Smoking in Sci-Fi

Cigarettes are right up there with Coca-Cola as a feat of marketing, manifested into being with the one-two combo of advertisements and addictive ingredients until they hit a critical mass and became a genuine self-perpetuating element of Americana.

The tobacco propaganda machine faltered in the 90s, leaving a long, fascinating debris trail of old science fiction illustrations depicting a retro-future that never was.

Let's take a chronological look.

First up is possibly the coolest example: This 1955 illustration by Frank Kelly Freas. Cyborgs don't need mouths, but the smoking vent is crucial.

Here's the backstory for that specific artwork, taken from Freas' autobiographical 1977 art collection The Art of Science Fiction:

"I was in the middle of a group of sketches one weekend (weekends are my best working time) when a friend stopped in for an overnight visit: Algis Budrys, known very familiarly as A.J., one of the finest and subtlest writers of this generation. A.J. spotted the sketch, and turned on....

'a physicist in the Moon Dome; it blows up; the Russians rescue him and.... '

Of course he went with me to the publisher and I sold the cover and he sold the story, which became a classic. It was titled WHO?"

That's right, the classic 1958 novel Who? – which even became a 1974 film starring Elliott Gould – was all sparked by a Frank Kelly Freas sketch. It's a good reminder of how retro sci-fi illustration is at the center of the genre as much as the dust cover of it.

Or the magazine cover: Freas was originally creating that work for the April 1955 cover of Fantastic Universe here, before Budrys spun his own story out of it.

Remember that illustration... we'll be circling back in a minute.

This Topps card, from their 1957 "Space" series, is mostly about playing checkers in low gravity, but the uncredited artist still throws in a floating cigarette and ashtray.

I'd complain about the lack of verisimilitude, but it's not like these guys bothered to get a magnetic checkerboard, either. And it's an easy fix: "Thank God we invented the whatever device," they're saying.

John Schoenherr's cover for the July 1965 cover of Analog magazine includes a chill raccoon smoking through a cigarette holder while sitting on the knee of a dinosaur who's arguing with a guy in a jumpsuit about which direction to go on an alien planet.

Three years later, Frank Kelly Freas used a cigarette for a similar accentuating detail for the same magazine, with his March 1968 Analog cover.

And 13 years after he first did the smoking egghead cyborg illustration, Frank Kelly Freas reworked the same painting, for a new 1968 edition of Who?

Freas writes in his art book about this artwork:

"The design of the head presented several interesting aspects, not the least of which was how many details could be eliminated. As with the arm, a very precarious balance had to be kept, to retain the sense of power and menace, without degenerating into mere horror. Any attempt to humanize the features was doomed, but it had to be clearly not the head of a robot.

The solution lay in treating the head almost as the helmet on a suit of armor. No eyes. Just a slot—and deep inside, glowering directly at the viewer, two glowing red embers.

The mouth was trickier. The perspective naturally had to follow the curve of the ovoid, but the least error in design would give it an expression varying between a horrid grimace and a silly grin. I wanted no expression in the mouth at all.

A relatively minor problem was that of achieving the feel of shiny metal for the head: there were no silver eggs full of pantihose in the supermarkets yet, but the polished bowl of a stainless steel serving spoon gave precisely the information on reflections I needed."

Peter Max did a series of anti-smoking posters around 1970.

“To reach college students after the broadcast PSA space was eliminated by the enactment of the 1970 broadcast ban, the American Cancer Society developed a campus antismoking poster campaign. Posters were an attractive option because poster space is often free or inexpensive on high school, college, and university campuses . . . in addition to using grassroots creative generated by college students, Peter Max, a regarded graphic artist, also designed posters, book covers, and a television commercial campaign for the American Cancer Society with the tagline, “Happy people Don’t Smoke” and “Beautiful Things Happen When You Don’t Smoke Cigarettes” that were used in the late 1960s and early 1970s.” — Elizabeth Crisp Crawford, Tobacco Goes to College: Cigarette Advertising in Student Media, 1920-1980

But popular media wasn't done making smoking look cool, if Shusei Nagaoka's 1976 album cover to Jefferson Starship's "Spitfire" is any indication.

Jack Doyle's February 1978 cover art for Modern Electronics depicts Mel, a futuristic robot. I'll give them points for predicting the Roomba, but not enough to make up for how much of these tasks we've offloaded to smartphones. And of course, there's a robotic ash tray arm.

There's a labelled view inside the magazine, which you can read on the Internet Archive here.

Also from 1978 are these two Japanese magazine cover illustrations, shared by 50 Watts with no further context beyond the name of the artist, Yuji Kamozawa.

I would assume that the two smokers in the first image are a couple juvenile delinquents, but the robot nanny in the second image also seems fine with her child smoking in front of her.

This next one's a private commission by David A. Hardy, and is undated.

The scene is a balcony on the planet Terminus, from Asimov’s Foundation series, and if it looks familar, that's because I also featured it earlier this year, in a roundup post dedicated to the other vice that appears on that tabletop, drinks.

Check out how the cigar smoke blends in with the Milky Way!

A 1979 UK edition of Alfred Bester's Tiger! Tiger! boasts this stunning cover by Adrian Chesterman. The book itself doesn't appear to feature any cigarette-smoking, whether inside or outside of a spacesuit.

Finally, a jump ahead to 1984, when Bob Pepper depicts a guy sparking up on a cover to A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K. Dick.

All any of these artists had to do to predict vaping would be swapping out the burning paper product for a boxy, high-tech gizmo. I have yet to find an artist who did.

That's all I have! Drop a comment if you can point me towards any more art that fits the theme. I'd enjoy doing a sequel roundup; I find sci-fi smoking to be one of the most fascinating and funny examples of how futuristic predictions so rarely break free from the milieu of their time.

Cool Link: How Book of the Month club survived 100 years of a turbulent publishing industry - Fast Company

Interesting bit of book history here, via the Transfer Orbit newsletter.

Music rec: Vintage Obscura radio, a livestream of old obscure music tracks unearthed by an online community dedicated to digging them up.

Next Time: Black and White Sci-Fi