Illustrator John Giunta – Literary Art and Illustration

Infinity Science Fiction’s opening issue features cover art depicting a scene that – precisely because it’s at once disturbing and fascinating – makes one do a double-take and wonder, “What is going on here? What’s the story behind a women marrying (well, she’s wearing a veil, so it must be so!) a simulacrum of a man formed of nothing but his circulatory system? We can’t see her face, but her posture betrays neither reluctance or hesitation. Otherwise, Robert Engle’s cover, in terms of colors and shading and light and dark, is quite pleasing. A yellow horizon rises to soft green; the soft green to grayish-blue; the grayish-blue to dark blue; the whole, illuminated from the horizon.

While one might think that Robert Engle chose (created) this subject matter to attract attention to the (then) new magazine by virtue of its strangeness, such isn’t the case: As indicated in the table of contents, the cover is, “Suggested by Winston Marks’ Kid Stuff“. This is so: The painting conveys the premise, mood, and at least partially, the story’s plot. But, there are neither spacecraft no alien worlds in the tale; Engle probably tossed those in to show visual tropes typical of the general theme of science fiction.

As for Marks’ story, it’s remarkably short at only six pages, unlike William Tenn’s “the Sickness” and Frank McCormack’s “Phantom Duel”, which are the two novelettes carried in this issue. Ironically – something that the editor and publisher couldn’t have foreseen, the cover story, “The Star” by Arthur C. Clarke at only five pages (placed at the end of the magazine), having proven to have been far more well-remembered than Mark’s tale (if the latter is remembered at all!), would I think have been a far better suitable subject for the cover painting.

As for “Kid Stuff”, it’s light (well, very light) humorous (well, ever-so-slightly humorous), and neither deep nor profound. However, while I won’t give away the details “here”, the very brief tale’s plot has a remarkable parallel with that of the Star Trek (original series) episode “The Squire of Gothos” – a parallel I won’t discuss here. Given the time-frame of Marks’ story and the Star Trek episode (November of 1955, and January 12, 1967 – a gap of twelve years), this suggests – to me – that episode writer Mark Schneider, who ” worked in television and film between the 1950s and the 1980s,” either directly read, or was familiar with Mark’s story.

You can view the full episode of “Squire of Gothos” at Daily Motion, with the proviso that the video has been vertically transposed such that left is now right, and right now left. (However, rest assured this change does not induce hallucinations!)

I’ve transcribed and formatted “Kid Stuff” as a PDF file (akin to Paul W. Fairman’s “The Woman in Skin 13“), which you can download here. So… You can read Marks’ story yourself, to judge the parallel between text and television.

In closing, here’s John Giunta’s interior art for Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Star”, about which you can read more at the (highly recommended) blog Classics of Science Fiction.