Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories were particularly suitable venues for Virgil Finlay’s art, the page size of both publications allowing Finlay’s painstaking emphasis on detail and shading, rendering illustrations of a near photographic nature, to be displayed to maximum advantage. For instance, the lead illustration for Jack Vance’s tale “Abercrombie Station”, on pages 10-11 in the March, 1952, issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories...
Another Jack Vance tale illustrated by Finlay was “The Houses of Iszm”, in the Spring, 1954 issue of Startling Stories. Not actually having yet read the tale (well, I possess the Ace Double edition shown below; it’s in my queue of books-I-hope-to-read-someday, the “end” of which lies far beyond the visible horizon…), the figure of the young woman is probably allegorical and symbolic – there may be no actual female protagonist, as such – since the story revolves around the efforts of one Ailie Farr to steal a tree that is specifically female.
The illustrations below were downloaded from Archive.org, and edited using Photoshop to render the best possible images.
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Illustration by Virgil Finlay, pages 10-11.
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Illustration by Virgil Finlay, page 19
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“The people of Izsm lived in homes that were alive. Their dwelling places were elaborate, lush hollow trees, wherein the very walls, floors, ceilings, and even the furniture and plumbing, were all part of the living, thriving plant.
The Iszic, alone of all the people of the universe, possessed the secret of cultivating such a dwelling. The result was that they were holders of a gigantic, lucrative monopoly, exporting millions of such home to all the other worlds.
For decades, aliens from other worlds, including Earth, had been desperately trying to steal a female house-seed in order to break the monopoly. The Iszic security force had squashed every attempt successfully.
This is the story of yet another plot – the most ingenious of all – to carry off a prize worth billions, just one seed from The Houses of Iszm.”
(Ace Double 77525, published 1964, cover by Dean Ellis)
References
The Houses of Iszm, at Wikipedia
The Houses of Iszm, at Goodreads
