INFINITE WORLDS: The Fantastic Visions of Science Fiction Art.<i> By Vincent Di Fate</i> . <i> Wonderland Press: 320 pp., $45</i>

Superannuated visions of the future--the covers and illustrations for old sci-fi pulps and paperbacks--are a prime American collectible, more plentiful than scrimshaw or old quilts, as quaint as cigar boxes, full of anecdotal and associational interest and priced to be competitive with comic books and baseball trading cards. Those who cannot afford the original art can at least amass cartons of old pulp magazines and paperbacks for which the Old Masters--Chesley Bonestell (1888-1986), Earle J. Bergey (1901-1952), Frank R. Paul (1884-1963), et al.--produced their cover paintings and interior line drawings.

The technical quality of this work ranges from Bergey’s sincere and primitive (Bergey’s babes-in-brass-bras covers for Startling Stories in the ‘40s) to the chaste astronomical landscapes of Chesley Bonestell’s landscapes in the ‘50s to the low-brow, high-definition erotic (contemporary cheesecake of ‘70s and ‘80s by artists like Boris Vallejo and Frank Frazetta). As collectibles, the better work of Bergey, Bonestell and Vallejo has realized auction prices between $7,000 and $15,000. A work by Frazetta, the most popular and priciest sci-fi artist, can command $30,000 or more (his cover art for a Vampirella comic book was auctioned for $70,000 in 1990), but sci-fi art rarely carries price tags comparable to those found at even mid-level fine art galleries.

In some artists, this has provoked a simple and understandable chip-on-the-shoulder resentment. The more confident, like Vincent Di Fate, usually shrug off the chip, but other artists develop a kind of compensatory megalomania similar to that of those sci-fi writers who dismiss all other writing but science fiction as mundane and lacking the transcendental value of space opera. Ray Bradbury’s foreword to “Infinite Worlds” is a prime specimen of this form of denial, as Bradbury, the Eternal American Boy, recounts his reaction to a Jasper Johns retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art: “[I] . . . left with fewer brains than when I arrived. How an artist can be born to live in one of the great centuries of electric-visual-audio-sensual metaphor and have not even one 2-cent stamp of optical surprise stick to his retina flabbers one’s gast. I felt as if I had made a lunatic turn into a time-alley where the graffiti never knew that Freud, Apple Computer or Carl Sagan were ever born. . . . Suffering bends from lack of some fresh-air image, I fled MOMA and hurled myself into the nearest poster gallery to refill on rockets, marshmallow-suited astronauts, and Melies’ Moon. . . .”

Such confident philistinism has become increasingly rare in an era of universal couth, but Bradbury is probably correct in supposing that he speaks (or sees) for the majority, who admire any picture that is a magic window offering a high-resolution view of something for which they feel fondness, curiosity or reverence. The “sense of wonder” is what sci-fi fandom claims as the genre’s special territory; this corresponds in the visual arts to the Sublime, which in painting has been expressed either as eye-popping landscapes or heroic nudes. These two channels continue to be favored by the artists Di Fate celebrates.

However, judging by his brief account of the history of science fiction art, “Infinite Worlds,” Di Fate is as innocent of earlier versions of the Sublime--indeed, of any non-sci-fi art painted before 1930--as any American third-grader. He’s heard rumors of Da Vinci, seen some reproductions of Bosch, and that’s about it for the past, until the premiere of the movie “Rocketship X-M” in 1950. In his own way, he (and most of the artists whose work the book reproduces) seem as authentically primitive as Grandma Moses or the Sienese School of the 13th century.

Like those artists, science fiction illustrators were perpetuating traditions of imagery and craftsmanship they had inherited from a vanished civilization. Behind the fantastic landscapes of artists like James Gurney of Dinotopia (1995) fame, or the outer space panoramas of John Berkey (born in 1932), loom the Babylonian dioramas of John Martin (1789-1854), whose work probably did not impinge on American illustrators except through Martin’s influence on Gustave Dore and the set designer of D.W. Griffith’s “Intolerance.” Time and again, science fiction artists (and writers) have reinvented the wheel (or cannily infringed on the patent), and an interesting book might be written on that subject. This is not that book.

Like most coffee-table books, this is simply a picture album, showing a sampling of the work of a large number of science fiction artists, presented in alphabetical order. There is no information as to the size, medium, date or present provenance of the works reproduced, and the brief bios of the artists read like flat PR boilerplates, as in this numb appreciation of James E. Bama:

“Bama’s commercial art career encompassed a variety of subjects, and he is regarded as a major figure in the illustration mainstream. His extraordinary ability to paint figures and to render textures influenced dozens of other artists, and the impact of his work is still felt today, many years after his retirement from the field.”

Di Fate makes no odious comparisons and creates no invidious distinctions. His colorless consideration of Howard V. Brown (“a versatile, highly skilled artist” who “emerged as one of the most talented and popular artists in the genre”) is typical of the critical acumen he brings to the other artists in the book. Though from the six astounding covers by Brown reproduced here, he would seem to be a hack of minimal technical competence, derivative ideas and zero flair.

Despite Di Fate’s intransigent blandness, it is possible to winkle out some interesting data from the assembled bios: how the work of more foresightful artists of the genre, including Jim Burns and David Mattingly, was regularly co-opted by a Hollywood hungry for set designers and thereby they ceased to produce collectible art, since the studios owned the artists’ work; and how often, today as in the Renaissance, careers in illustration are a family business carried on by fathers and sons, husbands and wives. But of the dollars-and-cents realities of these artists’ lives, Di Fate has almost nothing to say.

It might have been interesting to see pictures of the artists themselves, but that is a pleasure we are allowed only in the case of Vallejo. The text captions a Vallejo painting of a Lucite figure with Arnold Schwarzenegger biceps and torso as “the artist himself, posed as a robotic deity for a painting that speaks of time, space, and the limitlessness of the imagination.” Well, why not? Things quite as grandiose and no less silly have often been said of the heroic figures of Vallejo’s great-great-role-model, Michelangelo. Painters are not the best spokespersons for their own art.

An honest appraisal of the pleasures and embarrassments to be obtained from the sub-Michelangelo side of sci-fi art with its pornographic element would have to take into account the degree to which the artist equivocates or luxuriates in its eroticism. Frazetta and Vallejo have been commendably up front in this regard, and their ever-escalating prices among collectors reflect that. But the most audacious and successful of science-fiction illustrators is represented in “Infinite Worlds” by only one postcard-sized reproduction of a monster with a head more blatantly phallic than that of Joe Camel. This is the work by one of the few artists about whom Di Fate is snide: the Swiss H.R. Giger. Giger did not illustrate other people’s stories but was the inventor of his own nightmarish fancies, a designer of aliens (including the Alien of cinematic fame) whose every bone and internal organ is a pornographic pun. Giger’s vagina-dentate monsters of the 1970s and 1980s are unveilings of the secret identity of the bug-eyed monster of earlier pulp magazines. A book of science fiction art without a selection of Giger’s images is like a book about Dutch art with no mention of Rembrandt.

Giger’s slim representation may well be his own choice and not Di Fate’s. It’s not as though there were an argument being pursued in this book or a historical overview being advanced. There are simply a lot of pictures, clearly reproduced, many on the same scale as when they first served as covers for Astounding Stories or illustrations in Omni. There are enough prime specimens and ho-hum hack work in all categories--ancient camp, lunar landscapes, gruesome monsters, soft-core porn, gore and lyric whimsy--to make me wish that someday someone might write the text that should have been part of this package.