Out of this world: seven lots that helped shape the realms of sci-fi and fantasy

The first drawings for the cover art of Jurassic Park

In 1989, the 25-year-old graphic designer Chip Kidd was asked by the publishers Alfred A. Knopf to design a jacket for Michael Crichton’s latest manuscript: Jurassic Park. Steven Spielberg had already optioned the story as a potential movie, and Kidd’s brief was to make a cover as iconic as that used for the first edition of Peter Benchley’s Jaws — which had subsequently been adopted as the poster image for Spielberg’s 1975 film adaptation.

Kidd had travelled to New York’s American Museum of Natural History to study ‘AMNH 5027’, its legendary T. rex, when a book in the gift shop caught his eye: Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution by Robert L. Carroll. On page 296 was a drawing of the same specimen, adapted from a paper published in 1916/17.

Working directly on the page, with pencil, felt-tip, biro, crayon and highlighter, Kidd tweaked the illustration’s appearance and added the book’s title and author, then faxed his design to Crichton. ‘Wow. Fantastic f***ing jacket,’ was the author’s response. (Never mind the fact that Tyrannosaurus rex roamed the planet during the late Cretaceous period rather than the Jurassic.)

Jurassic Park became a bestseller, and Universal Studios licensed Kidd’s design as the park’s emblem, and ultimately the franchise’s logo. Kidd’s archive, including all the other artwork that helped create the Jurassic Park cover, is now housed at Penn State University — meaning that this is the only piece in private hands.

A visualisation of Jodorowsky’s Dune universe

The 1970s version of Dune, by the Chilean-French director Alejandro Jodorowsky, has been called ‘the greatest movie never made’. His mind-bending big-screen adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic science-fiction novel was set to star Mick Jagger, Orson Welles and Salvador Dalí, with Pink Floyd writing the score.

To help bring his epic vision to life, Jodorowsky enrolled H.R. Giger as his ‘spiritual warrior’, giving the Swiss artist free rein to recreate Herbert’s imagined universe.

Giger’s work appears alongside drawings by Christopher Foss and Jean Giraud (aka Moebius) in a collection of images and ideas relating to the proposed film known as the Dune Bible. Giger only managed to complete five numbered illustrations of a world in which, he said, ‘black magic was practised, aggressions were let loose, and intemperance and perversion were the order of the day’. The movie project was then cancelled.

Humanoid constructions such as the one shown above were part of the Dune vision: in a 2014 documentary about the doomed film, Jodorowsky describes a castle with a protruding tongue on which spaceships land.

Following the collapse of Dune, Giger would go on to make his name creating the titular ‘xenomorph’ in Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi horror Alien — for which his efforts were recognised with an Academy Award.

An original 1933 poster for King Kong

Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s 1933 film King Kong is recognised by the US Library of Congress as ‘culturally, historically and aesthetically significant’ and has been anointed by the BBC as ‘the greatest monster film ever made’.

The plot follows a giant ape, discovered on the mysterious Skull Island, which is brought to New York City and famously scales the Empire State Building. The film’s special effects — including the use of stop-motion animation, rear projection and miniatures — stunned audiences.

The image became the insignia of the franchise, with an updated version of the throne appearing on the TV show’s posters. A cast replica, which toured promotional events, sold at auction in October 2024 for $1.49 million, having been catalogued as ‘One of the most coveted seats in Pop culture’.

Production notes for 2001: A Space Odyssey

In 1964, after a whirlwind four years spent directing Spartacus, Lolita and Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick began plotting what was arguably his most ambitious project.

Following a meeting with the British science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke in New York, the pair decided to join forces to create a book and screenplay about a group of astronauts and their supercomputer on a voyage to Jupiter to investigate an alien monolith.

At his Polaris Productions offices in Manhattan, Kubrick gathered a crack team to help him realise the vision. Among them was associate producer Victor Lyndon, who documented the production conferences in a momentous file of typescript notes. In May 1965, he presented the volume under the film’s working title: Journey Beyond the Stars.

Across some 160 pages, the document outlines in meticulous detail how Kubrick was to achieve his groundbreaking special effects and includes a lengthy section dedicated to planning the famous ‘centrifuge walk’ scene on the Discovery One spaceship. It also highlights how some matters were still being decided upon, such as the name of the mutinous robot, which would eventually change from Athena to HAL.

The film was released in 1968 as 2001: A Space Odyssey, and won an Academy Award for visual effects. Today, Kubrick’s masterpiece is regarded not just as a cornerstone of the sci-fi genre, but as one of the most influential films ever made.

The file was gifted by John Hoesli, the movie’s art director, to the noted historian Piers Bizony, author of 2001: Filming the Future, and it has remained in his collection ever since.

A print of the escape module from Alien from the artist’s own collection

Few horror-movie moments are as ingrained in the public consciousness as when Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver, discovers that she isn’t alone on her escape module in the 1979 film Alien.

Three years before the movie’s release, director Ridley Scott and writer Dan O’Bannon hired the artist Chris Foss to help them bring their extraterrestrial vision to life. During the early stages of development, when O’Bannon was figuring out the movie’s climactic ending, Foss presented him with a felt-tip drawing depicting the moment when Ripley ejects from the spaceship Nostromo with the unexpected stowaway.

O’Bannon was so taken with Foss’s dynamic image that the writer had two copies made on 20th Century Fox stock paper using the diazotype method (where an image is projected onto photosensitive paper, then developed with photographic chemicals). One he kept for himself; the other — this one — he gave back to the artist.

Foss would go on to forge a career as one of the most celebrated science-fiction illustrators, best known for his work on films including Flash Gordon, A.I. Artificial Intelligence and Guardians of the Galaxy.

An original artwork for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is the book that launched one of the most famous and influential fantasy franchises of all time, grossing more than $30 billion.

But back in 1997, when Thomas Taylor, a 23-year-old artist working in a bookshop in Cambridge, painted a watercolour of the boy wizard boarding the Hogwarts Express for the front cover of J.K. Rowling’s first edition, he could have had little idea of the book’s cultural impact.

That original artwork sold at auction in London in 2001 for £85,750. Following the sale, a disappointed underbidder contacted Taylor to ask if he would consider creating a second version of the work. The artist agreed and sent this work along with a handwritten note, stating that it is ‘the only replica I shall ever paint’ — a promise he has kept to this day, despite multiple requests to create others.

In June 2024, the original artwork reappeared at auction in New York, this time realising $1,920,000.

Explore art from antiquity to the 21st century at Classic Week, 26 November to 12 December 2024 at Christie’s in London. On view from 29 November