Penguin Paperback SF Covers

[Voros]

Someone on the Tabletop RPG Book Club on G+ posted this cool link to an overview of Penguin’s paperback sf covers over the years.



I have a number of these. Some of favourites are the modernist abstract art covers they used for the Brian Aldiss edited anthology of sf short stories. I also love the psychedelic surrealist 60s/70s covers. In general I prefer the UK covers of sf paperback, they’re usually more interesting than the US. Some of the modern cvers are quite nice too.

 

[Dumarest]

None of those really grab me; I'd probably pass them by unless I knew the authors' work. I guess I'm more of an action-cover DAW and Ace paperback guy.

 

[Voros]

Love the Swan Song and Winds of Gath covers! I can dig on all different kinds of style and approaches.

OT: I have that Norton, it is a good one!

 

[Dumarest]

Love the Swan Song and Winds of Gath covers! I can dig on all different kinds of style and approaches.

OT: I have that Norton, it is a good one!

Those are two of my favorite covers. Haven't read that Norton book, will have to look for it. Some more fun old-school sci fi paperback art from various publishers:

 

[Voros]

Not digging the Tribesmen of Gor cover, at least as a sf cover, but I find John Norman’s Gor books range from boring to ridiculous. The Stableford Gates of Eden cover though is a perfect example of the kind of paperback cover that say ‘what is going on? pick me up and find out!’

I saw you also posted Margaret St. Clair’s The Green Queen. She is a terrific, underrated writer of the 50s whose novels bridged pulp and more literary sf in fascinating ways. Her short stories are more overtly proto-New Wave.

I highly recommend Agent of the Unknown which is as fine if not better than early Phillip K. Dick (which it shares its Ace double with). Wildside Press republished it seperate from the Dick novel as few years ago, with the original cover too.

 

[Voros]

Van Vogt (a fellow Canuck) was a very uneven writer but his bizarre and dreamlike power fantasy novels inspired some great psychedelic cover art (and he was an admitted influence on Dick’s own hallucinatory novels).

Book of Ptath is one of my favs of his novels but this cover is in the ‘so bad it is good’ category, which now that I think of it fits this particuarly ludicrous novel.

 

[Ronin]

 

[Dumarest]

Not digging the Tribesmen of Gor cover, at least as a sf cover, but I find John Norman’s Gor books range from boring to ridiculous. The Stableford Gates of Eden cover though is a perfect example of the kind of paperback cover that say ‘what is going on? pick me up and find out!’

I saw you also posted Margaret St. Clair’s The Green Queen. She is a terrific, underrated writer of the 50s whose novels bridged pulp and more literary sf in fascinating ways. Her short stories are more overtly proto-New Wave.

I highly recommend Agent of the Unknown which is as fine if not better than early Phillip K. Dick (which it shares its Ace double with). Wildside Press republished it seperate from the Dick novel as few years ago, with the original cover too.

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Haven't read any Gor books. They sound kinda dopey to me. That just popped up when I was doing an image search. Those Stableford books both have great covers. I'd never even heard of him. It's a shame how many of these books are out of print and hard to find.

 

[Voros]

Haven't read any Gor books. They sound kinda dopey to me. That just popped up when I was doing an image search. Those Stableford books both have great covers. I'd never even heard of him. It's a shame how many of these books are out of print and hard to find.

Stableford is a good writer, Man in a Cage is a New Wavey book of his I read and enjoyed. His Hooded Swan books, which Swan Song is from, is a space opera series where Stableford tried to portray a non-violent hero. I haven’t read it but I have read a lot of his sf criticism as well as his very good book on the history of the scientific romance genre in the UK. These days he seems to do a lot of translations of French and other foreign language sf from the past, which I want to check out.

 

[Lofgeornost]

This isn't a Penguin cover, but there didn't seem to be any other thread for SF book covers, and some above aren't Penguin anyway. It's the cover of Planet Stories, May 1952, to illustrate Poul Anderson's story "The War Maid of Mars. " I think it's a great example of the 'woman in evening wear' type of magazine cover--surely a war-maid of Mars will look like she's on her way to a cocktail party in 1952.:



It's by Allen Anderson and is apparently one of only a couple of his original cover illustration paintings to survive: https://pulpcovers.com/war-maid-of-mars/#1

 

[Voros]

It's lovely! I really like the Planet Story covers and they published some of my favourite sf writers of the era including Ray Bradbury and Leigh Brackett.

We have a couple threads of sf covers, including this one.

 

[Lofgeornost]

It's lovely! I really like the Planet Story covers and they published some of my favourite sf writers of the era including Ray Bradbury and Leigh Brackett.

We have a couple threads of sf covers, including this one.

Sorry; my mistake. I'll post any others in that thread.