Spherical Red Aliens

I received one of my occasional requests a while back, from someone trying to track down a 70s paperback cover illustration. The description? It featured "creatures (Martians) in the shape of red balls with very long arms and very thin legs."

I put out the call on my tumblr, and got a bunch of potential covers. In the end, the original asker found their own cover, so I'm included that here as well. But first, all the covers that it was not.

It's not this 1965 cover by Ed Valigursky for Crashing Suns, by Edmond Hamilton, even though it really fits the bill.

That's not even the only Ed Valigursky cover that isn't the one we're looking for, either. His earlier 1961 cover to Wandl the Invader, by Ray Cummings, had already featured a similar pink spherical alien.

It's not Edward Gorey’s interior art for War of the Worlds, which was in black and white anyway.

It's not this 1939 illustration by Frank R Paul titled “Life on Mercury,” featuring a bat-like alien with a red carapace.

It's also not either of these two illustrations by Micheal Whelan, both done as interior illustrations for Roy A. Gallant's 1980 book National Geographic Picture Atlas of Our Universe.

Someone else suggested that it might be an illustration from the short story “Arena,” by Fredric Brown. This story does indeed have a red, vaugely spherical alien in it, along with a naked man. Boris Vallejo illustrated both for the March 1977 issue of Starlog magazine.

The same issue features an interior illustration of the alien, called a "Roller," by an artist credited only as "Rene."

"Arena" first appeared in a June 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction magazine, and, fun fact, was adapted into an episode of the very first season of the original Star Trek series – mostly because the writer of that episode had subconsciously swiped the concept from Brown's short story, and the TV producer decided to reach out to Brown to get the rights for it rather than write a new one.

Most anthologies that contained the story don't seem to have red spherical aliens on their covers, however. One exception is this 1972 Norwegian edition:

However, in the end, the cover we were after had nothing to do with Arena. Here are the real, actual red spherical aliens that we were searching for this whole time.

The artist Yvon Le Gall did this artwork in 1975, for …et les martiens invitèrent les hommes, by Philippe Ebly.

I have to admit that "creatures (Martians) in the shape of red balls with very long arms and very thin legs" is a pretty decent description of those aliens, although it's tough to which one limbs are arms and which are legs. Here's another, slightly more red, version of the same art.