Ex Libris: Alien Landscapes

Following directly on from Mechanismo, both stylistically and chronologically, come Alien Landscapes. Written by Robert Holdstock and Malcolm Edwards, the former who dabbled in science fiction novels such as 'Where the Time Winds Blow' and also wrote the rather good 'Tour of the Universe'. Alien Landscapes took an entirely different tack from Mechanismo, as all the artwork was prepared specifically for the book. Also the book dealt specifically with a number of famous science fiction novel settings:

When I came across the book, I bought it for the art. After i'd read the book, I then went on to read some of the books covered in the album. Most of the settings I was completely unfamiliar with, so reading about the setting and the story behind it gave a good insight into the tale itself. One or two, such as Anne McCaffreys Pern sequence and Eros, the artificial asteroid world, didn't appeal to me at all, but Arthur C Clarkes Rendezvous with Rama and Hothouse certainly struck chords with me.

 The principal reason I bought the book was for the Rama illustrations, which were by airbrush maestro Jim Burns who had created the Gaussi Fighter on the Mechanismo cover. Reading about the autonomous Biots inside the Rama spaceship and the adventures of the crew as they explored the ship, while being able to see the alien designs in glorious colour, meant that finding a copy of Clarkes Rama was a must.

The other book which I was driven to read was Brian Aldiss Hothouse. Written in 1962 as a series of novellas, the story concerns the Erth in the distant future, the sun has gone nova and the moon has been stilled in its course. Plant life has taken over every ecological niche and humans have been driven down the food chain and live a precarious existence among the branches of the giant Banyan tree, preyed upon by motile plants and carnivourous insects. In Mechanismo and Tour of the Universe, i'd come across the rather abstract art of Bob Fowkes and taken an immediate and total dislike to his weird style. In the Hothouse section however, Fowkes presented a series of verdant Rousseau style panoramas that were rich with hidden detail, reminding me of the cover to the collected edition of Lord of the Rings, with the creatures of Mirkwood and Mordor hiding behind the letters and between the tree roots. The story was quite comical and sinister in several ways, but Aldiss used language as creatively as the theme of the story, naming the various creatures in an odd ryhming fashion, such as 'whistlethistle', crocksock, tree bees and plant ants. There is a high degree of symbiosis present in the story, the hero of the tale, Gren, a human is colonised by a sentient morel fungus which has developed intelligence superior to mans. The Tummy-Belly Men are a gruesome example of plant and animal integration as a large plant with mesmeric properties, lures humans close enough to be caught in its tendrils and then inserts a sharp creeper deep into the spinal cord to achieve control over its human slaves.

Later in the story we are introduced to a strange mutant creature, half human and half fish, the Sodal-Ye, who attempts to separate Gren from the voracious and controlling Morel, by luring it to a new human host in the form of a baby.

The book has several lavish colour spreads for each sci-fi novel and an in depth examination of each setting. The artwork is all uniformly of a fantastic standard and allows the reader to gather an insight into the background to some very well known tales.