Fabulous Bestiaries
by Jeff Patterson on 07/10/11
Regular readers of this humble blog know that I am a dedicated enthusiast of science fictional wildlife "documentaries," especially in art book form. My copies of Wayne Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials and Expedition are tattered and ragged with repeated browsings, as are Dougal Dixon's After Man, Karl Kofoed's Galactic Geographic, the mindbending Spacebloom, Alec Gillis' Worlds, Weta Studio's The World of Kong, and Ricardo Delgado's Hieroglyph (still my vote for best comic book limited series in the last 20 years. Where's the damned trade paperback?).
This week this esteemed pantheon of books expanded when I received my copy of Terryl Whitlatch's magnificent Animals Real and Imagined. It is, quite simply, stunning. In an ideal world SF Fandom would demand a dozen such tomes like this a year or more, and there would be a Hugo catagory for visual imaginary non-fiction. I know creature design is a mainstay in games and movies, but this kind of artfully rendered work is the distillation of sense-of-wonder.
