Michael Whelan's Works of Wonder (R)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This award-winning illustrator finds that the literature of science fiction and fantasy ``gives the artist the greatest opportunity for creative expression in the field of illustration today.'' In this collection of Whelan's cover illustrations for some 50 booksnotably all published by Del ReyIsaac Asimov's robots, Edgar Rice Burroughs's martians, H. P. Lovecraft's skeletons, Anne McCaffrey's flying dragons and the Star Child of Arthur C. Clarke's 2010: Odyssey Two are rendered in brilliant hues and careful detail. Unfortunately, Whelan's descriptive talents do not extend to his writing, which is artless. Furthermore, since he assumes, apparently, that readers are intimately familiar with the books in question, his decision to give a white lizard six legs rather than eight in one cover painting and his explanation that red lilies represent the Earth Goddess, regeneration and immortality in another picture will be meaningful only to connoisseurs of the genre. (December)