Science Fiction

Imagined futures, alien worlds, robots and spacecraft in illustration, film design, comics and art.

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About

Visions of machines, other worlds and possible futures took visual form alongside the novels that defined the genre. The French illustrator Albert Robida pictured flying machines over Paris and news delivered by screen in Le Vingtième Siècle (1883). Fritz Lang's film Metropolis (1927) gave the 20th century its model of a towering, divided city and a gleaming robot woman.

Popular illustration spread these images widely. Frank Frazetta painted muscular heroes and alien landscapes for paperback covers from the 1960s, and the French artist Moebius drew weightless desert worlds in comics such as Arzach (1975). Film turned concept art into a discipline: Ralph McQuarrie's paintings helped shape the look of Star Wars (1977), and H. R. Giger's biomechanical creature haunted Alien two years later. Artists still use the genre's tools, among them time travel, robots and colonies in space, to comment on the present.