Foss, born in 1946 on Guernsey, trained as an architecture student before becoming a professional artist. He produced many deftly realist black-and-white illustrations of copulating couples for Alex Comfort's erotic manual The Joy of Sex (1972), and also produced a large number of full colour paintings as book covers through the 1970s and 1980s, mostly science fiction. He worked with an airbrush, an adapted air-operated tool that atomizes and sprays paint with varying degrees of spread and focus, enabling him to create very fine gradations and shadings, mist effects and sheens, spotlights and starbursts. His architectural training is evident in the structural solidity and scale of his spaceships, the extrapolated flying-building quality.
By and large Foss did not attempt actually to illustrate the specific action of the book. He was not a fan of science fiction and preferred not to read the works he was commissioned to paint, working instead purely on his own inspiration. The lack of fit between cover and story has puzzled some readers, although I would say it adds to the mystique and glamour.
His fame grew through the 1980s, with Foss illustrating album covers, working on visualisations and designs for Jodorowsky’s celebrated, unmade Dune and also on the Traveller games. His work as cover-artist continued. Then, in 1990, he produced Diary of a Spaceperson.There’s a moment in Monty Python’s Holy Grail film when Arthur and his kerrniggetts encounter the enchanter Tim, played with a exaggerated Scots accent and much wide-eyed mugging and scowling by John Cleese. Tim mops and mows, warns the group of the monstrous rabbit that awaits them, and shoots flames and explosions from his magic staff. Then Graham Chapman's Arthur turns his head to his men, and comments, sotto voce: ‘what an eccentric performance’.
That’s how I feel about this book.
One can imagine the publisher’s meeting out of which the idea came: ‘Hey, how about a large format full-colour book that reprints some of Chris Foss’s most magnificent SF cover artworks, blowing them up to full-page and double-page spreads!’ ‘Great idea!’ ‘And interspersed with those, we could bung in a bunch of soft-core pencil drawings of attractive young women with their tits out!’ ‘We could—wait, what?’ ‘And to tie it all together, a storyline—about a lovely young woman called J, just the letter, travelling the galaxy having various adventures! With her tits out! The stories can all take place inside Chris’s artwork!’ ‘Well ... I mean—shall we get a proper SF author to write the text?’ ‘No, no, I’m sure Chris can handle that himself.’ ‘Really? He’s on record as saying he’s no great fan of SF.’ ‘No matter! Art by Foss! Text by Foss! Naked breasts by Foss! It’s a winner!’
And that is what we have. The story is told in the form of diary entries, printed in an irksome handwriting font that is genuinely hard to read. J moves from place to place, locations and plot determined by pre-existing Foss art. So, for example: there are a couple of Foss canvases of gigantic structures or spaceships against oceanic background. Therefore the story sends J to ‘New Venice’, a water-world.
By way of adding a little dramatic tension here, J is given an aversion to water: ‘I don’t believe it!’ she confines to her diary. ‘Assigned to Venice! That land of DIVS, PEABRAINS and NO HOPERS. What’s more I can’t stand water.’ Arriving at New Venice, this sentiment is reiterated. ‘WATER, at least Venice’s version of water—I DO NOT LIKE IT.’ In what ways the water of New Venice differs from regular H2O is not disclosed to us. J's water aversion has no narrative consequences. Indeed there is no real story on Venice. Peabrains, no-hopers and divs, oh my!
Then there’s this great Foss painting of a spaceship hauling ice through space, so the story sends J there, as a space-lumberjack, ‘marshalling in the Berg Park. Frozen water—YUGH!’ A page later and she's off to a planet upon which 10km tall cities, in constant motion, roll around a planetary railway track, ever keeping under the planet’s two suns to fuel their solar power.
The randomly peripatetic adventures—kidnapped, topless, by space pirates! Marooned on a jungle planet, also topless! Caught in the middle of a space battle! Inseminated by an alien! (‘the reactor’s white hot, we’re pumping lead and my stomach has definitely got something inside it!! For God’s sake, humans are not supposed to be able to be fertilised by aliens’ ... stomach?)—is too bitty and inconclusive to hold the attention. Foss’s space-art is magnificent, but is demeaned, rather, by being forced to dance attendance on this piddling episodic story. And the many pencil-sketches of topless young women are just skeezy. You can see the lubricious cynicism of the pairing: you know who likes science fiction? Teenage boys. You know what else teenage boys like? Boobies. Let's combine them! It'll be a smash! It's Flasher Gordon. It's The Empire Strips Off. It's Book of the New Page-3-of-the-Sun. It's The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Nudity.
Foss’s grasp of science-fiction manifests a rather charming ineptness. At one point J travels to ‘Stasco 3, one of the biggest planets in this part of the sky, twice the size of the Earth’s sun’. Big! The sun's equatorial surface gravity is 274 m/s^2, 28 times earthly gravity, so one would assume Stasco 3 is going to be a squash and a squeeze. But no: J arrives, wanders happily around, although it takes her a little while to adjust to the new atmosphere (‘I tried a few breaths and had to have medication for my lungs’). This is how people dress on Stasco:
And that’s the one constant. On more than one occasion, J, wandering through some space-port or metropolis, is mugged at gunpoint, the thieves stealing all her money and all her clothes from the waist up. You think I’m joking, but I’m honestly not. It happens repeatedly. It’s like Kenny Everett’s flamboyant film-star being interviewed by Parkinson: ‘…and then suddenly all my clothes fall off!’
