The PorPor Books Blog: SF and Fantasy Books 1968

Visions of the Future
Edited by Janet Sacks
Introduction by A. E. Van Vogt
Chartwell Books, Inc. 1976

Science Fiction Monthly was published in the UK from 1974 - 1976 by paperback publisher New English Library. The Monthly was a large-size magazine that featured high-quality reproductions of sci-fi art, inserted without staples and intended to be removed, unfolded, and hung as posters.

Visions of the Future (128 pp), edited by Janet Sacks, compiles art from the Monthly. At 13.5 x 10 inches in dimension, the book is expansive enough to adequately showcase its contents.

While some of the most prominent sci-fi artists in the UK and the USA were featured in the pages of Science Fiction Monthly, and will be familiar to anyone who was a fan of sci-fi in the 70s, others are rather obscure.

The showcased art spans the gamut from figurative pieces indicative of the New Wave aesthetic, to the more realistic art exemplified by Chris Foss. One area where Visions of the Future falls short is that while it provides the titles for the featured pieces, it doesn't give any information about the original art (acrylic, oil, airbrush, etc.).

Jim Burns, Beyond Bedlam

Visions of the Future can be seen as the UK counterpart to Ian Summers's 1978 book about American sci-fi art,Tomorrow and Beyond. Between them, the two books provide a good overview of 70s commercial art for the sci-fi market. Copies of Visions in good condition can be had for reasonable prices, so if you are nostalgic for the art that served as covers for books and magazines of the era, this is worth picking up.

Lucinda Colwell, Panic O'Clock

The cover art (above) for the 1974 novel Panic O'Clock by UK author Christopher Hodder-Williams is the most striking piece in Visions of the Future. According to this post at the Bear Alley blog, Lucinda Cowell (b. 1947) is an American-born artist and graphic designer who first set up a print shop in London in 1972, afterwards enjoying considerable success in the fields of commercial art and advertising well into the 1990s.