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 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 done some freelance Penguin covers and would go on to work with Andy Warhol, Elton John, The Beatles, The Who and The Rolling Stones, but when he arrived at Penguin in March 1965 he was still in his early twenties and yet to make his mark. One of his first Penguin covers was for My Enemy's Enemy by Kingsley Amis, which includes the science fiction story Something Strange.

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 the pairing of sf with modern art went too. In its place came black covers and a window offset towards the lower right corner for the artwork, which now featured a variety of photographic styles and coloured illustrations.

Some 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 Alternating 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 and was then 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 its appearance changed from book to book, as did 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 Susan Cooper, whose debut novel Mandrake is a curious treatment on the theme of planetary consciousness, 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 story to Ballard's dozen for here is a typical seaside scene, a day on the beach like any other until the moment of the photograph. For the camera has captured 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 see it like that and described the cover as 'a dismal flop'.

Drunkard's Walk is a futuristic farce in which immortal telepaths use 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 that launched Penguin's sf series three years earlier and corrected the blurb on the book's back cover so the timescale of the story was two billion years instead of a mere two thousand. However, the blurb now seemed to be referring not to the new cover but something else entirely. '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 for Hal Clement's « Mission of Gravity » and J G Ballard's « The Drowned World ».

Stapledon's novel deserved a work of art and perhaps this had originally been intended, although the little silhouette of a man etched against a low Sun neatly captures 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 different banner and logo colours finally paid off on the 1966 reprint of Deathworld. For this he brought back the black and white penguin but placed it in a mauve roundel with a white border and matched it with a banner in the same cool mauve. This softened the monochrome glare of white typography on a black cover and restored a sense of balance which the other covers lacked. The 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.