Out of this World

Amazing Stories, January 1929, Frank R Paul's cover for Marius The Sixth Glacier, in which cosmic conditions start a new ice age
© The Estate of Frank R. Paul/The British Library

Bovril advertisement, c.1890. In the 1870s the owners of an energy drink named their product Bovril to capitalise on Vril’s association with power and energy
© Reproduced with kind permission of Unilever

Sheet music cover for Raymond Taylor's composition, A Signal From Mars, 1901
© British Library Board

Francis Godwin’s Domingo Gonsales trained a flock of ganzas to transport him in The Man in the Moone. From the first edition, 1638
© The British Library Board

Frank R Paul, April 1928 ‘Eye’ cover for Amazing Stories, the world’s first science-fiction magazine
© The Estate of Frank R. Paul

Lucian of Samosata, True History, Dutch edition, 1647. It is the oldest written work with elements of science fiction, dating from the second century AD
© The British Library Board

Cover of Enrique Gaspar’s Novelas (1887) for El Anacronópete, depicting the earliest known portrayal of a time machine
© The British Library Board

Page from Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus, 1976-1978
© Luigi Serafini

Polish samizdat edition of Evgeny Zamyatin's My (We), published in Warsaw, 1985
© Supernowa Publishing

The Martians from HG Wells's The War of the Worlds, as depicted by Alvim-correa in the Belgian edition, La Guerre des mondes (Brussels, 1906)
© The British Library Board

Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (1909), illustrated by Frank Leyendecker
© The British Library Board