Cover Art: Out of the Silent Planet

I was looking at an article that was about the cover art of "your" favorite books. Except the books listed either weren't my favorites or else I wasn't interested in them or hadn't even heard of them. So Iooked up the different covers from some of my favorite books and I was surprise at how many different covers some of them have had. It was hard to pick a favorite with so much art to choose from.

 Today I chose covers from Out of the Silent Planet, a book that stole my heart. The first two are the copies I have/had. The first one was the copy that my love brought home when he used to work recycling. Somebody had thrown away a bunch of science fiction books; this was among them. I didn't like the picture at first and shelved it for a while but once I read it I continued to read it over and over until it fell apart. So I replaced it with a cover that looks almost like it. The original picture framed in binary. I'm not sure why since computers never really entered the story at any point in the trilogy. After seeing other covers I've decided that this is my favorite. It's the best rendering of the planet Mars as envisioned and described by Lewis and the characters are small enough to leave lots to the imagination, which you need when reading this story.

 Like other classics, there were more covers than I cared to save.There are other attempts at artwork depicting different scenes focused on Ransom's flight and his time spent with the Hrossa. I even tried my own hand at drawing scenes from this book as well (none posted.) 

 My second favorites are the last three. They have that classic sci-fi artwork flavor to them and focus on the ship which, in the story, was a sphere. Just one of many reasons that I love the old science fiction before the science caught up to the fiction.