Science Fiction

“The artist who commits himself to science fiction takes on a formidable job. He has to make a picture of something that has never existed. He has no model or “swipe file” to help him. If he is illustrating an actual story, it is tougher yet. He has to give form to an airy imagining – and not even his own imagining, at that, but that of the author of the story.

Authors are not always helpful to their artists. Sometimes what they write about is well described, but more often authors use the kind of words that evoke an image for the reader but don’t do a thing for the draftsman. (How do you make a picture of ”a blackness blacker than black”?)”

Frederik Pohl, “The new visions” 1982