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Star Fantasy by Julie Bell

I know there's "space fantasy" which is scifi-ish setting with magic and wizards and such, but I think it's a slightly different thing when you have a fantasy setting with sci-fi elements. What do you even call it, like, "star fantasy"? A fantasy setting but definitely set on a planet in a galaxy of more stars and planets. I'm thinking of like, conan the barbarian with the alien wizard exiled from his own planet and radium gems and some forms of magic being styled as actually just bizarre alien sciences. I know a lot of fantasy settings have elements of that sort of thing, like alchemy and the alignment of stars as important to magic are staples, but I feel like it's been lost more recently, it's mostly just ideas that have been inherited. There's more ideas to mine.

The god that a particular people worship, a shadow in the night sky that occluded the stars, is also to the reader clearly a massive and ancient starship in orbit of the planet, with a great array of crystals singing in its core. A wizard points to the sky and tells you that there, on the planet that turns around that star, a morose people who see with their skin spill a tithe of their own blood into pipes of a metal not known on your world, to give life to their walking architecture. A lich's minions carry to a king who slighted her a chest of incredible weight, and when it opens, a statue of dull grey metal seems at first to do nothing, but no living creature nearby will know its natural death.

Again, I recgonize that you do sort of get a lot of this, but like... there's a vibe. When the story is mostly a traditional fantasy setting but there's other stuff that... visits, from far beyond and long ago, not just gods and demons but things of flesh and blood, though different flesh and different blood. The sense of the world being unfathomably deep and strange, that your entire planet and all you know is just a remote island, and whole other worlds, beyond number, full of incomprehensible and uncaring wonders, wait behind the stars.

Maybe part of it is that science and technology don't feel magical to most people any more. Which, you know, fair.

#fantasy #scifi #space fantasy #star fantasy

Heavy Metal Magazine Vol. 2, No. 6 (October 1978) cover by Ron Walotsky.

Reprinted in Star Fantasy #14 (February 1979).

#heavy metal magazine #star fantasy #comic covers #70s #ron walotsky

Heavy Metal Magazine Vol. 2, No. 2 (June 1978) cover by Joe Jusko.

Reprinted in Star Fantasy #11 (November 1978).

My very first painting and professional cover. Painted at 17 years old, three years after the B&W pieces in this gallery. Watercolor, colored inks and gouache.

#heavy metal magazine #star fantasy #comic covers #70s #joe jusko