Giant Bees and Wasps

Someone on Tumblr recently asked me if I knew about an old sci-fi magazine cover featuring guys with guns riding on giant bees. They thought the artist was Virgil Finlay, and they were right.

I had actually never seen this one before, but with a little research, I can now bring you: Virgil Finlay's cover for Fantastic Novels Vol. 1 #4, published Jan 1941.

It's illustrating The Radio Beasts, by Ralph Milne Farley, a science fantasy novel about a guy who fights ant aliens on Venus by riding giant bee aliens into battle against their aircraft.

This isn't related to anything else, but apparently Ralph Milne Farley was the penname of Roger Sherman Hoar, who had previously served in the Massachusetts State Senate in 1911 and campaigned for women's suffrage. Kinda cool.

Anyway, Finlay's painting later inspired this less-safe-for-work version from Anton Brzezinski in 1994:

The book has one other cover that focused on the bees, this medicore uncredited 1976 one.

Despite Virgil Finlay's lasting influence, I would name a completely different artwork as the quintessential giant bee/wasp illustration: W. F. Phillipps' cover for the 1969 Pan Books edition of The Furies, by Keith Roberts.

The coiled energy and pitch-black background really drive up the horror of the image, for an arresting cover that sticks with you. This one's a step up from even the great Paul Lehr, who had previously done this cover for the 1966 paperback, complete with an eerie wasp nest.

The author himself actually contributed the first two magazine cover illustrations for the story's debut:

You can check out all the other covers over on ISFDB.org, although I'm not blown away by most of them. Steve Crisp's 1985 cover is pretty fun. Those faces reflected in a wasp's eyes give me an excuse to bring up one of my favorite cover art tropes, Space Helmet Reflections, for the Nth time.

I took a look through my archives for other sci-fi landscapes featuring giant bees, and all I found was this artwork by Klaus Bürgle. I couldn't find a date or publication associated with it, but those are some cool alien bees.

Check out the free new issue of Journey Planet, all about workers' rights in science fiction and fantasy.

Articles inside discuss topics including Doctor Who, 2000AD, Deep Space Nine, Frederik Pohl, and a lot more – including a dive into how organized labor appears in Clifford D. Simak's 1940s and ’50s science fiction stories, written by friend of the blog Joachim Boaz.

Next Time: Self Portraits