Cool Spaceships

Spaceships: The first frontier. Across the '70s and '80s, complex and colorful spaceships were the primary element that publishers everywhere thought to shoehorn onto any science fiction book cover.

The diverse visual style of all that spacecraft is impossibly to fully sum up, but in this post, we're going to try regardless.

Last time I did a roundup of awesome spaceships, someone commented to note that I should include the very colorful art of Alan Gutierrez. You're so right, commenter!

Here's a great 1983 example, complete with an interesting planet and some arcane symbols on the ship itself, which looks like the Magic Schoolbus decided to dive into a retro sci-fi art collection.

Granted, the spaceship isn't the colorful part of my favorite Alan Gutierrez illustration, this highly saturated 1986 cover to Saturnalia by Grant Callin.

Chris Foss delivers a very cool combination of spaceship and outer space scenery that could almost fit in with all the other orange and teal science fiction art out there.

Angus McKie's finely detailed science fiction scenes never disappoint. I really like the worldbuilding implied by the hodge-podge of modules that this space-freighter is compiled from.

I'm assuming this is a world in which strong interstellar right-to-repair laws have allowed everyone to continually replace old parts as they break down in turn. Call it the "Spaceship of Thesis."

This John Harris illustration opts for a similarly lived-in rattletrap of a spaceship.

Peter Elson makes a largely black and white color scheme look incredible with this cover art.

Although Elson can also do a searingly colorful spaceship illustration just as well! I love the horsehead nebula.

The space background gets even more convoluted with this John Berkey piece, "Diplomatic Immunity," in which an interstellar lightning storm appears to have broken out.

I love the colors Michael Whelan chose for this breath-taking illustration.

Mark Bright’s cover art for a 1982 Battlestar Galactica book, War of the Gods, adds a lot of visual interest to the scene by including the swirling red atmosphere of that planet across the entire background.

Here's an image that I posted on my Tumblr recently, with much less engagement than I think it deserves: David Jackson's 1982 cover art for God’s World, by Ian Watson.

I really love Jackson's chiaroscuro-like use of high-contrast shadows; I think it adds a lot of verisimilitude when depicting the vacuum of outer space.

A publisher in early '80s France might have agreed with me: This other piece by the same artist was chosen for the 1981 French translation of Stewart Cowley's Starliners: Commercial Spacetravel in 2200 AD.

Stewart Cowley's Terran Trade Authority series of fictionalized art book collections is probably one of the biggest sources of all the cool spaceships that many readers remember from the 1970s or '80s.

Here's one more example from those books, by TTA stalwart Bob Layzell for Stewart Cowley’s 1979 collection Spacewreck.

This Bob Layzell is for Robert Holdstock's 1978 Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. It's one of my favorites from Layzell's oeuvre. Love the floodlights and sweeping pathway working together for a stylized composition.

Bob Layzell passed away last week, as his daughter Shana confirmed on Facebook. His legacy lies in atmospheric, imaginative, frequently spaceship-packed visions of the future, popular on UK book covers across the 80s and beyond.

I particularly liked his penchant for depicting plant life growing over junky spaceships or buildings, so his art made an appearance in my look at Overgrown Ruins a while back.

Downthetubes has a great In Memoriam article for the guy that includes the fact that he had the nickname "Merlin" at one point.

Here are a few more examples of his spaceship art.

Cool Links

Here At The End Of All Things: The Vast Luminous Art Of Andy Kehoe - Unquiet Things

Speaking of cool artwork, here's a showcase of the artist that my friend and fellow art book author S. Elizabeth picked for the very last entry in her 2023 Art of Fantasy collection.

The Houghton Mifflin Readers (1971)

This is an entire blog dedicated to a series of English curriculum readers for US schoolkids. "The graphic influence of psychedelia is apparent in the interior illustrations and in the design of each volume’s distinctive graphic identity. The titles alone are a timestamp: Signposts, Panorama, Images, Diversity, Galaxies, Serendipity."

Guide to Retro Science Fiction Art Collections

Here's the guest post I recently wrote, just in case you missed it last week.

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