Homo hydrogenensis n a new stage of human existence characterized by ontological insecurity in a nuclear world. Also known as 'Eniwetok man' after the Pacific atoll requisitioned by the USA for atomic weapons tests following World War II. The term was coined by J G Ballard in his short story, The Terminal Beach (1964).


In the mid-1960s Penguin's chief editor, Tony Godwin, decided that popular fiction needed a separate art director, and over a pint in a pub one day (or so the story goes) he gave the job to a young illustrator at The Sunday Times Magazine named Alan Aldridge. Aldridge had already produced a number of freelance covers for Penguin, and later in the sixties he would go on to great things, working with Andy Warhol, Elton John, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Who amongst others. But when he joined Penguin in March 1965 he was still in his early twenties and yet to make his mark.

As a subseries of the fiction list, sf also passed to Aldridge and twelve months after his arrival the covers of the Penguin sf series underwent a radical transformation. The layout of the logo and typography was similar to the Marber grid but the grid itself had gone, and apart from two reprints Germano Facetti's pairing of sf with modern art went too. In its place came black covers with a window offset towards the lower right-hand corner for the artwork, which now featured a variety of photographic styles and coloured illustrations.

Some of the covers worked and some didn't, but either way Aldridge's black magic had a disturbing effect on the penguin logo, which suffered an unpleasant identity crisis. First it abandoned its roundel to float wraithlike on the cover of Alter- nating Currents. Then it began to re-materialize on Edgar Pangborn's Martian chronicle, A Mirror for Observers. Following that it changed from purple to orange, before being born again as a black-and-white bird in a fat new roundel where it lay, somewhat psychotically, in an egg-shaped pool of orange yolk. But it never settled, and it changed its appearance from one title to the next, along with the colour of the sf banner.

Someone must have pointed out that apart from a story in the first Penguin Science Fiction anthology, there were no female writers in the series, because suddenly two turned up, like buses. First to arrive was Judith Merril, who co-wrote Gunner Cade with fellow American Cyril Kornbluth under the pen-name of Cyril Judd. And right behind Merril was the English writer Susan Cooper, whose debut novel, Mandrake, is a curious treatment on the theme of planetary conscious- ness, set against a backdrop of nuclear proliferation and Cold War paranoia.

If a picture paints a thousand words then the one on the cover of The Terminal Beach adds a thirteenth apocalyptic story to Ballard's dozen. For here, frozen in time, is a typical seaside scene, a day on the beach like any other until the moment the photograph is taken. For what the camera has captured is a man-made hell, and the brief buckling of space and time as a thermonuclear explosion fuses sand and sunbathers into a single vitrified image. Ballard, however, did not quite see it like that and described the cover as "a dismal flop".

Drunkard's Walk is a futuristic farce in which immortal telepaths are using mind control to force any 'normals' they regard as a threat to commit suicide. When a young, happy and popular professor of mathematics is targeted he discovers that the way to fend off such attacks is with a bottle of whisky, thus setting up perhaps the daftest dénouement ever written as the professor and police stagger around like the Keystone Cops in boozy pursuit of the sinister superhumans.

A reprint of The Day it Rained Forever in 1966 replaced the Max Ernst painting on its previous cover with a photograph of coloured dolls' faces peering like prisoners through a bottle-glass window. What this was meant to signify is anyone's guess, although the creator of the Marber grid presumably knew since he was the man behind the camera.

The 1966 reprint of Last and First Men replaced the dreary cover image that had launched the Penguin Science Fiction series three years earlier and amended the blurb on the book's back cover so that the timescale of the story was now correctly given as two billion years instead of a mere two thousand. However, the blurb also seemed to be referring not to the new cover but to something entirely different. "The infinite and icy perspectives of a surrealist painting give form to Stapledon's vision of the future", it said, as if recalling the alien landscapes of Yves Tanguy used earlier in the Penguin sf series for Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity and J G Ballard's The Drowned World. Stapledon's book certainly merited a work of art and perhaps this had originally been intended. It didn't get one, but the little silhouette of a man etched against a low Sun captured something of the scale of Stapledon’s story, from the first man staring at the Sun as it rises across the savannah, to the last man standing as the same star sets two billion years later.

Aldridge's experiments with various colour schemes for the logo and banner were not always successful, but this changed with the introduction of a cool new colour for the 1966 reprint of Deathworld. For this Aldridge reinstated the traditional black-and-white penguin logo, but placed it in a mauve roundel with a white border and matched it with a mauve sf banner, thereby softening the monochrome glare of white typography on a black cover and restoring a sense of balance which the other covers lacked. This use of black, white and mauve brought together for the first time the distinctive livery that would become synonymous with Penguin sf covers in the years that followed.