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 This portfolio consists of (then) unpublished work, though a number of the pictures from this collection later did crop up as covers.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. ( )