Worlds of Tomorrow, June, 1963, featuring “Spaceman on A Spree”, by Mack Reynolds [Unknown artist]

While the overwhelming majority of images at this blog are of illustrations from my own books, magazines, and random paraphernalia, a relative few – such as in “this” post – have been taken from images (JPGs) already available on the Internet, or, adapted from PDFs. I most commonly accessed files in the latter format via the Luminist Archive, or, the Pulp Magazine Archive, which seem (?!?) to a degree, to share the came content.

That’s how I found the below images from the June ’63 issue of Worlds of Tomorrow, which features illustrations from the relatively-lesser-known-artist Norman Nodel, for Mack Reynold’s “Spaceman on a Spree”. Which fact brings with it a caveat: I’ve not read much of Reynold’s fiction. But, what I have read has left me with a feeling of puzzled, if not disappointed, ambivalence. He certainly was a more than capable creator of plot, theme, and characters, and his stories – such as “Speakeasy”, from the January ’63 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction – feature innovative and novel technology. But, I was very disappointed with the very abrupt, and abruptly pessimistic, ending. I don’t know if such a literary trajectory is characteristic of all his tales, but it did seem so for “Genus Traitor”, from the August ’64 issue of Analog.

Regardless, I was favorably struck by Nodel’s illustrations in this issue, which I suppose were created in pen & ink. Utterly different in style from the work of Finlay, Emshwiller, and Rogers, his drawings fall more in the spectrum of those by Gray Morrow and Dan Adkins, which I suppose is reflective of the era in which they were created.

Hmm. Maybe now I’ll read this story, after all?