Got this for Father's day. A perfect gift for me.
John Harris is one of the greats of science fiction art. There is a sense of vastness and longing in his works. A quality that I've occasionally experienced in epic dreams about space. I admit that I have bought books just because I recognized his art on the cover. Fortunately, it is never a letdown to do so. John Harris' artwork is on the cover of the Ender's Game series, John Scalzi's Old Man's War, and Anne Leckie's Ancillary series just to name a few big hits. Harris has illustrated more than one Hugo and Nebula award winner. He has also done covers for newer printings of Isaac Asimov and Ben Bova's books.
There are also several pages of Harris' own art projects you won't find elsewhere. This is much more than just book covers.

I can lose myself indefinitely in Harris' images. They bring about a real sense of wonder for me.

John Harris is the artist behind the cover painting of dozens of science fiction books. His style is recognizable at a glance - vivid but indistinct, the line work blurred and yet the whole is understood at once.

This coffee table sized book is a treasure. Although ably introduced by John Scalzi and with commentary by Harris himself, the real joy of the book is the massive spreads, in full color, that allow the reader to examine in minute detail, sans text or markings, the images that have graced so many iconic covers.

Of particular note is the 'Works by Author' appendix, which displays several illustrations side by side, all the better to see how they work as a whole over the course of a given series. For myself, who came to Harris' artwork through Scalzi's 'Old Man's War' series, to see several illustrations from the books laid out together was both a chance to re-examine the paintings together, as well as an opportunity to reflect on a series of books I thoroughly enjoyed.

This is the kind of over-sized book I like to have out where I can leaf through it again and again, letting new details and revelations catch me where they may. I also hope that this volume paves the way for a standalone Art of Old Man's War book at some point in the future.

Highly recommended.

I've owned this book since its release in 2014, and have long enjoyed leafing through its lovely imagery and using the various paintings at writing portals. But only now, during the pandemic, did I sit down to actually read the book's text through from beginning to end. This was a delightful exercise, especially the final section, which I had always skipped when leafing through because its inclusion of humanoid figures was boring to me compared to the epic landscapes and spaceships and interstellar scenes. But the final section of the book is a group of sketches and drawings and paintings Harris has made towards his own science fiction cosmology—a world, like most of his paintings, born out of lucid dreaming. It's a rich world that I was so glad to read up on in detail. Truly a delightful book for any science fiction nerd.