American artist

Born in Chicago, Richard M. Powers studied in several art schools in that area before and after WWII. He began work in science fiction illustration no later than 1950 — an early abstract Powers cover being for Isaac Asimov's Pebble in the Sky (1950) — for Doubleday where he also did mysteries and Westerns, and also with two 1952 covers for Galaxy Science Fiction. When Ian Ballantine founded Ballantine Books in 1952, he approached Powers to do covers for him. Although some of his early work there was representational (some of the early Doubleday work had been abstract), Powers soon — with the cover for Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End (1953) — adopted a Surrealist style (much influenced by Yves Tanguy [1900-1955] and Joan Miro [1893-1983]) unique in science fiction; it became the trademark of Ballantine's 1950s science fiction. Powers' glowing and sometimes whimsical paintings are full of amorphous shapes, floating in space or over surreal landscapes, and have been enormously influential in science fiction illustration. He did a little more magazine-cover work, but most of his prolific science fiction cover illustration — he worked in other fields as well, including children's books — was for books, for Ballantine, Pocket Books, Berkley Books, MacFadden, Dell and others.

After his first wife's death he dropped most of his commercial work during the 1960s, then returned in the 1970s, not quite so prolifically but as forcefully as ever. He has had many exhibitions, in New York's Rehn Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery and elsewhere; his work commands as much respect outside science fiction as in it. With Powers’ work the packaging of science fiction could be said to have come of age. Covers no longer required glamorous space girls or technological hardware, and Surrealism captured science fiction's disturbing essence just as strongly as ray-guns or monsters.

Selected Bibliography:
Spacetimewarp Paintings (1983)
The Art of Richard M. Powers (2001)
Courtesy of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Copyright © John Clute and Peter Nicholls 1993, 1999, published by Orbit, an imprint of the Time Warner Book Group UK.