I love these old paperback collections of Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian barbarian. Frazetta’s paintings are to Conan in my mind as Larry Elmore’s paintings are to the Dragonlance characters.

Artwork seems particularly important to fantasy and science fiction books, perhaps because the worlds within these works are often meant to be substantially different than the world we actually inhabit. The art helps a fantasy world take shape and form in the reader’s mind.

I remember finding a collection of science fiction artwork in my art teacher’s classroom library in high school. Flipping through those paintings took me to another world, similar to what reading itself can do. The artwork in that particular collection was very realistic and always felt so clean and real to me, and brought a sense of calm and expansiveness.

I remember one in which a person was inside a human-made structure, gazing out a large window at a lush alien world in the midst of a rainstorm. I’m not sure how to communicate my feelings that painting and many others in the collection aroused within me. It has something to do, I think, with the juxtaposition of the human-made and technological with the organic, earthy, primeval reality of nature. Somehow it made me feel deeply at ease and also full of wonder, curiosity, and potentiality.