2026
A friend posted a book cover on Threads the other day: the trippy, verdant jacket of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest. I’ve still never read the novel, but every time I see this cover, my mind is boggled by how gorgeous it is. These old vintage paperbacks rarely make it easy to learn who painted them, but a little digging on ISFDB turned up a name: Richard Powers. Which rang a faint bell, because I had a post about him sitting half-drafted in my files, abandoned at some point and promptly forgotten.
So I asked my friend Adam Rowe, of the 70s Sci-Fi Art Tumblr, author of Worlds Beyond Time, whether he knew of the artist, fully aware the answer would arrive as an immediate and faintly insulted yes, obviously. (I am projecting here. Adam is too nice to act insulted. But if it were me, I would have been!) So yes, he’d written a whole section on Powers in his book, and somewhere in the middle of telling me about it a few days ago, I experienced a mortified flare of recognition. Huh. This sounded …really familiar.
Reader, I am a moron. I had already singled Powers out. In my own interview with Adam about his book, which I read cover to cover, Powers was one of the artists I’d fixated on and asked him about directly. He is not, as it turns out, a new-to-me artist so much as something my brain once glommed onto and then immediately cached away into storage to make room to keep more important stuff like the lyrics to Weird Al’s “Mr. Frump in the Iron Lung.”
Anyway. That cover! Drowned in a world of green, a wet watercolor green that bleeds past its own edges. A woman’s face surfaces out of a tangle of pale fronds, except her hair keeps unraveling back into them, so you can’t say where the woman ends and the forest starts. Pink and magenta flecks drift down over all of it, blossoms or spores or some secret mycological third thing. Off to one side, low, sits a small dark seed-head fringed like a sea urchin, faintly lit, a little private sun. And along the very bottom, so faint you could miss them, two or three figures stand sketched in bare outline, peering up at her.
No two are quite alike; the work is restless and wildly varied, but a handful of recurring elements surface often enough to feel like a signature. Bodies that blur past their own outlines: a face blooming open in the palm of a cupped hand; a woman condensing out of a dark husk with only her face and red hair finished; a whole head built from scabbed, scraped-on texture, the face under it carved and totemic and very nearly tiki, with hard little triangles and dots and dashes sifting down like television static. Coral and anemone growths pocked all over with neat ringed holes that resolve into eyes the longer you stare into them.
Half the time, you can’t tell whether you’re looking at biology or machinery: a reef on one cover is strung with glowing filaments, like someone ran a current through it; a hand on another is freckled with little starbursts that could be sores or suns. Whole cover flooded in a single color, a sodden green or a hot arterial red or a low-sodium orange, and shapes surfacing strangely out of it. Most science fiction art of the era at least did you the courtesy of somewhere familiar to stand: a rocket, a ridge, some square-jawed soul in a spacesuit. Powers does… not.
The scale slides around while you watch, planetary one moment and microscopic the next, and a lot of it has a certain Joan Miró looseness, all biomorphic shapes and little calligraphic marks adrift on a flat field, an alphabet no one was ever meant to read. The covers were forever getting saddled with clumsy packaging, type clomping across the image or a painting cropped down past all sense, and the weirdness underneath came through all the same.
Then, every so often, he’d do something like this. The Midwich Cuckoos is the odd one out: almost no color at all, just black brush-ink on cream, a band of khaki, a single pool of gold. He’s pared the whole thing down to a few gestural strokes — a great dark shape in profile, a head or a brooding hill or some sleeping animal, with one enormous ringed golden eye held open in the middle of it. Two small children stand up on the black mass, drawn in the barest scribble, and a little steeple leans in at the lower edge. Elegant and hushed and graphic where the others are bold and buzzy and chaotic, and yet there’s that eye again, the same one surfacing in all the coral and the anemones.
Ah, the horror anthologies, these are the ones I love best! The same hand behind all that hushed green tenderness moonlighted in the charnel house, and bless his little macabre heart for it! The Zacherley collections give us a leering ghoul risen from the flames to stir a vulture’s skull into his own bubbling muck, and a gangrenous green face sloughing apart at the jaw. The Graveyard Reader is a sodden cluster of glistening pods, swollen and eyed, one of them cradling a tiny human face with its mouth wrenched wide. And then — because there is always some wretched little detail waiting to undo you — there in the corner of Midnight Snacks, a prim miss lady in her pink finery, smiling out sweet as you please amid the carnage, as though she’d wandered in from some other, far more wholesome book and gotten herself pasted into this one for reasons known only to God and Richard Powers.
Richard M. Powers (1921–1996) spent decades smuggling Surrealist and abstract painting where nobody thought to look for it, on the fronts of cheap science fiction paperbacks, and did it hundreds of times over for Ballantine, Doubleday, and what seems like very nearly everyone else along the way. What a fabulous weirdo! After writing all of this out, you’d think now I will remember who he is, but eh. You know me. I’m not making any promises.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
