I was recently looking at various sites like Buzzfeed, Gizmodo, io9 and others that basically take a set of images and say some fairly obvious things about them to create a piece of content that will attract some views.

I’ve been in a bit of a creative blackhole for the last few months, so I thought I'd try my hand at it to see how hard it is.

I recently came across a bunch of science fiction story magazines and decided to take photos of their covers, which provided me with a great source of images to try and create some content from.

I unfortunately didn't take photos of the inner covers which would have provided me more details than I currently have. Publish date, publisher, the other stories in the magazine, the artist. Had I known this is what I was going to do with them I think I would have taken down more information.

Astounding Science Fiction October 1957 - “Ribbon in the Sky” by Murray Leinster

It’s basically FaceTime or any sort of video chat. Albeit more bulky. Although temperature today remains the killer with most electronic devices won’t function below 0º Celsius, although they will survive down to around -20º.

Analog Science Fact & Fiction June - “The Weakling” by Everette B. Cole

Fantastically science fictiony and just a bit of the creationist faff. Humans and dinosaurs living and working together. Or alternatively and better more so, dinosaurs on an alien planet that humans come across and use them as pack animals? Perhaps not.

Astounding Science Fiction November - “Cat and Mouse” by Ralph Williams

This is one of the somewhat more staid covers; not containing anything that’s amazingly science fiction-like. A hipster in a flannel coat off to put out a fire. The gap in the trees is a bit odd, almost like they’re a fire barrier or something to the hilly countryside beyond.

Analog April - “Blind Man’s Lantern”

When I saw it this cover made me think of a piece of art I saw online a few years ago. “White Castle” by Yuri Shwedoff. Looking at them now the similarities aren’t that close, just the presence of a spacecraft and horses.

Now a few covers with similar themes, though more likely stories with similar themes, I didn’t have time to read everything contained within the magazines unfortunately.

I’d broadly call these the ‘savage’ vs the learned man. First a literal savage vs the intelligent men with guns in their city, the second the elite vs the workers and finally the 'explorer' vs the savage indigenous.

Future Science Fiction No.2 & No.10

These two covers, which are two of three that were in the pile that I took photos of share a similar theme of a blonde woman on the cover.
The blonde woman on an alien planet and presumedly Earth, in both she’s the ‘outsider’, preyed upon by the space butterflies in No.10 and oggled by the soldiers in No.2.

Astounding Science Fiction, stencil tagged covers.

The stencils are something I didn't notice until I started to compile and arrange the images into galleries and format them for this page. Not every Astounding has a stencil of some kind in the upper left corner, but enough that it seems like it was some sort of indicator to the reader.

Finally some a few more images that wouldn't fit into a specific grouping or analysis, but nonetheless are interesting and noteworthy.