One of the most difficult things when reading sci-fi is a question of visualisation. Depending on how good the story teller is and how colourful your imagination is, the experience can vary tremendously.Sometimes if I read a book it springs cinematically into my head, full formed and I can 'see' the settings, characters and ships in my head. Other times, its hard to visualise or imagine the more alien concepts. At such times, a little help is always welcome - something I found invaluable was 'Barlowes Guide to Extraterrestrials'. Published in 1979 by Wayne Douglas Barlowe and Ian Summers, it documents a selection of great science fiction aliens with a full page illustration and a description and biological workup of each one and the story in which it appears.
Its a beautiful and enthralling book - probably long out of print, but well worth looking for!
Ive scanned the 'index' sheets and comparative size chart which shows all of the entries as a big file, see how many you recognise!
Especially for Woodsy - No10 is the Overlord from 'Childhoods End'!
So good im blogging it twice - actually its a consequence of scanning the book as I cracked the spine and the pages loosened, so I thought id illustrate the kind of entry that Barlowes Guide to E.T's consists of. This is the Overlord, the dominant alien species from Clarkes 'Childhoods End', and an extremely demonic looking creature which so impressed me back in '79 that I went out and found a copy of the book to read. A lot of the illustrations in the volume compelled me to look into the stories behind them such as the cool alien arthropods from Hal Clements 'Mission of Gravity', the Mesklinites; which lived on an oblate world suffering extremes of gravity at various points on its surface or the truly alien, energy devouring Ixtl from Van Vogts 'Voyage of the Space Beagle'. Some of my explorations led to really great reads but in other ways, such as my expectations of seeing the 'Master' from the 'City of Gold and Lead' in the BBC tv series, 'The Tripods' - were a definite disappointment.
One of the most difficult things when reading sci-fi is a question of visualisation. Depending on how good the story teller is and how colourful your imagination is, the experience can vary tremendously.Sometimes if I read a book it springs cinematically into my head, full formed and I can 'see' the settings, characters and ships in my head. Other times, its hard to visualise or imagine the more alien concepts. At such times, a little help is always welcome - something I found invaluable was 'Barlowes Guide to Extraterrestrials'. Published in 1979 by Wayne Douglas Barlowe and Ian Summers, it documents a selection of great science fiction aliens with a full page illustration and a description and biological workup of each one and the story in which it appears.
