During one of my despondent nocturnal perambulatory meditations, I happened to find myself between the musty, forgotten stacks upon stacks of UNCW's journal archives. As I meandered between walls of paper and letters, my movements loosened a small quantity of paleolithic dust which took to the air for (perhaps) the first time in centuries. It danced across my line of sight and I inhaled it, causing myself to release a sneeze that in turn unleashed a sandstorm of the stuff. I spat into my t-shirt and covered my mouth with the wet cloth in order to protect myself from what seemed like inevitable asphyxiation, but, as luck would have it, a draft caused by a subtle change in upper-atmosphere temperature began to blow, clearing away the thick cloud that had threatened to suffocate me. When I had finished blinking the dust out of my eyes, I noticed the section of the Archives to which Fate had led me: this was the section where the fossilized remains of previous issues of Analog had been deposited by the receding tide of academia.
The imperfect medium of prose cannot convey the excitation I felt then, nor can I express with any accuracy the loudness of the roar of delight I gave that nearly caused the librarian to kick me out of the building. Instead, let me here put forth images of some of the beautiful things I found.
Below are some of the covers of Analog; I included the ones that I felt were the most suggestive or had the most artistic merit. They are wonderful artifacts from the most prolific era of American SF. These lonely compositions speak to the mythos of American Individualism (as spun in the popular SF mag) as well as reflect the poignant alienation of the period. Additionally, they are notable as exemplars of the period SF art that was not dependent on computer assisted imagery.
But these images aren't all. Among the Archives I found something even more fascinating, which I will reveal next week. Let's just say, it involves a sandworm.
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