Europa

Adam Rowe

05 May 2025 • 3 min read

Ron Miller, "Landing on Europa," 1984

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 forever war on Europa, the icy moon of Jupiter.

Here are a few examples from one Tumblr post, to give you the idea.

You can check out more examples over here or read the Know Your Meme explainer. Tumblr is a more searchable way to get Twitter screencaps if you don't have a Twitter account yourself.

For this post, I've rounded up a bunch of tranquil space art featuring Europa itself. Is it a historical record of the ways our space artists have gotten us interested in our own solar system over the decades? Or is it all cruel propaganda designed to appease the warmie conscripts before they meet their fates among the crystalline tunnels of the ulterior crust? You decide.

Here's Steve R Dodd's "Jupiter as Seen From Europa," from the 1980s. Dodd's a lesser known artist - check out a short documentary about him here.

Thanks to @retroscifiart for this scan and a few others included in this article.

These next two are both by Donato Giancola - the first one features a permanent sunset on Europa, while the other depicts the "candy cane" stripes that you'd see on fractured ice sheets.

There's a lot of evidence that Europa has a big liquid water ocean under its ice. Here's a Richard Bizley artwork depicting a few submarines and some alien eels.

Bob Eggleton adds a little sci-fi intrigue to the Jovian moon with this one, titled "Marooned on Europa."

No space artist collection is complete without David A. Hardy, who has naturally illustrated Europa plenty of times.

Here are just three examples, spanning decades of Hardy's career.

“I recently unearthed a painting I did in 1968 for an exhibition at the London Planetarium, ‘Jupiter from Europa.’ This was of course before we knew how flat Europa actually is, just that it was icy because of its albedo.” ~David A. Hardy

David A Hardy, "Jupiter from Europa," c 1977.

Ron Miller is another great space artist - I included one of his artworks at the top of this post, but here's another, depicting an ice fracture on the surface of Europa.

If you're on your phone you might not have noticed, but that image is a pretty tiny one! I think I pulled it out of an Internet Archive scan of an old issue of Omni, but I wasn't able to find a bigger and better version online.

Finally, here's a scene of "seismic prospecting" on Europa, painted by Ron Miller from 1990's In the Stream of the Stars: The Soviet/American Space Art Book.

Music rec: We're staying on theme with this collection of music from snow-themed video game levels.

Next Time: David Schleinkofer (1952-2025)