BARLOWE'S GUIDE TO EXTRATERRESTRIALS

Reviewed by Steven H Silver

In 1979, artist Wayne Douglas Barlowe and Ian Summers created Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials, an art book which included Barlowe’s impressions of fifty aliens taken from works of science fiction which were considered touchstones for any science fiction fan to have read. He presented this paintings alongside text by Ian Summers which provided information about the alien’s appearance, habitats, and culture as culled from the works in which the aliens appeared.

There is a certain “Monster Manual feel to the book, which offers up a two page spread for each of the aliens with a painting of the creature, sans background, taking up one page of each entry. The other page offers the source of the alien, a couple of paragraphs of text that provide the context for the alien within its world and how it could potentially interact with humans, and often more detailed looks at parts of the alien’s body. The statistics which would accompany the entry in a role-playing game are, of course, missing, although not really missed. In addition to the entries for each of the alien races, Barlowe and Summers provide a fold-out in the center of the book which offers a collection of most of the aliens included in the book reproduced to mostly the same scale so the reader can see the size differential between the Ixchel from Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time and the octopoid Sirians from Frederik Pohl’s The Age of the Pussycat. A less direct comparison can be made between Barlowe’s vision of the aliens and those of other artists. For instance, Barlowe includes the Ishtarians from Poul Anderson’s Fire Time and Darrell K. Sweet included his take on the Ishtarians on the cover of Fire Time published by Ballantine Books in 1975 and Dave Matitngly offered his own version for the 1984 Baen edition of the book.

At the time Barlowe and Summers published Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials, they could count on a large proportion of their potential readers being familiar with the majority of the aliens described and depicted in the book. A modern update of the work would have a more difficult time given the fracturing of science fiction readership due to the increased number of works published, both traditionally and independently. In fact, many modern readers may find themselves unfamiliar with the majority of the aliens, or, perhaps even authors, represented in this volume.

While Barlowe’s portraits tend to stiff, and at times, such as for the Gumbiesque Czill from Jack L. Chalker’s Midnight from the Well of Souls, cartoonish, they do offer a level of detail of the aliens that is often lacking in the textual work that introduced the creatures. These images offer a vision of the author’s work which is unofficial, practically fannish in content, but still offer an alternative look at the aliens who are only really defined by their textual descriptions.

Barlowe and Summers have created beautiful look at the alien species which populate science fiction literature, even if the book has a certain element of datedness decades after it was first published. It codifies the look of creatures such as Pierson’s Puppeteers from Larry Niven’s Ringworld, the Thrint, from his World of Ptaavs, and the Guild Steersmen from Frank Herbert’s Dune, although the last look very different from the way they’ve appeared in the various Hollywood adaptations of the novel, which only demonstrates that at its heart, no matter how close Barlowe remained to the textual descriptions, these images are the artist’s vision of the creatures.

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