Giant Teeth

When it comes to giant teeth in retro science fiction cover art, all conversations must begin (and will basically also end) with Piers Anthony's Prostho Plus.

This 1971 comic space opera combines several magazine stories from 1967-1970, all featuring a dentist who does dental work for aliens. The best covers focus on stories where he works on giant aliens and actually goes into their mouths, and it's a tie for which one I prefer the most – it's either Paul Lehr or Bruce Pennington.

Here's Lehr's cover, done in 1973 for the US paperback.

Pennington's cover for the 1974 UK paperback tackles the same "top and bottom rows of teeth as a framing device" concept, but on a slightly smaller scale.

Also, I'm no dental expert, but that tool the dentist is holding looks a lot like one of those compasses that artists use for drawing circles. I wonder if Pennington had one lying around and decided it would make a good space dentist tool.

Don Maitz delivered another fun Prostho Plus cover a decade later, with this 1985 cover.

That's about it for that tooth-themed covers of that title, aside from two German editions that both had pretty underwhelming takes. Here's Eddie Jones' 1972 cover, with a guy zooming around on a tooth itself.

The 1992 German edition returns to the teeth framing device again. I wasn't able to locate the artist behind this one.

I checked all the magazine covers and other anthologies that Piers Anthony's dentist short stories appeared in, to see if any of them made the cover.

I found one result: The story In the Jaws of Death appeared in an anthology, Young Extraterrestrials, and it seems to have inspired Fred Marcellino, the artist behind the 1984 edition's giant tooth-themed cover.

That's the end of Piers Anthony's contributions to the Giant Sci-Fi Teeth Cover Art archive.

Other covers of note include this one, for a Spanish edition of Asimov's The Martian Way. Based on the style and the publisher, I assume the artist is Horacio Salinas Blanch.

Mouths hold plenty of symbol value, so it's unsurprising that surrealist cover artists like Blanch got into the Giant Teeth game.

Here's an example from surreal sci-fi GOAT Don Ivan Punchatz: His 1967 cover for Earthworks, by Brian W. Aldiss.

And I'd be remise not to include this classic by Patrick Woodroffe, illustrating George R. R. Martin's A Song for Lya and Other Stories in 1976.

I haven't read all the stories in that collection, but I assume this cover is a surreal interpretation of the love-focused alien collective consciousness from the title story. So the creepiness is intentional here.

And that's it! It's a short list, ultimately. The quintessential Giant Teeth science fiction novel may yet lie ahead of us. If any dentists reading this have any pitches for the next great near-future Michael-Crichton-esque dental-tech thriller, feel free to hop in my comments.

Next Time: The Adventures of Starbeem and Re-Koil, plus a minor cover art mystery