"Sleet Storm"

Hello to what's left of IX! 

Elliot Dold (1889-1957) was one of the three most important science fiction artists of the 1930s, along with Wesso and Paul, and a mainstay of Astounding's first decade. This piece has had an auction history but no publication data, so I took a long troll through my Astounding collection and found it in the October 1937 issue, illustrating one of John W. Campbell's science pieces about the solar system. (His article "Sleet Storm" concerns meteors, natch.) So, minor mystery solved.

In the straight world, Dold is remembered (if at all) for his really remarkable illustrations for Night, a slim volume of erotic poetry written and privately published by Harold Brainerd Hersey in 1923. As artist/designer John Coulthart has noted, "The drawings are ... radically different to Dold’s science-fiction art, to a degree that they could easily be taken for the work of a different illustrator."

As an SF illustrator, Dold was strongest with alien exotica, enigmatic machinery and his gorgeous spaceships, which for me at least define a certain kind of thirties space opera. Like Paul, he was not always comfortable with the human figure, but even his worst illos have a certain crude power.