Chris Foss

Christopher "Chris" F. Foss (born 1946 in Guernsey, Channel Islands) is a British artist and science fiction illustrator. He is best known for his science fiction book covers and the black and white illustrations for the original editions of The Joy of Sex.

Foss started working as an artist in his teens, in Guernsey, creating signage for local companies. While studying at Magdalene College, Cambridge, he started pursuing professional magazine commissions, including the then recently launched Penthouse magazine. He went to a boarding school in Dorset; his master encouraged him to train for an art scholarship.

Foss's evocative science fiction book covers pioneered a much-imitated style featuring vast, colourful spaceships, machines and cities, often marked with mysterious symbols. Human figures are usually absent. These images are suggestive of science fiction in general rather than depictions of specific scenes from books, and therefore can be—and have been—used interchangeably on book covers. During the 1970s, Foss's images of future technology had the same iconic "defining" quality that H. R. Giger's would have in terms of depictions of alien or future life forms.

Books featuring Foss illustrations include the 1970s British paperback covers for Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, the Terran Trade Authority, several Edmund Cooper novels, and E. E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman and Skylark series. Some of the art he did produce was specific to the stories and some examples of this are the covers he did for the Grafton publications of the Demon Princes novels by Jack Vance in the late 1980s, Star King, The Killing Machine, The Palace of Love, The Face and The Book of Dreams.

...
Wikipedia