I judge books by their covers.

In the realm of science fiction — where voluptuous green-skinned babes and slimy androids roam free — an illustration can make or break the experience of a novel. The good ones build a tangible landscape, a breathing world, out of a writer’s imagination. They can stand on their own as fragments of the greater canon. The bad ones, however, can completely misrepresent an author’s intent and make you embarrassed to be carrying around a piece of trashy pulp. They can also be prohibitive: I didn’t pick up my beloved Philip K. Dick for years because of the hellishly nineties design of the easily-available Vintage editions. Which is why I’d like herewith to initiate a series of Space Canon educational tidbits about the artists of science fiction, a subject I’m only beginning to explore.

Today’s lesson is about Jim Burns, the Welsh illustrator whose airbrushed landscapes have graced countless book covers since the early 1970s, from Arthur C. Clarke, Philip José Farmer, and Isaac Asimov to several editions of Dune and over thirty Robert Silverberg books. Burns is a classicist with an immediately recognizable style and a tendency to form space babes against intricate technical machines and spaceships. Highly esteemed in the world of capital-F Fandom, he’s won the Hugo award for best professional artist three times. In the early 80s, Burns worked with fellow St. Martins School of Art alumnus Ridley Scott on Blade Runner, doing concept design for things like the film’s police spinner and various urban details (the job eventually went to insane-o visual futurist Syd Mead).

Burns is still working; he’s published a handful of his own books, including Planet Story (written by Harry Harrison), Mechanismo, Transluminal: The Paintings of Jim Burns, and Imago. You can read a fairly recent interview with him here.

If you are into science fiction and fantasy illustration, especially the vintage kind, immediately bookmark Sci-Fi-O-Rama and Ski-ffy, two phenomenal, well-curated resources with fantastic scans of early Burns and countless other unsung illustrators that will blow your mind.

Earlier this year, I received a charming email from a pair of Helsinki-based artists and designers who work under the name of OK DO. OK DO is a socially-minded design think tank and online publication, and they wanted to know if I’d contribute to a new publication and exhibition project they were working on. The project, Science Poems, was perfectly up my alley: a variety of articles and work loosely structured around the “poetry and multi-sensorial aesthetics of natural sciences rather than their functionality and logic.”

For the occasion, I wrote a short piece about the aesthetics of Science Fiction: The Science Poem Manifesto. Banged out in a lucid forty-five minutes, it was my most effortless piece of writing in recent memory, presumably because the themes had been banging around in my head, unexpressed, for a decade.

As Stanislaw Lem wrote, science fiction “comes from a whorehouse but…wants to break into the palace where the most sublime thoughts of human history are stored.” Within the shadowy, grimacing frame of its own poetics, it does. Because the sublime thoughts of human history have always been projected outwards, to the vastness outside of our minds. Science fiction is a movement outwards, not inwards: “up, up, and away.”

Science fiction knows, like the science poets do, that the sky begins at our feet.

The science poets look at our sky and they see three moons, or a ringed planet in sultry sunset; they hear a voice whispering across the void, hear the malice in its tone, but still find how to forgive it. Science poets see a tentacle and know its embrace. Science fiction is the grief of tomorrow and the horror of today. Science poetry makes no illusions.

The finished Science Poems book is an honest-to-goodness marvel, marrying interviews with chemists, astronomers, curators, and fashion designers with short fiction, photography, and aesthetic references to everything from John Cage to electromagnetism. It features discussions with Marc-Olivier Wahler, curator of Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Cosmic Wonder, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, and Paola Antonelli, senior curator of Art and Design at the Museum of Modern Art. I am proud to have been involved.

Read the entire Science Poem Manifesto here.

As far as I know, the Science Poems book itself is only available for sale online via Napa Books in Helsinki. If you live in Europe, a list of available booksellers can be found here. Also, a lot of the content — all exceptional — is available for free online. Lastly, a note to our continental readership: OK DO will be having a book party for Science Poems next Thursday, August 5th at Berlin’s Do You Read Me?! bookshop.