John Harris (b. 1948)
The Age of Pussyfoot
signed and dated ‘John Harris. 1978’ (bottom left)
shellac on board
28 x 19¹⁄₄in. (71 X 50.5cm)
painted in 1978

The original dust-jacket artwork for the first edition of Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead.

Speaker for the Dead, published in 1986, is the sequel to the acclaimed Ender’s Game. The novel follows Ender Wiggin, now an adult, as he travels to the planet Lusitania to uncover the truth behind a mysterious alien species and to speak for the dead, revealing the untold stories of their lives. The book delves into complex themes of empathy, redemption, and the consequences of humanity’s actions, and has maintained its status as a high point of modern science fiction.

In 1976, John Harris began to produce paintings which expressed the preoccupations with scale and space that remain with him to the present day. He was subsequently invited by NASA to witness a launch of the space shuttle and record the event in a painting, becoming the first British artist to be honoured in this way. That work now hangs in the Kennedy Space Centre and is part of the Smithsonian Collection. In 2015 he won the Chesley Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement. The Age of Pussyfoot was originally commissioned for a novel by Frederick Pohl, but was re-used for the first edition of Speaker for the Dead in 1986. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database records its further use as the cover artwork for all 23 subsequent impressions issued by Tor Books including the most recent in 2021.

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner