Subtitled "A History of Sex in Science Fiction Illustration".
A witty examination of the development of sex in science fiction illustration, and its relation to science fiction literature.
This 10"x10.5" volume is illustrated by many colour illustrations from the SF pulps through to the work of modern American and European artists.
"Unexpressed, hinted at, we could still feel some sense of innocence about yesteryear's golden SF age, but now along comes Mr. Harrison like a bull at the gate of all our inhibitions, the horns of his ribald charge at the subject brooking no moral dilemmas. He is out to have fun with our fantasies.
"His book is an expensive, but richly illustrated view of science fiction erotica - I know one newspaper cartoonist who promised it himself for a Christmas treat "purely for the draughtsmanship" - and if you want to know how flying fits into the sexual nature of things, how a space-suit can be seen as a reversion to infancy (a womb with a view?) and how human bondage is as nothing to the alien equivalent, then this is for you. In fact, it is very much for me, because Mr. Harrison's approach is exactly the right one - a ripe enjoyment of his subject coupled with a learning that was gained when he was a commercial artist and a writer.
"When I speak about comics I speak from a position, as it were, somewhere back among the molars in the horse's mouth," he boasts and, certainly, one of his best life-researched sections is the one in which he explains how starving pre-war American editors would be commissioned by a publisher ("black paint on an office door") and pull together such a magazine. It was a sociological situation, but it became a psychological one when such names as Dr Frederick Wertham saw the dangers of the grot-comics and publishers had to do a self-censoring job on themselves, "a mutual castration ceremony.
"Of course, many of these illustrations were trash - Alex Raymond's fine drawings of Flash Gordon being a most notable exception - and the fevered results with grasping, groping aliens mauling half-clad young ladies often had little to do with the stories with which they were connected. And, even after the advent of censorship, strange yearnings could still be discerned among all those alarming breast-plates and protuberantly suckered tentacles. Mr. Harrison believes that SF came sexually of age with the Philip José Farmer story "The Lovers", in Startling Stories in July 1952, and artists followed, breathing hard down the neck of an enlightenment which allowed an affair between Earth man and alien creature.
"Certainly the graphics of today's liberated Continental magazines here shown leave little to the imagination in the way the body contours stretch to the bursting point of excited nudity. But should they leave so little?
"So it is back to the words to find out where the real SF action is, and not just a magazine's arty glossiness in the style of Playboy. For sex is only a part of SF, as with life. That it should concern a major portion is - and in keeping with the book's puns - rather a rocketship phallus-y."