler.

Here's a blue sky trapped inside a building, done by Paul Lehr for a Harry Harrison-edited 1973 anthology, SF: Author Choice 3.

I'm not quite sure what's happening on Luis Royo's 1989 cover art for Look into the Sun by James Patrick Kelly. The story apparently focuses on an architect with a grand project to create "an immense floating cloud" which is then co-opted by aliens, so this is probably Royo's impression of that project.

Here's "Other World," by Adolf Schaller, which my fellow art blogger Retroscifiart scanned from an Edmund Scientific slide set from 1978.

Schaller was a space artist who contributed art for Carl Sagan's 1980 Cosmos TV series. He also passed away in August 2024, which I discovered while looking up that image just now. Here's another one from the guy.

And here's an unrelated artwork that the last one reminded me of: Artist Ron Cobb's 1990 pixel art "Skybox" – yes, it's a pun on the game dev concept – which won that year's 2nd Annual PixelPaint Competition.

Cobb was also a great cartoonist and film concept artist, so he was truly a renaissance artist.

Here's another one of my favs from him – I actually tried getting this one in my art book at the last minute, but it didn't happen.

Cobb painted it in 1975, and George Lucas loved it so much that it "served as the inspiration for the giant lizard-like Dewback creatures ridden by Stormtroopers on Tatooine in the original Star Wars," according to this site.

Cobb worked as a concept artist on Star Wars (I assume because Lucas liked this one piece so much?), but Lucas seems to have swiped this alien concept without letting him know. Here's how Ron Cobb described the story in Starbust magazine #16, December 1979:

"When I was doing the aliens for the Cantina scens in Star Wars, I looked at some of the stills of the stuff they shot in Tunisia, and suddenly I came to this picture of a stormtrooper sitting on the back of a big lizard and it looked an awful lot like a painting I did for John Milius, almost the same pose and everything. Strange! I didn't think anything of it, just a coincidence, and then many months later I was talking to Milius and he sais, 'Your lizard - my paintings's in Star Wars. Lucas was up here one night and he saw it and said he wanted to try to put it in Star Wars.' They started to build the lizards, but they were only able to build the upper part, they weren't able to build the legs. They ended up with camel-like legs whereas mine had great big iguana-like legs. I just made it up."

My art book has a section about the other sci-fi art that inspired Lucas, a lot of which he didn't get the permission for, so this story would have fit right in.

Here's Danny Flynn's 1990 cover art for Farmer in the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein. "Sky" is right there in the title for that one.

Here's a great blue sky from Michael Whelan, who coincidentally has recently joined Bluesky. This one was the 1988 cover to The Smoke Ring, by Larry Niven.

I don't know how "blue" this sky is, but it's certainly a very cool cover – Jim Steranko's 1969 cover art for Prisoners of the Sky, by C. C. MacApp.

Finally, let's wrap up by returning to Tim White, with his 1979 painting "Star Light Star Bright," scanned from the 1981 collection The Science Fiction and Fantasy World of Tim White by Retroscifiart.

Next Time: Spherical Red Aliens