A pictorial history of science fiction

by David Kyle

Loaded with color and black and white plates of vintage science fiction illustrations.

Genres: Science Fiction, Reference, Art

173 pages

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Librarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[E · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this at a garage sale. This is a fun book!
It is loaded with photos of vintage Sci-Fi magazine covers and books.

The book jacket was in mint condition. 150 pages from 1929 to 60s Kirk and Spock.

[Uco Library · Rating 4 out of 5]

Science fiction, to some, is an escapist form of storytelling, created by fanciful dreamers. True science fiction, however, is not intended to be an escape from reality, but rather a confrontation with the realities of days yet to come. From the seventeenth-century visions of what might lie on the moon to Captain Kirk’s five-year mission, mankind has been fascinated by the potential applications and advances of their own generations’ discoveries.

This title is more than twenty-five years old, so the very recent advances in the genre won’t appear. This is irrelevant, since that is not the main focus of the book. A Pictorial History of Science Fiction uses book and magazine covers, comic book and graphic novel illustrations, television and motion picture stills, movie posters, and even 250-year-old woodblock carvings to illustrate the evolution of science fiction as a whole.

Chronologically organized, the chapters include “The Wood and Feather Milleniums [sic],” “The Iron Age,” “The Steel Generation,” “The Silver Years,” “The Golden Years,” “The Uranium Decade,” “The Plastic Zenith,” “Isotopic Moments,” “The Alloy Now,” and “The Future Future.” The illustrations range from woodblock illustrations for Gulliver’s Travels and Baron Munchausen to the pen-and-ink drawings for classic novels by H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, from the 1950s pulps to production stills of Flash Gordon, The Planet of the Apes, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. The accompanying text points out the importance and influence of lesser known authors, such as Hugo Gernsback, John W. Campbell, Jr., and Stanley G. Weinbaum.

There are plenty of rocketships, flying cities, aliens, and robots for any science fiction fan. The author, while compiling art of all kinds in order to illustrate a complex history, focuses on the best artwork of each age. A Pictorial History of Science Fiction is a wonderful glimpse of the past’s vision of the future.

[Jerry · Rating 3 out of 5]

… it is science fiction and the urge to draw boundaries is irresistible.

On the one hand, it’s pretty cool. On the other, it could be a lot better. As the title says, it’s not really about the text, it’s about the photos. A lot of the photos are very small, especially as he neared the end and seemed to want to include a lot more examples. Even in a large-format book like this, putting six covers in a row across a single page means all we’re really seeing is the cover logo. Even with a magnifying glass, only the larger text is legible. It would probably have been better to cut down on the images and show the remaining ones with more detail.

But the images that are legible are amazing; one might even say wondrous, miraculous, astounding, and weird—to pull various adjectives from the titles of the magazines covered here. There’s an absolutely beautiful full-page reproduction of Margaret Brundage’s May 1934 cover for Weird Tales, featuring Robert E. Howard’s “Queen of the Black Coast”. Opposite it is a full spread of the King Kong novelization dust jacket, and a half-page September 23 Argosy featuring Ray Cummings’s “The Fire Planet”. I believe that’s September 23, 1933, but the accompanying text doesn’t say.

There’s a wonderful two-thirds-page inset of T. Anderson’s March 1951 Planet Stories cover featuring Leigh Brackett’s “Black Amazon of Mars”, surrounded by a 1953 cover for Gernsback’s Science-Fiction Plus, a 1942 John Campbell Astounding, a 1939 Raymond A. Palmer Fantastic Adventures, and a 1948 Campbell Unknown Worlds.

Which is a bit of a haphazard collection of covers, especially for a chapter titled “The Uranium Decade: 1936-1946”. The attempt to title each section by a metallic age, to extend the “golden age” metaphor (and possibly the golden/silver ages of comic books), is mostly an afterthought; it doesn’t seem to contribute a useful terminology.

The whole text has the appearance of organization without the substance of it, as far as I can tell. Despite using eras Kyle is constantly jumping forward or backward decades when talking about any particular author, editor, or magazine and it was difficult to see the significance in some of those digressions.

And digress he did! Here’s a single paragraph ostensibly talking about the influence of John Campbell and Astounding on the Golden Age:

The term ‘The Golden Age of Science Fiction’ is identified with Astounding Science Fiction. Alva Rogers, a fan who chronicled that magazine and its editor in his book, A Requiem for ‘Astounding’, says that the July 1939 issue really began it. That issue introduced A. E. van Vogt with part of his book The Voyage of the Space Beagle—and Robert A. Heinlein. Within the year that followed there were more stories from authors who had first appeared in Astounding: C. L. Moore (1934—although her first professional publication was the Weird Tales classic ‘Shambleau’ the previous year), Ross Rocklynne (1935), L. Sprague de Camp (1937); then, under Campbell as sole editor, Lester del Rey (1938), and Malcolm Jameson (1938). Also published within that year were: Nat Schachner, Nelson S. Bond, Ray Cummings, P. Schyler Miller, Manly Wade Wellman, Raymond Z. Gallun, E. E. Smith, Carl Vincent, John W. Campbell, L. Ron Hubbard, Phil Nowland, Clifford D. Simak, Robert Moore Williams, Harry Bates, and article writer Willy Ley. Other writers who would be discovered were: Horace L. Gold (1938), Raymond F. Jones (1941), George O. Smith (1942), Hal Clement (1942), Ray Bradbury (1942—without collaboration), E. Mayne Hull (1942), and Arthur C. Clarke (1946—who, however, was in the British Tales of Wonder in 1938). Isaac Asimov technically first appeared in the March 1939 Amazing Stories, but with his July 1939 short in Astounding he really became a Campbell discovery and protégé. Fritz Leiber appeared that year for the first time in Campbell’s other magazine, Unknown, as did Tony Boucher in 1941. Credit must also be given to Campbell for having brought Clifford Simak back after he had languished for several years and assisting him towards greatness.

That’s an amazing collection of intros. Sorting out what the text actually says, however, requires multiple readings, each making it more confusing than the last until it clicks. The whole book is like that, filled with fascinating anecdotes, digressions, parentheticals, and even main threads when one can be discerned.

One fascinating anecdote: John Campbell received a visit from the F.B.I. because they were worried about a security leak in the Manhattan Project. They’d noticed an Astounding Science-Fiction short story about preparing an atom bomb in March 1944.

The F.B.I. agent… was convinced finally that atom bombs and nuclear energy were commonplace themes… ‘What I didn’t show him,’ said Campbell, ‘was my circulation map with its cluster of pins for subscribers at a little place in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.’

Another interesting bit of cross-contamination: one of Campbell’s professors at MIT was “the remarkable Norbert Weiner”.

And one of the weirdest bits in this book came not from the author but from a previous owner. On page 104 there is a set of three covers for Astounding, showing three variations the title had gone through under various publication houses: Astounding Stories of Super-Science, Astounding Science-Fiction, and Astounding Stories. Some previous reader had pasted a blank white half-page over these three covers using (a very easily removed) sticky gummy material. No idea why.

There are also amazing black-and-white reprints; in the beginning are engravings from “The Wood and Feather Milleniums”, i.e., before the 19th century. These continue into Jules Verne and other less famous authors of his era. It’s not just that these authors were science-fiction-like, they also provided free content for magazine publishers who wanted to start magazines but didn’t yet have new content.

Toward the end there are several Virgil Finlay illustrations, at least one bleeding over from its full page reproduction onto the second page of the spread. The reproductions really are wonderful when they’re not too cramped.

Kyle doesn’t just reprint cover images and interior art. Very occasionally he reprints important texts, such as Hugo Gernsback’s essay “Reasonableness In Science Fiction” complaining that many science fiction stories are little better than fairy tales, and that authors should “stick to science as it is known, or as it may reasonably develop in the future.”

It’s a fascinating collection of stuff, especially the pictorial stuff.

In 1926 a culture medium in a petri dish was exposed to certain persons. This was called ‘Discussions’ and was placed in Amazing Stories. Before many phases of the moon had passed there grew a peculiar amorphous life form called readers. Feeding on published correspondence, within a few years it had formed into an embryonic fandom. In 1974, 4000 descendants of this fandom met for a weekend in a Washington, D.C., hotel.

[Dustin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting and somewhat informative. In the preface the author mentions a limited wordcount due to it being mostly an art book but if this had been printed at regular hardcover size or paperback size it would have easily been 250-300 pages long. It goes in pretty deep on a few topics like Hugo Gernsback (for obvious reasons, they named the damn award for him afterall) and has a solid, if a bit standard collection of art to represent the history if scifi throughout.

Honestly my biggest problem with this book is the coffee table size format. It was genuinely a pain in the ass to read.

[Chez · Rating 3 out of 5]

Best bit was the pictures, they were great. Written in the 70s, this book really was mostly a history of science fiction magazines through most of it, which aren't the way I read my sci-fi. It also read like a big list of names. But I liked the pictures so that's OK.