Chris Foss (1) (1946–)

This substantial book reproduces the bulk of the commercial work of the British paperback cover illustrator Chris Foss. Foss' work started appearing in the early 1970s and changed the face of science fiction paperback publishing, with his strange, colourful, sometimes asymmetric spaceships, carrying a profusion of aerials, probes, intakes, wasp stripes, claws and windows. Lots of windows...

The book opens with a biographical note from Foss' daughter, Imogene. This reveals Foss' roots firmly in the post-war Hornby/ Meccano generation; but also, he was born in 1946 on the Channel Island of Guernsey, which (together with neighbouring Jersey) were recovering from the German occupation of World War II and which left the islands littered with the structures of Hitler's Atlantic Wall. All these things - the model-making, with railways and Airfix kits a key part of growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, and the influence of abandoned monolithic concrete structures - made a huge impression on Foss. Early on, he showed an aptitude for art, and all these influences came out in his paintings and drawings. He studied art at Cambridge and started submitting work, first to student magazines and then to commercial outlets. One of his early submissions was to Bob Guccione's Penthouse, and Guccione took Foss under his wing. His promotion of Foss led to him getting his first major commercial sale, to the Sunday Times Magazine, illustrating an article on extra-sensory perception. This brought him even wider recognition.

Not only did Foss get to illustrate many science fiction paperback covers, but he also covered war books (fiction and non-fiction) and thrillers. A different sort of commission saw him produce many illustrations for Alex Comfort's The Joy of Sex; and he came to the attention of film makers. Foss did conceptual design work on Superman, Alien, and Alessando Jodorowsky's abortive project to film Frank Herbert's Dune. Later, Stanley Kubrick would approach him for conceptual work on his film A.I., unrealised at Kubrick's death but taken up and completed by Steven Spielberg.

Foss' influence cannot be under-estimated. He changed the face of science fiction publishing; his visual language informed many film makers, and much of the look of Star Wars, the later incarnations of Star Trek and many more films and tv shows is inspired by Foss' work. His spaceships are lived-in, and well-used; although his creations are way beyond human scale, they are nonetheless very human creations.

Although I'd been reading science fiction in one form or another since the middle 1960s, it was seeing Chris Foss artwork on the covers of novels by E.E. 'Doc' Smith or Isaac Asimov that excited me. Foss is eleven years older than me, but we are of the same generation and have the same influences. I was delighted to see and meet him at the 2014 World Science Fiction Convention in London. He looks avuncular, but given that he was moving in some of the hottest media circles in "Swinging Sixties" London, his repertoire of stories was vast and raucous, rather like his paintings!

In recent years, some "fine artists" have copied his work, claiming their canvasses as "found objects within the media landscape". Imitation is supposedly the sincerest form of flattery, though the artists who have done the copying would normally turn their noses up at "commercial illustration". Well, there is more inventiveness in Foss' work than in a dozen "fine artists"; there had to be, because his clients wanted something eye-catching and different to promote their books and to get punters to pick those books up rather than some other publisher's. And they wanted it to a deadline. It worked; and Foss is beloved by very many people worldwide. This book is a fine tribute to a lifetime spent being inventive to order, a skill few possess.… (more)

One of the first books published in the UK devoted entirely to SF art, this large-format paperback was a vehicle for the work of Chris Foss, who (it seemed) single-handedly provided cover art of most of the paperback sf published in Britain during the 1970s and 1980s. His trademarks were chunky, industrial ships, spouting antennae and windows in equal profusion, finished in garish primary colours and geometrical patterns. Human figures rarely featured in his paintings save as tiny, distant figures, which led to the uninformed saying that he obviously couldn't paint people. Which was odd, because Foss had provided all the illustrations to Dr Alex Comfort's seminal (so to speak) best-seller, The Joy of Sex...

Foss' trademark work was probably responsible for a lot of sf sales during the period of his popularity; certainly, I was attracted to the genre in part because of the very different look his work gave book covers. Brian Aldiss provided the foreword to this book, which in part takes the form of a reported conversation over lunch. The name 'Terence Cuneo' cropped up, and certainly Aldiss felt that Foss and Cuneo shared a love of the machine as art-form. This portfolio consists of (then) unpublished work, though a number of the pictures from this collection later did crop up as covers. If anyone still feels that Foss had no feeling for mood or atmosphere, then I suggest they look at the picture on page 13, which depicts a spaceship scrapyard. It is just as I imagined such a scrapyard would look.

I understand Foss now lives in virtual exile in the Channel Islands. His agent has tried to tempt him to come to sf conventions in the UK on quite a few occasions, without success. I hope she keeps trying.… (more)

"Realms of Fantasy" takes an in-depth look at the worlds created by by some of our most imaginative authors at a time (the early 80s) when the fantasy genre was enjoying tremendous popularity. The illustration is top-notch and really adds to the book. Though the works are varied, the settings can be divided into 5 catagories: stories set in the ancient past, set in present-day lost worlds, set on other planets, set in the distant future, and stories set in fantasy earths quite separate from our own. All of them are fascinating but my personal favorites are the alternate earths.… (more)