This complex, detailed, and eerie surreal painting by Dean Ellis was created as cover art for Red Tide by D.D. Chapman & Delores Lehman Tarzan (Ace Science Fiction Special #2). The painting shows a mutated reptilian scientist who is one of the last humans surviving in a dystopian underwater near-future. Post-apocalyptic scenarios where humans struggled to adapt to a drastically changed earth were a popular sci-fi trope in the 1970s, when a growing environmental consciousness and Cold War nuclear fears were both at the top of readers minds. Both these fears seem to combine in Red Tide, described on its back cover as follows: “If a water animal can change into a land animal, why should not a land animal sometimes change into a water animal? That was the goal of the research at Cobb Seamount, an underwater experimental station. Then they received the mysterious “Red Tide” broadcast – something about widespread epidemics… military retaliation … And suddenly there wasn’t any surface to return to. Now life in Cobb Seamount was no experiment – it was survival.”

Artist Dean Ellis : 1920 – 2008, was born in Detroit, MI. Ellis studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art and the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts, and served in the Pacific during WWII. He worked as an illustrator and painter after the war, and in 1950, Life included him in a list of the 19 most promising young American artists. He moved to New York in 1956, and created covers for Ray Bradbury novels in the 1960s, which led to jobs painting cover art for many of the SF publishers at the time. He also designed postage stamps for the US and other countries, and his paintings have been collected and exhibited widely.

Simply double matted and framed under plexiglass. A copy of the book is included with purchase.