Children of Tomorrow: Illustration by Bruce Pennington

What’s great about this cover us that the couple in the foreground seem to be oblivious to the giant spacecraft above — the proof of this is that they’re running to the spaceship rather than from it:

The illustration is by English fantasy artist Bruce Pennington who started out as a fine artist and then went on to film posters and then in 1967 illustrated the cover for Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (which put him on the map). The Children of Tomorrow cover was painted in 1973 for the A. E. Van Vogt book. The technique and color of the artwork remind me a great deal of the Andrew Wyeth’s 1948 painting Christina’s World. While Wyeth doesn’t feature any of the fantasy elements that his father N. C. Wyeth employed, the painting and Pennington’s illustration share a sense of surrealism and isolation by surrounding their characters in a stark landscape:

Cover found by Martin Isaac.