Great Space Battles, Stewart Cowley & Charles Herridge
The Hamlyn Group, 1979
96 pp, 44 full color illustrations, 10 b/w illustrations
As humans make their way into space, they will probably find something to fight over and Great Space Battles presents two narratives of our future, interstellar strife. Nonetheless, I’m an optimist for our future, but the topic does permit some good sci-fi artwork.
The first chapter recalls a fictional war against another human-like species, while the book’s second half presents several smaller vignette chapters of the conflicts beyond the stars.
My first TTA book, kick-ass art really, hardly any mediocre images. I found the premise & progression of the Laguna War story engaging, A mysterious civilization via the H.M.S. Bounty with a cathartic twist.
While “Spacecraft 2000-2100 AD” is fantastic and deserves its “best” rank, I actually enjoy this one a little more than the first book, mainly because it brought in Peter Elson’s fantastic art. However, it definitely suffers from being a rush-job, and while I love the main story and think that doing a long-form type was a great idea, Cowley really should have limited the artwork to just Elson’z, Angus McKie’z and perhaps Tony Roberts’ so a more uniform “flow” could have been acheived. Most of Jim Burns’ work doesn’t fit at all, neither the main story nor the other stories, and some of the other art is a little odd as well for the stories they went with, e.g. the “CA 1992 Ferryman”
Hi Tom…thanks for the note. I just saw this; I was having server problems and the whole site was down for ~3 weeks! I agree that each title has its whole artistic “feel” based on the variety of artists. Sort of a “good, better, best” ranking! Thanks for dropping by!
There’s also ‘Space Wars, Worlds and Weapons’, Steven Eisler, Crescent books, 1979.
I received this book as a Christmas present when I was a sophomore in high school–back in the heady days of Omni Magazine and Star Wars. This book has been lost from my possession, and for years now I have been racking my brain to remember the title, but fortunately I just came across a reference to Terran Trade Authority while perusing sci-fi art from the 1970s. I think I can actually point out almost every illustration within this book from a line-up mixed with other sci-fi art. If this was still in print I would purchase a copy for nostalgia sake.
Thanks for dropping by TRP! Have you perused Amazon or ABEbooks.com? These titles have never been reprinted, but remain fairly common on the second-hand market and, often, at fair to moderate prices. Good luck!