Frank Rudolph Paul was an American science ficiton illustrator of pulp magazines influential in defining what both cover art and interior illustrations in the nascent science fiction pulps of the 1920s looked like.

Paul can be credited with the first color painting of a space station and illustrated H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds for Amazing Stories magazine, the first magazine dedicated to science fiction. He would paint all the covers for over three years. These visions of robots, spaceships, and aliens were presented to an America wherein most people did not even own a telephone. Indeed, they were the first science fiction images seen by Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Forrest J Ackerman and others who would go on to great prominence in the field.