British writer Charles Eric Maine (David McIlwain) authored at least sixteen novels and four screenplays, as well as detective thrillers under the pen names Richard Rayner and Robert Wade. He may be best known for the dystopian 1958 Ace novel World Without Men, which features cover art by Edmund Emshwiller. Regardless of one’s opinion about the novel’s literary merits, this has to be one of the most striking covers ever published by Ace, let alone among the very many works created by Ed Emshwiller. His model for the startled red-irised lady was his wife Carol, who appearance was the template for the features of women in many of Emsh’s paintings.
Purple Hair? – check!
(Green Hair? – check!)
Silver Lipstick? – check!
Bullet Style Artillery Shell Top? – check!
Jane Jetson style geometric flat-top collar? – check!
Below is Ed Emshwiller’s original painting. The subtleties of shading and color are here much more obvious than in the cover as printed. Particularly interesting are the eye-like red sphere at the upper right – shades of HAL 9000! – and, the antenna-like set of wires and rods set against a pink background, in the upper center. I don’t recall where I actually found this image; it might have been at Heritage Auctions. (Well, maybe. It’s been a while.)
The book was republished in 1972 under the title Alph. Dean Ellis’ cover art connotes the novel’s theme far more sedately, and perhaps more effectively, than that of Ace’s 1958 edition.
For Further Digression, Distraction, and Diversion
A straightforward example of Richard Powers’ late 1950s science fiction cover art….
With colors ranging from white, to bright orange, to dark greenish gray, to black, the cover shows the surface of the moon in (highly) imaginary, (very) exaggerated, (strongly) symbolic fashion: There are neither craters nor chain-like walls of jagged-peaked mountains, nor flat plains of dust, but spires projecting from an irregular foreground. A woman’s face, formed from a lined pattern of dots, is at lower right. Near the center is the only conventional element in the painting: The diminutive figure of an astronaut in a dark spacesuit, only visible because he’s backlit by a background glowing white.
Regardless of the cover’s originality, the novel itself – having gone through nine printings since 1957, the latest having been in 2021, is fairly straightforward and conventional. As described by Andrew Darlington [spoiler alert!], “1956 – ‘High Vacuum’ (Hodder & Stoughton, 12/6d, 192pp, Corgi, 1959, USA Ballantine), the ‘Operational Programme’ of the ‘Ministry of Astronautics’ undertakes the first lunar landing in Moonship Alpha. Three of the four crewmen survive the initial wreck, plus the female stowaway, the second, Russian ship is sabotaged, Kenneth F Slater says ‘although there is a survivor, there is not a ‘happy ending’ to the story. It is all the more realistic for that’ (‘Nebula’ no.25, October 1957). Leslie Flood adds ‘the story collapses into formula melodrama’ until ‘a dream glimpse into the future of the moon-base involving the stowaway’s spaceman son – immediately belied by the child being stillborn’ (‘New Worlds’ no.66, December 1957).”
So, it seems that the novel is primarily plot and character driven, rather than being founded in hard SF.
SURVIVAL…
“Vacuum is the first and last enemy of the astronaut. In space, vacuum is normal. In space, therefore, air is abnormal, and life forms depending on air for survival in space are in abnormal state. The establishment and maintenance of the abnormal is therefore the beginning and the end of interplanetary flight.”
The Handbook of the Ministry of Astronautics
Charles Eric Maine, author of The Timeliner and The Isotope Man, writes a tale of a grim race with time. The Alpha rocket is the first manned expedition from Earth to get to the Moon. It makes a crash-landing, and facilities for “the maintenance of the abnormal” are sharply cut. There is enough oxygen to support the four survivors for five weeks – or two for ten, or one for twenty… Nerve-wracking because it is so matter-of-fact, this is a high tension story of ordinary men in an extraordinary situation, of decisions quietly made that are literally of life and death importance, and, in the end, of the naked determination of the human will to survive – at any cost.
“For some very interesting reasons, 1953 was a year when over forty different science fiction and fantasy magazine titles appeared on newsstands in English-speaking countries. I haven’t tried to research non-English countries. And I’m not even sure I’ve found all the magazines published in English. Some of the titles below are reprint titles, but most of these magazines published new fiction.” – James Wallace Harris, May, 2022
…so has written James Wallace Harris, at his insightful and entertaining blog, Classics of Science Fiction, in the aptly-titled essay The 1953 SF&F Magazine Boom. More than an analysis of the social, cultural, and economic impetus for the profusion of such magazines in the early- to mid-1950s, James posits an explanation as to why readers and aficionados of science fiction of different generations are primarily attracted to works published during a given time period. James suggests that the stories having the greatest impact upon a reader (I think this might be extrapolated to any and all literary genres) would be those whose years of publication were coincident with a reader’s childhood, and which – as a matter of timing – would subsequently form the focus of his reading by the time he reached his teens and twenties. As he explains, “I imprinted on 1950s science fiction because that’s what I first read. I embraced the 1960s and 1970s science fiction because that was my generation’s science fiction while I was going to high school and college. Now that I’m old, my mind is returning to the science fiction of the 1950s. I was born in 1951, so I don’t remember 1953 except through old books, movies, music, and TV shows I discovered in the 1960s.”
I agree with James’ thoughts, but my case was (is) a little bit different. Though born very (quite very!) late in the 50s, my tastes in science fiction, while now quite eclectic, generally focus upon works spanning the 40s, 50s, and early 60s, rather than the mid-60s and later. I suppose this is because my interest in science-fiction primarily arose during my early and mid twenties, when I discovered and was (quietly) enraptured by the tales I encountered in two major anthologies (the covers of both of which are illustrated at this blog!): Asimov and Greenberg’s Isaac Asimov Present The Great SF Stories, and, Wollheim and Carr’s World’s Best Science Fiction. Both anthologies – one to two books published per year, for each – were structured chronologically, such that each edition comprised a selection of stories published during a specific calendar year, moving forward in time. So, having symbolically moved through time with the reading of each book, in each series, my literary tastes never became focused too strongly on a particular decade. Instead, they centered around specific authors or sub-genres.
Prior my discovery of those two anthologies, my only substantive exposure to science fiction was during high school, through Volume I of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, (junior high) and, Robert Heinlein’s The Past Through Tomorrow (senior high; I still have my original copies of both. Though I greatly enjoyed several (not all) of the stories in those works, my primary reading during my teens was focused on history and aviation, “in general”.
Yet, I do have a point of resonance with James’ analysis: I never really developed much of an interest in science-fiction published from the 1970s onward. But, in recent years I’ve been branching out. A little. I thought Dan Simmons’ Hyperion series was absolutely spectacular (okay, to be specific, Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion; regretfully not so much Endymion and The Rise of Endymion) and, recently, Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy.
So…
James’ post includes a list of the titles of forty-eight science-fiction and fantasy magazines that were available in English-speaking countries in 1953. Among these is William L. Crawford’s Spaceway, which was published from 1953 through 1955 and resurrected between 1969 to 1970, for a total of twelve issues. The ISFDB reveals that cover artists for the 1950s issues were Mel Hunter and Paul Blaisdell, and for the 1970s issues Morris Scott Dollens.
Here’s the cover of the issue Volume 1, Number 1, which, having been published in December, was the only issue of 1953…
Here’s a closer view of Mel Hunter’s cover art. Like Beyond Fantasy Fiction and the early issues of Galaxy – and unlike Astounding and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction – the illustration occupies a specific portion of the cover, with title and other text set above and alongside it, rather than overlapping onto the artistic “real estate”. (I like that.)
Aside from illustrating a predicament inherent to perilous planetary plunges, notice how Hunter has depicted each astronaut in a spacesuit of a different color. (Yellow, orange, green, blue, and red.) Where have we sees this before? Could it have been the 1950 film Destination Moon? Otherwise, despite the our explorers’ rather dire situation, the combination of a star-dappled bluish-black sky, a spacecraft vertically perched upon a frozen plain, icy precipices (water ice? carbon dioxide ice? methane clathrate? frozen nitrogen?) in gray, off-white, and traces of red (tholines?) – and of course, the colorfully suited explorers themselves – lends for a pleasing scene. (Despite the danger.)
Mel Hunter’s other contribution to the magazine’s inaugural issue is this leading illustration for Charles Eric Maine’s “Spaceways to Venus”.
As far as the impact and significance of Spaceway? Well, when I made a cursory glance at the table-of-contents of each issue in the magazine’s issue grid at the ISFDB, I had no glimmer of recognition for any story title. And, it seems that the magazine’s 1969-1970 iteration recycled stories from its 1950s issues, and, a few works from the 1930s.
So, at least some of the other early covers were nice!
For Your Further Digression, Distraction, and Diversion
“Science fiction is prophetic, not in the sense that it predicts the future in empirical detail, but in the sense that it understands causality in the longest possible term.” – Thomas F. Bertonneau
I don’t know if Alex Schomburg’s striking cover art actually pertains to Charles Eric Maine’s story “Wall Of Fire” (well, p r o b a b l y not…!) but regardless, his dual-sphere spacecraft is strikingly consistent in design to the vehicle that graces the cover of the June, 1957 issue Satellite Science Fiction in my prior post.
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In any event, this issue of Satellite Science Fiction is notable as having been the venue of the first American publication of the 1955 novel “Crisis 2000“ – as “Wall Of Fire“ – by British writer Charles Eric Maine (David McIlwain). The author of at least sixteen novels and four screenplays, Maine also authored detective thrillers under the pen names Richard Rayner and Robert Wade.
