Angus McKie's colorful, detailed '70s paperback covers are some of my favorites.
A little while back I posted one of McKie's works that's likely among his most well-known, given that it was the 1978 cover to the iconic Spacecraft 2000 to 2100 AD art collection.
I did a little riff on the right-to-repair laws that might have been behind the ship's aggressively modular appearance. Obviously, that green nose in the front was a replacement part, right? It reminds me of an old cobbled-together junker car my dad put together in his youth by combining halves of two different red 1973 Ford Capris.
But I've kept thinking about the concept.
The truth is, that colorful, slapdash, function-first-beauty-second feel is central to what I love about McKie's '70s artwork. To me, that's a comforting view of the future. It promotes a very "lived-in" idea of space travel, like the original Star Wars trilogy with more science, or the worlds of Bladerunner and Alien without the dsytopian corporate overreach.
Here in the real world, we went a different direction (due in large part to all that corporate overreach). We've got the Apple future, where everything is sleek and subscription-based, but nothing is ownable and repairable.
So for this post, I'm looking back at McKie's '70s illustration to highlight all the examples of the modular, piecemeal, repairable future McKie built.
Read the rest of my post here
