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70s Sci-Fi Art
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/70s-sci-fi-art-blog-index/
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Index
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/interview-rick-sternbacks-dolphin-suit/
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Check out a dolphin in a spacesuit
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/gwen-howerton-on-the-history-of-the-houston-blacklight-poster-company/
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Gwen Howerton on the History of the Houston Blacklight & Poster Company
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<div class="post-card-excerpt">The history of a lot of disposable media is somewhat under-recognized, from pulp magazines to paperbacks. But the more gimmick-heavy formats have it worse than others. In my experience, the '70s blacklight poster fad is one of the least documented (well, 4DX movies might have them beat,</div>
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/dreams-and-daydreams/
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Dreams and Daydreams
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<div class="post-card-excerpt">I got a great question on Bluesky recently.
Someone asked "I’m trying to find a piece that I believe you’ve posted before, featuring an Everyman reading and imagining himself Conan-like, iirc. It is similar to this Rockwell. Do you recall it?"
I didn't</div>
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/masks/
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Masks
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<div class="post-card-excerpt">Robert Silverberg's The Silent Invaders is set in a future where Earth is a galactic power and has been infiltrated by two separate alien species, each intent on winning Earth over to their side of an ancient battle.
The extraterrestrial double agents disguise themselves as humans through surgical</div>
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/odds-and-ends-6/
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Odds and Ends: April 2026
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<div class="post-card-excerpt">Star Trek historian extraordinaire Jörg Hillebrand has written a fascinating thread on Blue Sky, about the "Denebian slime devil."
The alien beast was made up for a throw-away insult in the classic "Trouble With Tribbles" episode, before getting a few different representations in manuals and</div>
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/spot-the-difference/
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Spot the Difference
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<div class="post-card-excerpt">Today, we're seeing double, with a big, wide-ranging list of various times that artists did very similar artworks for one reason or another.
We'll start with my favorite example of an artist playing a "spot the difference" game.
'Mass: Cathedral 1,'</div>
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/angus-mcbrides-legendary-beasts/
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Angus McBride's Legendary Beasts
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<div class="post-card-excerpt">Several years ago, I wrote a post showcasing the fantasy art of Angus McBride. I'd already devoted most of it to his terrific Middle Earth Role-Playing game art, so by the time I got around to mentioning his 1966 series on mythical creatures, I didn't</div>
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/space-trash-and-future-junkyards/
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Space Trash and Future Junkyards
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<div class="post-card-excerpt">The early iconography of science fiction was largely built in the 1930s by Frank R Paul and a handful of other science fiction magazine cover and interior artists: Sleek gleaming spaceships, bug-eyed-monster aliens, world-ending apocalypses, and stark art deco cities.
Decades later, a new crop of artists</div>
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/sea-monsters/
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Sea Monsters
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<div class="post-card-excerpt">I've talked before about the genre debt that science fiction owes to adventure fiction, and the sea is a big example. It's the "outer space" from before outer space became outer space: Unknowable, endless, and inhospitable enough to kill you fast if you don&</div>
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/space-shuttles/
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Space Shuttles
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<div class="post-card-excerpt">I almost called this post "strange shuttles," as a spiritual follow-up to my post dedicated to only the most offbeat types of dragons in retro speculative fiction art.
However! Even though I'm mostly interested in the inventive sci-fi style version of what a shuttle-</div>
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/angus-mckies-modular-future/
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Angus McKie's Modular Future
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<div class="post-card-excerpt">Angus McKie's an elusive artist. He had a flurry of stellar science fiction paperback covers across the mid-to-late '70s, before slowing down across the '80s and '90s while working across a variety of other mediums, including his own graphic novels, the 1981 Heavy</div>
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/odds-and-ends-5/
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Odds and Ends - March 2026
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<div class="post-card-excerpt">Featuring a protesting genie model, hauntology, and artwork from "the temple of love."</div>
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/robert-tinney-byte-magazine-and-beyond/
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<span class="post-card-primary-tag">deep dive</span>
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Robert Tinney: Byte Magazine and Beyond
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<div class="post-card-excerpt">Robert Tinney's a big name in retro tech. Here's a collection of lesser-known facts and art from the famed Byte magazine cover artist.</div>
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/80s-unicorns/
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'80s Unicorns by Sue Dawe and Andy Mack
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<div class="post-card-excerpt">Featuring the retro fantasy art of Sue Dawe and Andy Mack, with a cameo from Lisa Frank.</div>
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/robots-in-love/
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Robots in Love
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<div class="post-card-excerpt">Happy Valentine's Day week! Last year, I flew pretty close to the "getting too specific" sun with a post centered on bug aliens in love with humans.
This year, we're dropping the requirement that humans be involved and swapping out the proboscis for transistors.</div>
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/cool-spaceships/
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Cool Spaceships
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<div class="post-card-excerpt">Spaceships: The first frontier. Across the '70s and '80s, complex and colorful spaceships were the primary element that publishers everywhere thought to shoehorn onto any science fiction book cover.
The diverse visual style of all that spacecraft is impossibly to fully sum up, but in this post, we&</div>
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/strange-dragons/
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Strange Dragons
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<div class="post-card-excerpt">Someone on Tumblr recently shared this illustration with me: Kinuko Y. Craft's 1990 cover art for The Malacia Tapestry, by Brian Aldiss (and posted on Tumblr by sweathome).
I'm sorry to say that I had to look a second time before I noticed the creature hidden</div>
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/beams-from-flying-saucers/
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Beams From Flying Saucers
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<div class="post-card-excerpt">There's something about the old-school "flying saucer" UFO.
I've covered a wide range of classic sci-fi spaceship art, but the flying saucer is in a class by itself. It's mysterious, eerie, unknowable, even horrific. Cryptic and a cryptid.
There'</div>
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/ray-guns/
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Ray Guns
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<div class="post-card-excerpt">Science fiction magazine covers of the '30s-'50s loved thinly-reskinned adventure tropes. Skeletons on deserted islands became skeletons on deserted planets; Wild animal attacks became alien monster attacks. The violence inherent to the genre meant that pistols and rifles were naturally the next in line for a</div>
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/polar-bear-drawn-sleighs/
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Polar Bear-Drawn Sleighs
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<div class="post-card-excerpt">Next month is the tenth anniversary of a blog post I wrote for the Barnes and Noble Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog.
Like many cool art blogs owned by corporations, it is no longer online, so I don't feel too bad about scavenging that particular post off of</div>
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/70s-influence-fantasy-film/
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'70s Influences on Fantasy Film
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<div class="post-card-excerpt">Here's a shot from the 1978 animated Lord of the Rings movie, directed by Ralph Bakshi.
Here's a John Howe illustration – Howe worked as a chief conceptual designer on the live action 2000s trilogy.
And here's a shot from the 2001 Fellowship of the</div>
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/ed-emshwillers-four-armed-santa-claus/
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Ed Emshwiller's Four-Armed Santa Claus
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<div class="post-card-excerpt">For the first decade of Galaxy Science Fiction’s 30-year-run, Ed Emshwiller illustrated a total of eight Christmas-themed issues featuring the same character.
The version of Santa Claus on these 1950s-era covers had an appearance exactly in line with mid-century America's expectations, but</div>
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/orange-and-teal/
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Orange and Teal
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<div class="post-card-excerpt">If you were a movie nerd on the internet in the late 2000s/early 2010s, you're familar with orange and teal.
The two colors are opposed to each other on the color contrast wheel, so they look good together. And since orange roughly translates to the fleshy skin</div>
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/time-machines/
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Time Machines
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<div class="post-card-excerpt">Everyone knows, more or less, what a spaceship looks like: The exact shape varies, sure, but if it travels through space, it needs a hull and some thrusters. But what about a time machine? What does moving through time look like? No one knows.
In his classic novel The Time</div>
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/sheep-and-the-pastorial/
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Sheep and the Pastorial
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<div class="post-card-excerpt">I've mentioned before that a lot of what makes the '60s-'80s cross-section of sci-fi art history stand out is how much it focuses on organic life. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I feel like we've focused more on hardware in</div>
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/odds-and-ends-4/
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Odds and Ends: Nov 2025
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<div class="post-card-excerpt">Welcome to another grab-bag issue.
I'm starting with something particularly fascinating that I stumbled across. It's even about 1870s speculative fiction illustration, so it's technically within my purview here at the increasingly inaccurately named 70s Sci-Fi Art blog.
Here's the</div>
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70s Sci-Fi Art
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