Lester del Rey - Fantastic Science-Fiction Art 1926-1954

Copyright 1975 by Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

SBN 345-24731-0-595

The editor wishes to thank Edward Wood for supplying the magazines for reproduction. He is also grateful to the publishers and artists for permission to reproduce the covers: The Conde Nast Publications, lnc.; Popular Library Inc.; Ultimate Publishing Co. Inc.; H. R. Van Dongen; and Frank Kelly Freas. And particular thanks are due Ian Summers, who gave freely of his time and help in selecting the best of many covers.

First Printing: September, 1975

Printed in the United States of America

Design by Karin Batten & Elliot Kreloff

BALLANTINE BOOKS

A Division of Random House, Inc.

201 East 50th Street, New York, N.Y. 10022

Simultaneously published by

Ballantine Books, Ltd., Toronto, Canada

Back in the early days, when science fiction was an orphan, there were numerous fiction magazines on the newsstands, representing almost every category of storytelling. There were westerns, detectives, confessions, love stories, family slicks,- and there were even magazines devoted to such highly specialized subcategories as baseball fiction, submarine stories, and terror tales. All of these were somehow descendants of other, earlier fiction magazines, and their cover art showed that they were derivative.

But science fiction did not emerge from the same sources as other category fiction. It came from magazines that were devoted to facts and to the technical knowledge of the time. So we might say it derived from the description of a gadget crossed with an explanation of some development of scienceusually that new science, electronics.

Hugo Gernsback is generally recognized as the founder and foremost promoter of science fiction. He began publishing it in his early technical magazines: Modern Electrics, Electrical Experimenter, and Science and Invention. Gernsback himself wrote and published a serial novel entitled Ralph 124 C 41 + in 1911,- the story was clumsy and rather silly as fiction, but it was an outstanding piece cf prophecy. The engineers and hobbyists who were the readers of the magazine were enthusiastic and demanded more such stories, and Gernsback happily complied.

In 1926, he went even further by launching Amazing Stories, a new magazine devoted entirely to this type of literature, which was then named scientifiction. The motto of the magazine showed its technical and prophetic intent: Extravagant fiction today... Cold fact tomorrow! Gernsback knew very little about editing a magazine of fiction; but he knew what his gadget-loving readers wanted, and the magazine was an instant success.

By todays standards, the fiction in the early issues of that magazine is appallingly bad, except for reprints from the novels of Wells, Verne, Burroughs, and others. The characters were cardboard at best, the dialogue incredibly stilted, and the plotting was of the most elementary kind. Repeatedly, the story would be interrupted for lengthy explanations of the science behind it. There were mad scientists with beautiful daughters who must be saved, invasions by giant insects, evil villains, and most of the cliche situations that were later picked up by all those bad movies that called themselves science fiction.

None of that seemed to matter. The importance of the stories lay in the wonders of science and of the future. Atomic power was exploited; men went to the moon and the planets; wonderful inventions solved all mankinds problems,- technology ruled the world. This was believable then, because nobody had ever really considered pollution, energy crises, radiation poisoning, or any of the distressing later by-products of technology. In the quarter century before the magazine first appeared, men had accomplished wonder piled upon wonder, and there seemed to be no limit to what was still to come. Even the first few years of the Depression did not really squelch that enthusiam.

The magazines covers reflected the interests of Gernsback and the readers. Whereas other fiction magazines of the time showed noble heroes and beauteous damsels (usually in distress), Amazing Stories and the magazines that followed depicted the wonderful world of the machine.

The source of that art, like the stories themselves, lay back in the old science and gadget magazines Gernsback had published for hobbyists and engineers.

Frank R. Paul had been the cover artist for Gernsbacks Electrical Experimenter and Science and Invention. A highly gifted Tenderer of the possible development of any invention, he was capable of taking a raw idea and turning it into a picture fantasy that was yet faithful in every detail to the original design. With that background, Paul found no difficulty in taking the clumsy descriptions of gadgets found in the stories and developing them into something far more impressive than even the writers had been able to imagine.

Since he had never illustrated for the general fiction magazines, he made no effort to conventionalize his covers according to the patterns of fiction. (Gernsback also had no experience in the editing of fiction for general circulation, so he had none of the accepted ideas of what covers must be to impose on Paul.)

Paul did, however, have an excellent understanding of the need to make his covers suggest stories to the readers for whom the magazine was meant. He read the stories carefully, with an eye for technical detail and a quick sense of a scene that would make a dramatic cover. He wasnt necessarily looking for the human conflict, but for the situation that was suggestive of future wonder.

Paul has often been accused of being unable to draw human figures and faces well, and most of his science-fiction illustrationswhether covers or interior black-and-whites, which he also did for the magazinesseem to bear this out. His human beings appear to be all alike. The clothes of the men are often right from the popular idea of what an engineer in the field might wear, from boots to bush jackets. Yet I have seen a few later paintings by Paul that show considerable skill at portraiture,-and in some of the covers (as in the August 1 929 Science Wonder Stories cover reproduced in this book), the human heads were no more stylized than the ones on many other magazine covers of the day. Generally, he did not make any great effort to do careful portraits of peoplethat was not the center of interest for the readers. The machinery and backgrounds, which were the center of interest, were executed with great care and skill and with a surprising variety of imagination.

During science fictions first two decades, Frank R. Paul clearly dominated the field. He set the general style, which most other artists were happy to follow. And he executed far more cover paintings than any other artist could hope to equal. When Hugo Gernsback gave up Amazing Stories, Paul went with him to help start two new magazinesAir Wonder Stories and Science Wonder Stories; these were later combined into Wonder Stories, with Wonder Stories Quarterly following as a spin-off in which complete novels could be published.