GALLERY OF FRANK R. PAUL's SCIENCE FICTION ARTWORK
artwork (c) Frank R. Paul estate
Cover art by Frank R. Paul for January 1932 Wonder Stories, illustrating Stanley D. Bell's "Martian Guns."
Here we see the colossal gun of the Martians bombarding helpless earth from the moon. One giant shell is just leaving the gun on its 240,000-mile flight of destruction.
Notice that Paul, like most astronomical artists at the time, failed to predict the presence of cloud cover over the earth. The continents look a little big, too.
However, the fact that the gun isn't pointed straight at the earth isn't a mistake. Probably anything launched in the earth's general direction would fall into the gravity well around the planet. Rockets going the opposite direction, from earth to moon, do not travel in a straight line, either. Rather, they have a looping trajectory (even circling the earth before traveling toward the moon). So the film Apollo 13, which had the moonrocket pointing straight at its destination, was scientifically and historically inaccurate.
Interior art.
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