Virgil Finlay

Renowned science fiction artist Virgil Finlay was born in 1914, a year and a couple of weeks after my father, and lived until 1971, a few years longer than Paul Linebarger / Cordwainer Smith. Finlay created over 2500 fastidiously detailed science fiction and fantasy drawings, using a complex technique which involved putting black ink on white scratchboard and then scraping off selected areas. Finlay would combine this with drawing in black ink on the white background. He also did a lot of color work—for magazine covers, for example.

Here's a link to a good webpage about the black-and-white technique, and Virgil Finlay's life and work, in detail. His gentle sensuality always extremely popular with fans, Finlay often worked for very small wages, all that the science fiction magazines paid at that time. Because his method was time-consuming, he often worked very long hours.

I don't know how many Cordwainer Smith illustrations Virgil Finlay did. The illustrated Cordwainer Smith bibliography done by Mike Bennett on this website includes several Finlay covers. There are two magazine covers by Finley on this page, with his name given.

A fan sent me a CD with the Finlay drawings reproduced below, scanned in from a magazine, probably Galaxy, and I have copied three of these below; you can see where the original art spanned two pages.

There have been a number of books published that feature the work of Virgil Finlay; while most are out of print, searching the usual online bookstores might yield you some results. (I went to Amazon and Alibris and was going to create direct links for Virgil Finley but there was so little at either place that I didn't bother. Of course, at a different time, it could be better.)

These scanned-in, reduced, web-graphic-quality images can only give you a hint of the delicacy and subtlety of this art. All of the Virgil Finlay illustrations on cordwainer-smith.com are copyright © Lail M. Finlay.

Here are two more illustrations from "On the Storm Planet." The one at the top of the page is from that story too.