 'QUANTUM SHOT' #612Link - by Avi Abrams We can not get enough of that stuff. The Future that never happened. The Past that kept dreaming and never woke up. Also read Part 2 and Part 1 We continue to update our extensive collection of the most inspiring and hard-to-find retro-futuristic images. As usual, we try to stay away from the well-known American pulp and book cover illustrations and instead focus on the artwork from some rather unlikely sources: Soviet and Eastern Bloc "popular tech & science" magazines, German, Italian, British fantastic illustrations and promotional literature - all from the Golden Age of Retro-Future (from 1930s to 1970s). Wait for images to load. We'll start with a line-up of neat planetary vehicles, envisioned for 'Project Sword' series. Here is a Moon Bus, powered entirely by crude oil:    (images via) You have to appreciate the lines of the 'First Spaceship on Venus' (from the 1960 East Germany/Poland film):  Curious how such a cool vintage-streamlined rocket might look on the launch pad? Check out these scenes from a Russian cult-favorite movie 'Nebo Zovyot', 1960 (remade by Roger Corman as 'Battle Beyond the Sun'):    (images via) Life inside the space station (complete with a space kitten) from the Russian movie 'Road To The Stars', 1957 -  (more screenshots and info here)  (left: 'UFO' series; 'Land of the Giants' vehicle is on the right)  (left: screenshot from 'Space 1999'; right: from 'Journey To The Far Side Of The Sun' - via)  (scenes from the German TV series 'Orion Patrol' - via)  (scenes from the Russian movie 'Planeta Bur: The Storm Planet' - see the whole movie here)  (Russian magazine covers from the 1950s and 1960s) Great vintage designs from the cover of Hunt Collins' novel 'Tomorrow and Tomorrow' (Hunt collins is a pen name of Evan Hunter, better known as Ed McBain) - left image. A curious one-man space platform from the cover of 'Weird', Oct 1971 - on the right:  German rare sci-fi editions yield a peek inside a space port, spaceship maintenance and repair:  (images via)  (intense planetary exploration scene from 'Operation Future' (ed. by Groff Conklin, 1961) cover - left. Right: 'The Space Frontiers', novel by Roger Lee Vernon) Construction of the space dome on Mars (from 'Dan Dare's Space Book', 1954) - below left. And pretty ugly space suits (1952 model) shown on the right:  (images via) Floating in a pretty crowded space, 1950s style:  (fragment of the cover of 'The War Against The Rull' by A. E. Van Vogt; image via)   (images from the Vols Interplantaires, French space exploration futuristic edition) Perils of the Spaceways:  (art by Alex Schomburg)  (art by Ed Cartier, illustration to 'Tradition' by J. McIntosh, Other Worlds, April 1952) Vintage Japanese movies also depicted pretty intense space exploration:  (images via) Outrageous water-to-air launch jet from Gerry Anderson's UFO series (see some similar real life designs on our page Flying Submarines) -  (images via) Great minimalist art from the Russian vintage book 'The Flight To The Moon', 1954, showing the Moon Base:  Here is another busy Russian Moon Base (from 1961) -  (image via) Rare and gorgeous visions of space exploration from the Russian 1950 book 'The Rocket':  (images via) Pretty detailed art by Jack Coggins from 'Rockets, Jets, Guided Missiles and Space Ships' (1951) -  (images via) Fragment of the Grosset & Dunlap 1950 "Book of Model Spaceships": there is something from the vintage Westerns in this scene -  (image via) 'The Next 50 Years on the Moon' (by Erik Bergaust, 1974) states that sometime between 1980 and 1990 we will have a permanent Lunar colony:   (German book covers in the 1960s-1970s) Of course, no retro-future space art collection will be complete without a mention of Frank R. Paul - the king of science fiction illustration during the Age of Wonder (1930s-1940s). Here is his 'City on Mars', 1940, and 'The Golden City on Titan', 1941:  (images credit: Frank R. Paul) One more thing... do you suppose there is such a thing as a Retro Futurism Cute Overload? Well, the utterly adorable and infinitely cheesy picture below may just start the new category :)  DON'T MISS PART ONE -> -- AND PART TWO -> CONTINUE TO OUR RETRO FUTURE COLLECTION! ->  |
