Space Wars Worlds & Weapons

Type: Multi-Artist Collection with Fiction

Author: Stephen Eisler

Publisher: Octopus

Format: Hardback 325mm x 240mm (A3)

Cover Price £3.95

Publication Date: 1979

Page count: 96

This is a solid hardback book with a glossy dust jacket (albeit my copy is showing signs of wear!). The book is printed on half-gloss paper and is mostly full-colour with some pages in spot colour. These pages add an added layer of realism by providing layouts of ships or buildings, which would make them useful for tabletop RPGs. Despite the matt paper, the art is well reproduced using a mix of both large and small pictures, some full-bleed others with margins. This is a stand-alone book, although Octopus also published a similar volume "The Alien World" of which a review will hopefully follow. Naturally I would have preferred more art and less text. The text makes a break from the many other similar books from this era by not being a work of fiction, but instead a review of how various science fiction authors have handled the theme of each chapter e.g. Space Vehicles, SF Weapons, Alien Creatures, etc. It is a somewhat entertaining romp through the SF greats of the 60s and 70s. Confusingly the illustrations are described with fictional text in the style of the TTA Handbooks! The spot colour line art illustrations were commissioned directly for this book and were drawn by Roger Full. An example of his work is below, an illustration of the Quadrax XB21 Super Cruiser.

The artist credits are a nightmare to decipher but I think the picture below features Eddie Jones (top) and Edward Blair Wilkins (below). This gives an idea of the mixed text and picture format, often reducing great pictures to annoyingly small images. The print quality is, however, good enough that a reasonable level of detail remains.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s there was a boom in the use of SF & Fantasy artwork that had previously been used as book covers. Agencies like "Young Artists" sold the re-use rights for this art cheaply as it was considered a bonus on top of the original sale. Hamlyn, Octopus, Intercontinental and others all produced books that set this artwork to a fictional background. Note that there is significant duplication in the artwork used by these three publishers. Note that all these volumes are fairly collectible these days with this one being a little more available than the TTA books.