As I continue the long process of unpacking, I’ve come across a whole lot of stuff that I forgot I had, stuff that I just shoveled into boxes before I left Utah. There are a *lot* of things that, now that I paid a painful sum of money to have shipped, I’ll have to get rid of. Hopefully via selling. A mountain of paperbacks that it turns out I don’t have the space for. A fat box of DVDs that I’ll never watch again. That sort of thing.
There are also things that I have no intention of letting go, including a small stash of vintage sci-fi. Included in that is a very small number of “Science Fiction Plus” magazines. One of them, the October 1953 issue, has cover art by Frank R. Paul. Paul was one of the more important sci-fi artists of all time, with illustrations gracing the covers of many pulps in the 1920’s and 1930’s. By the 1950’s the times had pretty much passed him and his art style by, but he was still at work.
The cover below shows a somewhat more graceful spaceship than he typically created. It honestly looks like the midway point between the movie-era Starship Enterprise morphing into the Protector from Galaxy Quest. Angle those pylons up some and greatly increase the diameter of the “bridge module,” and you have something *damned* close to the Enterprise.
As I come across stuff of interest during the unpacking, cleaning (you wouldn’t believe just how dusty things got after 15 years in the Utah desert, even things that had been reasonably effectively sealed) and dealing-with stages, I’ll scan and post.