Just as all we know about ancient Rome comes from Hollywood, much of our knowledge of the times ahead has come from press and book drawings. What would Wells’ The War of the Worlds be without the illustrations of Warwick Goble (1898) or those of the Brazilian artist Henrique Alvim Corrêa (1906)? Rendering aliens and other never-seen beings, but also visually interpreting new forms of technology as well as new forms of behavior and social interaction, is of course not the exclusive privilege of the illustrator, but their role remains key even in our age of technologically extended reality. Science fiction or, more generally speaking, anticipation, cries out for visual and other accompaniment, and drawings are among the most supple and efficient ways of addressing the readers’ need to have more than just a glimpse of what is often difficult to image.
Since science fiction has for many decades taken...