Abstract
This study examines the cover designs of popular works of eco-dystopian speculative fiction, documenting how graphic designers and commercial illustrators have conceptualized the impact of human behaviors on the near-future environment. The sample includes one hundred and five covers for ten high-impact, mass-market novels written between 1962 and 2013. Coded for thematic similarities, the sample reveals visual strategies and narrative tropes that have recurred since the advent of contemporary eco-dystopian fiction in the 1960s. Yet evolving social and environmental conditions render the specific visual motifs more journalistic than anticipatory. Reconceptualizing eco-dystopia through the meta-language of design failure, however, can be a way to suggest both genre-specific continuity and emergent concerns.
1 Frank R. Paul’s “The Moon Doom” for the pulp magazine Wonder Stories [May 1933] shows a tidal wave sweeping away Manhattan, as does Robert Stanley’s illustration for Dell’s paperback edition of When Worlds Collide [1952]; E. Moritz depicts a flooded Egyptian Valley of the Kings for Fantastic Universe [July 1956].
2 To code the one hundred and five unique designs used on the covers of these ten novels, the images were first grouped with regard to the physical objects depicted in them [e.g., plants, animals, buildings, machines, human beings, etc.]. Within these groupings, the images were further grouped by the conceptual significance of their primary subject matter relative to the novel’s plot, i.e., what the physical object is intended to signify. This process revealed four primary types of aesthetic experiences, or visually engaging cognitive tools for making sense of the idea of eco-dystopia: failed urban infrastructure, the return to nature, failed interactions between biology or genetics and design, and the presence or absence of individual human identity. Only nine covers, most of them entirely typographic, did not fall into one of these four subject-matter categories.
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