Artists of yesteryear
depicted future

Bug-Eyed Monsters! Sexy Lady Robots! Marauding Aliens! Mysterious Messages From Beyond! Death Rays! Flying Saucers! Hurtling Asteroids! Computers! Portable Phones! Televised Sports!

"Worlds of Tomorrow: The Amazing Universe of Science Fiction Art," by Forrest J Ackerman with Brad Linaweaver (Collector's Press, 176 pages, $39.95)

OK, we're running out of exclamation points, and besides, some of the above have actually come true. There was a time in the public zeitgeist when magazines with Astounding, Astonishing, Startling, Wonder or Amazing in the title had nothing to do with J.Lo's booty or Britney's starter marriages. No, these flights of hyperbole were reserved for the world of the imagination.

Science-fiction magazines were yesterday's brown-paper wrapper purchases, slightly seedy, filled with dreadful dreck interspersed with lightning flashes of brilliance -- for every Isaac Asimov, there are a dozen John Normans or Dale Browns -- and the colorful covers beckoned from the bottom row of the newsstand. We're talking of dames in dishabille and distress, rocketeers blasting slavering aliens, monster robots kicking over the Empire State Building.

Yeah, it's hard to resist, all right.

The unsung foot soldiers of the pulp science-fiction world were the cover artists. Often uncredited, they created inner worlds of innocent awe, where the limitations of physics didn't rein in the free run of imagination. As Bob Heinlein liked to point out, the universe is not only odder than you can imagine, it's odder than you CAN imagine.

These pulp artists are given their due in the lavish new illustrated volume "Worlds of Tomorrow: The Amazing Universe of Science Fiction Art" by Forrest J. Ackerman with Brad Linaweaver. There aren't many folks who legitimately need no introduction, but "Forry" Ackerman's cheerful contributions to the universe of fantasy and science-fiction fandom are legendary.

The authors' book gathers together many of the pulp illustrations that sparked their imaginations as young dreamers, from the "Golden Age" of the '30s, '40s and '50s -- before science fiction became too commercialized. The authors add comments and present rambling, chatty discourses on each other and the universe in general. It keeps the book from being too scholarly and pompous. After all, expanding your mental and imaginative horizons is supposed to be fun.

Unfortunately, many of the art credits are still missing. Proper accreditation has been lost over the years. Even if the illustration seems like a mantra to modern times, an icon of the national unconsciousness, as familiar as Capt. Kirk's hairpiece, the artists' names have vanished. They created bizarre brilliance and then faded back into obscurity.

Honolulu Airport's Pacific Aerospace Museum (recently demolished by the state) showed in a groundbreaking exhibit called "Yesterday's Imagination, Today's Technology" a lot of the things we take for granted today were "invented" by science-fiction dreamers. The nerds of yesteryear are the creators of modern technology, and the rabidly creative illustrations arrayed in "Worlds of Tomorrow" provided a starting point. (It's interesting how many of the illustrations of technology take an animist approach to design. There are few boxes and hard edges.)

And it's come full circle. Take a look at the recent movie "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow," and try not to visualize the future visualized through the past. The trick is not to get dreamily lost in archaic, golden visions of a nostalgic future, but to take the romance of distant horizons and the wonder of learning into our own imagined future.

A book to dream upon.