Galactic travel guides of the 1970s

Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, several publishers brought out colourful coffee-table sf books. Usually, they were filled with cover-art from sf novels, around which someone had written some text to tie the pictures together. Many had the vibe of a space guide book taking the reader on a journey through galaxy introducing them to lost civilizations and indigenous alien lifeforms. Stewart Cowley’s was the man behind many if not all of these gorgeous books. I used to buy them whenever I saw them – which was more often than not from book discount shops for £1 which actually was quite a lot then.

The books all lived together and had pride and place on my bookshelf and many a rainy sunday I would copy and draw many of the fanatstical spacecrafts, atraunaughts and aliens into my sketch book. Since then I have long lost both the books and my drawings

My three favorite publications where ‘Aliens in space’,'Worlds at war’ and the incredible 'Spacewreck’ which illustrated fallen and decaying spaceships that had either crashed onto far off planets or had lost power and floated forever into the void, never decaying and frozen in the moment.

Allegedly Ridley Scott also came across this book during the late 70s and used it as a basis for the derelict alien spacecraft that the Nostromo comes across on a planetoid. Later he was introduced to the artwork of H. R. Giger; and felt that his painting Necronom IV was the type of representation he wanted for the film.

The books are now out of print but many fans have taken it upon themselves to create these illustration and create incredibly detailed model intepretaion. While trawling the dark recesses of Tumblr one evening late last year, I came upon an intriguing image. It seemed to be a model of the spacecraft from one of my favourite Colin Hay paintings Star Dwellers. A few google queries later and I discovered that I was looking at the work of artist Grant Louden, who after a successful career in advertising and graphic design has been quietly working away on a series of amazing sculptures based on classic spacecraft paintings by the likes of Tony Roberts, Peter Elson, and Colin Hay. Star Dwellers is Grant’s first finished build, and he has meticulously documented the process over on his website.