Expedition to Earth, by Arthur C. Clarke – September, 1971 (December, 1954) [Unknown artist – Vincent Di Fate?…]

Richard Powers’ trio of covers for Ballantine Books’ late 1950s editions of Arthur C. Clarke’s anthologies Expedition to Earth, Reach for Tomorrow, and, his novel Childhood’s End, show a level of originality, symbolic power, entrancing ambiguity, and just-plain-old-unusualness that stand out even for that artist’s unique body of work. You can view the cover of the 1954 edition, here. However, when Ballantine republished these three books in the early 1970s, a different illustrative path was followed. Rather than reprise Powers’ original art, or avail the skills of contemporary artists such as Jack Gaughan, Paul Lehr, or John Schoenherr, the covers of all three editions featured works by a (yet) anonymous illustrator. The cover art for each book is representational, conventionally “spacey”, and different in format from much science-fiction cover art – then and now – in that it occupies only a portion of the cover’s “real estate”, the remainder of the cover is simply plain, blank, and empty. (Well, the title, price, and publisher’s name still show!)

The inspiration for each painting is – for anybody in the early 70s, and still today in 2023 – immediately recognizable: Each composition was inspired by a different aspect of the spacecraft appearing in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. For Expedition to Earth and Reach for Tomorrow, the cover art is inspired by the Jovian expedition ship Discovery One; for Childhood’s End, by the Aries 1b lunar lander.

You can see this below, on the cover of the 1971 edition of Expedition to Earth.

The artist clearly used the spherical command / control / habitation module of the Discovery as the inspiration for his painting. Though different in detail from the Discovery, the sphere retains three evenly-spaced, equally-sized circular hatches of the Discovery, inspired by the original craft’s pod bay doors. It also features the Discovery’s line of cockpit viewports above the sphere’s centerline. It’s very different in having two almost-stuck-on parabolic antennas and a radar mast. There’s also that big boxy clunky rectangular thing stuck to its side, which I think was inspired by the docking port of the earth-orbiting space station which appears early and briefly in the 2001 film, when Pan Am’s space clipper Orion III approaches the station, particularly at 1:22. Enjoy, from Screen Themes:

Curious; the Internet Speculative Fiction Database entry for these three early 1970s Ballantine editions indicates (correctly) that the cover art for each is uncredited and unsigned.

What happened? Were the rights singed over to Ballantine?

So, in thought, just an idea: The paintings look like (look like!) the work of Vincent Di Fate.

(Just an idea!)

Here’s Lawrence D. Miller’s 1984 diagram of the components of Discovery One….

And, at Spacedock’s YouTube channel, the video “2001 A Space Odyssey: Discovery One | Extended Ship Breakdown (May 27, 2011)” shows the spacecraft’s components, in the context of both that film, and the later 2010: The Year We Make Contact.