Customer Reviews

Visions of Spaceflight: Images from the Ordway Collection

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Fred Ordway has to be the world's leading space historian. If he isn't recognised as such he darned well should be! True to form Fred delivers an outstanding book filled with beautiful reproductions of some of the greatest space art ever painted. In the past fifty years Fred Ordway's contributions to the documentation of man's preoccupation with the heavens has to be unsurpassed. This book is a brilliant and perfect addition to any space enthusiasts collection. Trust me...buy this book!

Author Ordway's absorption with rockets and spaceflight began before NASA even existed: he was one of the first to work in the space industry and assembled a beautiful collection of images relating to astronautics and rockets. Five centuries of spaceflight images are presented here, in a stunning collection of both real rockets and illustrations of imagined creations. Many a science buff as well as science fiction fans will find Visions Of Spaceflight fascinating.

I have been trying to get my hands on this book for years and finally, bought it used via Amazon. It has been well worth the time and effort. The two highlights for me are:
1) Ordway's recollections of searching obscure foreign bookstores for even more obscure books depicting stories of space travel, and
2) the reprints and recreations of the famous Collier's space travel series artwork from the 1950's.
This is a very satisfying book for someone fascinated with early visions of how man would explore space.

This large-format book brings together paintings, etchings and other visual images of how humans envisioned travel to the moon and the planets from early Renaissance times to the 1950's. Most were illustrations accompanying published works of fiction. These images, collected by Ordway, are very well reproduced and have useful captions.

Until the second half of the nineteenth century, these depictions of space vehicles, other worlds, and their possible inhabitants were wildly fanciful. After Jules Verne, improved astronomical observations and better engineering made these visions increasingly recognizable for those who grew up with the Space Age. The book, which includes photographs of early rocket experiments, ends with an extensive section on the 1950's, covering the ideas of Wernher von Braun and illustrated with paintings by Chesley Bonestell and Fred Freeman.

Readers may wonder why there are no visions from non-western cultures; were none sufficiently interesting, or do they really not exist? The foreword by Arthur C. Clarke is disappointingly flippant.

Beautiful "coffee table" book. The author's love for the pictorial material in his collection and this book shows at every page. The author is at his best with the "post-Goddard" material and 20th century representations of space flight. Being the proud owner of some of the original, older material, I did notice that a couple of captions for Flammarion and Terzi are wrong but I am just being picky... Enjoy!

All of the paintings in this volume are dated, the paintings are for the most part not accurate as we see spaceflight today, but their historical value is immense. For example, early paintings of the lunar surface often exhibit sharp peaks on mountains, of course we now know eons of cosmic bombardment smoothly rounded most features. Text at the beginning of this book explain how these paintings were collected over many years, they date from before the 1600's to the 1950's, a fascinating story in itself, and there is also a foreword by Arthur C. Clarke. Each painting is accompanied by a caption in this large-format book.

From our perspective today many of these paintings look very quaint, though when they were first published they must have appeared very futuristic. Buy this book for it's historical and art value, not for scientific accuracy.