Space Weapons
                                             (1984 - Gallery Books)  

     (by Frank Barnaby)    A mixed bag of a book.  I'm just not sure who the producers thought their audience was.  The sophomoric text would seem to suggest that as everyone began talking about President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (dismissively dubbed 'Star Wars'), there was here perceived a need for a primer or simplistic introduction to the aspects of rudimentary space warfare within the arena of missiles & satellites.  To provide visual interest someone thought to add bunches of pictures of spy planes, missile launches and a good amount of satellite paintings (almost always accompanied by space shuttles).  For good measure, also toss in just a handful of more fanciful space-habitats and futuristic attacks.  So, you end up with a 72 page book (with a painted cover and endpapers) with only 32 pages featuring large reproductions and another 10 collecting smaller images together.  Unfortunately, almost all of the good pages are being utilized to display 15 large images laid over the book's central gutter and more than half of those suffer significantly from it.  As I imagine this was not meant primarily to be an art book, most of the paintings are not credited, unless it is by the image-agencies that sourced them.  As best as I can determine, the 'well-presented art is by: Colin Hay, Marcus Lindroos (2), John C. Olson, and UNKNOWN (12).

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