I was doing some research on Harold W. McCauley, the artist of the above image and was finding relatively little, but I did come across this neat article about a show featuring Sci-Fi art then and now.
It's interesting to see the writer's take on an image from the old Star Frontiers role-playing game, as well as the last few lines of the article.
In regard to the reference to McCauley, I found the mentioned image, "Cosmic Bunglers," but it lacked the humor I've found in most of McCauley's work. The above image seems much more representative of his best work.

By Michael O'Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 11, 2000; Page N55

WHAT'S NOT TO LOVE about "Possible Futures," an exhibition of science fiction book and magazine illustration at the University of Maryland Art Gallery that manages to be both breezy and erudite?

It's got sex, bug-eyed monsters, high-tech hardware, action, drama, robots run amok, rock-jawed heroes and pneumatic heroines, killer rabbits, explosions and eye-popping vistas of planets on which the foot of man has never trod. It's also got implications about man's love-hate relationship with technology, xenophobia and jingoism, changing society, gender roles and the hubris inherent in trying to exert dominion over nature.


In this heady frappe of the Western, the romance novel, gadget love and futurism, there's something to delight everyone—even a comparative Luddite like the critic who stakes his expertise in the literature on three meager titles, discovered in adolescence: Walter Miller's "A Canticle for Leibowitz," A.E. van Vogt's "The World of Null-A" and Larry Niven's "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" (a life-changing short story on the subject of Superman's love life).

"Well, those are some good ones," says Jane Frank, who curated the show from the extensive collection she and her husband Howard own. "But I could give you another 50-best list that would keep you going for a while."

No doubt.

Even before the Franks began acquiring art depicting themes from science fiction and fantasy (think Bilbo Baggins and Conan the Barbarian), the couple collected books and periodicals, and several of those publications accompany the pictures on display. But the book jackets and magazine covers are only faint echoes of the pictures on the wall. Going from the books (or for that matter the teensy reproductions in the show's catalogue) to the original paintings is a bit like finding yourself in front of an Alexander Calder after having seen only the postage stamps.

Okay, so the works here are not really monumental—they were commissioned for photomechanical reproduction, after all, not museum exhibition—nor do they move (at least not literally). But they do possess, in addition to an aura of mystery, excitement and the romance of the alien, a technical virtuosity and wealth of detail that often gets lost in translation.

Take Allen Anderson's lissome Amazon from the cover of the 1952 novel "Sargasso of the Lost Starship." The blonde bombshell's getup—an amalgam of Rita Hayworth decolletage, form-fitting body armor, stand-up collar lifted from a military officer's dress uniform, holstered pearl-handled revolver and primitive arm-dagger—is all over the couture map. About as far away from the space-age mini-dress of Lt. Uhura as Joan of Arc's chain mail, its pastiche of the familiar in an unfamiliar form signals to us that this is science fiction . . . that and the fact that she appears to be leading an army of green-eyed wombats into battle, armed only with spears.

In the words of author Ursula LeGuin (quoted by former gallery director Terry Gips in her forward to the show's catalogue), "Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive."

Yes, but descriptive of what?

It's laughable to look back 50 years to what mid-20th-century artists thought the future would be like, and it will be equally laughable 50 years from now to look back at the visions of today's artists. The hovercraft of Alex Schomburg's 1952 "Death of Iron" looks like two streamlined tops from metal cocktail shakers welded together, but fitted with a picture window from a suburban ranch house. Behind that window sit two pilots (male, natch) and behind them a woman primly dressed as if to serve shrimp canapes (wearing gloves because, um, the future is a dirty place?). The landscape, of course, looks like Arizona since, as Greg Metcalf points out in his astute catalogue essay on sci-fi's Western roots, "we always conquer land that looks like Monument Valley."

Now compare Jim Burns's 1985 "Star Frontiers": the shiny space cruiser (looking for all the world like a blue Batmobile) is piloted by a driver (once again male) in wrap-around shades (so 15 minutes ago!) while his female companion with the wind-swept, platinum blond locks rides shotgun, brandishing a gun whose ludicrously long barrel would have been sure to strike penis envy into the hearts of Schomburg's flyboys. She's still not much more than window dressing, but this modern bit of cheesecake has got firepower and is not afraid to use it.



For mixed messages, how about Robert Fuqua's 1944 "The Mad Robot"? Sure, the scene of the Flash Gordon-style hero doing battle with an angry automaton (powered by a disembodied brain in a jar) can be seen as a parable of the evils of science out of control, but what's our hero attacking him with? No wooden cudgel but a state-of-the-art ray gun. Then, as even now to a great degree, technology is seen as both the hope and the downfall of civilization.

But despite the show's best efforts to, as Gips writes, disrupt a "simplistic understanding" of the genre and to drag sci-fi art into "the mainstream of art history, art theory and cultural criticism," "Possible Futures" is above all else a hoot. Good examples of its sense of fun are James Gurney's 1989 "Quozl," depicting a close encounter between a race of man-size space hares and a typical American living room (Bugs Bunny plays on the boob tube), and Schomburg's 1963 "Monkey in Space," in which the first banana-wielding primate on the moon stares forlornly out the window of his now trashed lunar excursion module.

Yes, there's psychosexual subtext out the wazoo here if you're of the mind to go looking for it (and no one can tell me Harold W. McCauley didn't study Giovanni Bologna's "Rape of the Sabine Women" before painting the damsel-abducting robot of his 1956 "The Cosmic Bunglers").

Here's catalogue essayist Dabrina Taylor writing of Virgil Finlay's 1955 painting of a half-naked alien babe and a marooned astronaut:

"As the vulnerable, prone body of the male explorer in 'Mistress of Viridis' illustrates, the otherness of femininity and its alienness to a masculine observer can also be aligned with danger. Lying entranced or somehow overcome beneath the towering body of a woman who, in another context might easily be labeled a siren or a mermaid, this male traveler seems helpless; behind him, all the phallic power and technology and power signified by his ship are useless to him now."

Here's collector Jane Frank:

"Really? I don't see it."

Sometimes, to paraphrase Sigmund Freud, a robot is just a robot.