TAKE-OFF FROM MT. EVEREST

Cover art for the December 1934 issue of Wonder Stories.

"His gaze was distracted to an unusual object that was protruding from the snow higher up the mountain, an object that glittered in the late afternoon sunlight." (The Alien Room, Wonder Stories, December 1934, p. 778)

Frank R. Paul is understood as establishing many of the visual traditions in the science fiction genre. His eye-catching imagery, as seen in the present picture, embellished magazine covers and provided rich color to the stories that filled science fiction pulp magazines . This particular picture adorned the December 1934 cover of Wonder Stories and accompanied the story The Alien Room, written by W.P. Cockroft. The adventure follows the Moyston Expedition on Mount Everest. While climbing, the group spotted a shiny object sticking out of the snow further up the mountain. Upon reaching this foreign conical thing, the men decided to dig it out, searching for its entry point. They discovered its door and climbed in, leaving one man alone in the snow. Inside, they found a skeleton, similar to that of a human, but over ten feet tall. A plan of the solar system was amongst the many alien objects, and the men hypothesized that they had discovered an observatory used by a race of people that lived underneath Mount Everest. As they continued to fiddle around and tinker with the bits and bobs on the walls, the doors suddenly closed, trapping the men. A second later, they shot up into the sky in what was not an observatory, but a spaceship, leaving their one companion out in the snow in disbelief.

Paul was born in Austria and trained as an architect in Vienna before emigrating to New Jersey before World War I. He was hired by Hugo Gernsback in 1914 to illustrate the science magazine The Electrical Experimenter. Amongst his many publications, Gernsback published Amazing Stories which is known as the first science fiction magazine which established the genre in 1926. Paul created hundreds of cover illustrations for Amazing Stories, Wonder Stories and several other pulp magazines. His most famous cover was published for the August 1927 edition of Amazing Stories, illustrating H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. Paul’s lasting influence on the visual vocabulary of science fiction can be found in the representation of aliens, machines, spaceships and especially the architecture of “other worlds”.