10 Striking Sci-Fi Book Covers

Frank Herbert's now-classic saga of a far-future war between noble houses on a desert planet has been through endless reprints, including two separate tie-in editions for David Lynch's ill-fated movie adaptation and the Sci-Fi Channel's version. But nothing beats the original hardcover edition's artwork, courtesy of longtime sci-fi illustrator John Schoenherr. The tiny human figures dwarfed by the rock and sand all around them -- possibly depicting hero Paul Atreides and his mother Jessica seeking safety -- bring home the scope and ambition of the book in a single, striking image.

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Philip K. Dick's novel about a bounty hunter and the androids he's sent to "retire" has only a few things in common with the movie adaptation Ridley Scott directed, but they're the right few things. Among them is the suffocating, oppressive atmosphere of the book's future Los Angeles setting, captured beautifully in Drew Struzan's neo-noir posters for the film. Multiple versions of the design were used as cover art for various reprints of the book; check Amazon or your local used bookstore for variations.

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The book that more or less singlehandedly coined the term “cyberpunk” came out in 1984. It’s dated a bit around the edges—most any book that peers into the digital near-future has suffered that fate. Unfortunately, so has the cover art for the million-plus selling paperback edition, which has come to resemble an Amiga-era screensaver. But at the same time, that digital assemblage perfectly encapsulates the moment in time expressed by the book: this is what we thought the future would be like. In that sense, Neuromancer has a timelessness all its own.

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Few book covers manage to be iconic and a good encapsulation of the book's conceits at the same time. Le Guin's story dealt with a frozen world where the inhabitants are genderless save for two days of the month, during which time they manifest a gender randomly and mate. Alex Ebel, who also painted the cover for Le Guin's The Dispossessed (and the classic "Friday the 13th" one-sheet movie poster), devised a striking and beautiful image that has survived any number of reprints.

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What sort of cover to put on Samuel R. Delaney's labyrinthine masterwork, which is at least as much about the telling of the story it's allegedly about (a city cut off from the outside world for unknown reasons) as it is about that story? Bantam went with veteran sci-fi illustrator Dean Ellis, who also designed the cover for the paperback edition of Ray Bradbury's "The Illustrated Man." Ellis produced an ominous post-apocalyptic landscape that's at least as intimidating as the book itself.

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Science fiction has any number of antecedents and ancestors. Jorge Luis Borges, master of "metafiction," has to be counted among them; if stories like "Funes the Memorius" and "The Library of Babel" aren't sci-fi, nothing is. And what better artist to illustrate the covers of books about paradox and infinity than M.C. Escher, the Dutch artist whose love of paradox and infinity ran through his entire body of work? Penguin saw fit to use Escher's images in several reprints of Borges's short stories, and they are appropriate enough to seem commissioned.

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Harry Harrison's grim and (sadly, still) prophetic novel about the dangers of overpopulation was filmed as Soylent Green, and even sported the movie's one sheet as cover art in one of the book's many printings. But the most effective and subtly terrifying one of the bunch was the Orb 2008 reprint, which used an aerial view of Manhattan with just enough depth perspective to convey the sheer weight of millions of human beings living with entirely too little elbow room. The fact the image is an un-retouched stock photo makes it all the more unnerving: this is our world.

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There have been any number of cover designs over the years for Isaac Asimov's classic, but the very best of the bunch were courtesy of longstanding fantasy and sci-fi illustrator Michael Whelan. Instead of the usual spaceship-and-planet art, Whelan went character-centric and depicted three pivotal people from the series: the prophetic Hari Seldon, the infamous Mule, and the clever Arkaday Darrell.

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Say what you will about Robert A. Heinlein's "sex and Jesus" novel, as he himself called it, but "Stranger in a Strange Land" garnered a cult following for its author. Its original cover art featured a Rodin sculpture, but later reprints were radically different. Best of the bunch was the beautiful "underwater" cover, courtesy of James Warhola --Andy Warhol's nephew, and a prolific sci-fi illustrator to boot.5

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John Steakley's military sci-fi adventure has been a perennial favorite on the order of "Starship Troopers" or "The Forever War" -- not just a story about guns going off, but about the human toll of war. Its original 1984 DAW printing displayed a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek James Gurney painting, one that manages to be in a classic pulp-sci-fi vein while also as cocky and thoughtful as the book it was designed for. The reprints are far more generic and uninteresting.

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