Thursday 7 July 2016

Psychedelic Sci-Fi Round-up:
In The Kingdom of the Beasts
by Brian M. Stableford
(Quartet, 1971)



Yes folks, after his novel ‘To Challenge Chaos’ appeared in our last Psychdelic Sci-Fi Round Up, young Brian Stableford is back to bamboozle us again with more headache-inducing, order/chaos themed science fantasy hullabaloo… but thankfully on this occasion, illustrator Patrick Woodroffe has a suitably retina-punishing cover design on hand to help get our poor minds softened up in advance. Pretty freakin’ far-out.

A specialist in this sort of thing, Woodroffe went on to bestride the ‘70s with a wealth of similarly intense fantasy/sci-fi artwork, as well as creating a handful of stone-cold classic prog era LP covers, including Greenslade’s Time & Tide (which I bought as teenager based solely on the artwork), Budgie’s Bandolier (which I WISH I’d bought as a teenager) and Judas Priest’s Sad Wings of Destiny.

Sadly, Woodroffe passed way in 2014, but a wide variety of his artwork (and a terrific photo of the great man in the early ‘70s) can be found here.

(The faded colours on the above scan are accurate to the appearance of my copy of the book by the way, in case you were wondering. God only knows how mind-flaying this thing looked when it was fresh off the presses.)

1 comment:

Elliot James said...

Fantastic painter. I've never seen his work before. Thanks for the enlightenment.