Top 10 Chris Moore Covers

The Fantasy Hive was saddened to hear of the death of science fiction illustrator Chris Moore (1947-2025).

Across his career, Moore illustrated mainstream fiction novels and rock album covers, but remains best known and loved for his science fiction covers. His gleaming and smooth renditions of high-tech spacecraft, cool withdrawn protagonists and inventively rendered aliens graced book covers from the 1970s through to the present day, and for many fans of a certain age his aesthetics helped define science fiction. His covers were used in the initial run of Gollancz’s SF Masterworks series, beginning in 1999, cementing them in the minds of a whole new generation of SF fans. As a tribute to Moore’s work, here are my ten personal favourites of his many covers, in chronological order. All covers sourced from the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. 

Clifford D. Simak – Way Station (1976)

Moore’s cover for the Methuen Paperbacks edition of Clifford D. Simak’s classic of agrarian SF Way Station (originally published in 1963) may not suit the tone of the book, but it’s a thing of beauty that immediately showcases the strengths of Moore’s style. Here is a beautiful spaceship, all neat interlocking panels, cathedral-like windows, and bulbous sensor pods, breathtakingly floating above planet Earth, while protagonist Enoch’s house floats serenely in space for some reason.  

C. J. Cherryh – Downbelow Station (1983)

With his predilection for lovingly-rendered spaceships, it’s not surprising that Moore became the go-to illustrator of many hard science fiction authors. Some of his most evocative art was used for C.J. Cherryh’s Alliance-Union series, as seen here in this cover of the Methuen first book for the series, 1981’s Downbelow Station. Moore captures beautifully the elegant lines and futuristic complexity of the eponymous station, whilst making sure it still looks like a functioning piece of space equipment where Cherryh’s story can take place. 

J.G. Ballard – Crash (1985)

With his ties to hard science fiction, Moore wasn’t the most obvious choice for the Vintage Books cover of J.G. Ballard’s psychosexual nightmare Crash (1973), and in truth his character portraits were rarely as compelling as his lovingly drawn spaceships, but in this case it actually works to his advantage. Here, a woman’s shoulder, her face obscured, the vastness of the American landscape, and the artfully strewn wreckage of miscellaneous car parts miss the English urban setting so crucial to Ballard’s novel, but they somehow capture a disturbing and alien eroticism that’s nevertheless perfect for the book. 

William Gibson – Burning Chrome (1988)

Given that cyberpunk had its roots in hard science fiction, it’s no surprise that Moore found his aesthetic of gleaming, impersonal high-tech surfaces perfectly suited for the main thread of rebellious science fiction in the 80s. Moore illustrated various covers and stories for genre pioneers William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, but none are more iconic than his illustration for Gibson’s Burning Chrome, first appearing on the Grafton paperback collection of the iconic 1986 cyberpunk short stories. Here Moore’s sensuously rendered technological surfaces merge with human skin, and the 1980s cyborg is born. 

Greg Egan – Permutation City (1994)

Moore’s illustration was used as the cover for Millenium’s first edition of Greg Egan’s post-cyberpunk hard SF classic Permutation City, and remains the iconic rendering. Egan’s city, a virtual reality environment, is a gleaming technofuturist marvel, but Moore frames it skewed, seen through a window of further immense technology, hinting at the city’s status as embedded in a computerized environment.  

Philip K. Dick – Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? (1997)

Moore had done cover illustrations for Philip K. Dick novels since the 19 70s, but it’s his 1990s covers that became iconic. And none show this better than his cover for Dick’s masterpiece Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? (1968). Since the canonization of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), cover artists have struggled to combine Scott’s neon rain-drenched cybperunk vision with Philip K. Dick’s stories of slobbish losers living in ghastly decaying dystopias. Moore’s great trick here is that he manages to combine both, rendering the futuristic dystopian imagery of the film with the alienation and sadness of Dick’s original vision. 

Alastair Reynolds – Revelation Space (2000)

Gollancz chose Moore to illustrate the cover for the first edition of Alastair Reynolds’ groundbreaking space opera Revelation Space (2000). Moore switched from his normal maximalist style to a minimalist design classic, portraying a beautiful but tiny spaceship dwarfed by a giant planet and the immense darkness of space. The cover helped cement Reynolds as the leader of New Space Opera, its visuals effortlessly chiming with Reynolds’ powerful and bleak vision, announcing that here was a new and bold take on the beloved genre. The image has become so associated with Reynolds’ writing that changing the cover when it was inducted into the Masterworks series in 2013 was unthinkable. 

Sheri S. Tepper – Grass (2002)

One of my favourite of Moore’s SF Masterworks covers is the one he did for Sheri S. Tepper’s feminist SF classic Grass (1989). Tepper and Moore might seem at odds on first glance, but it’s clear this inspired Moore to take a different approach somewhat outside his comfort zone. The lush greens beautifully capture the planet Grass, with the grass stalks and a glittering insect foregrounded. This highlights the ecological aspect of the storyline, whilst the rounded castle and spaceship in the background, again slightly tilted to warn the reader that something is a little bit off, portrays the retro-futurist nature of the planet’s brutal neo-feudalist society. 

Yoon Ha Lee – Ninefox Gambit (2016)

Moore’s art continued to grace SF covers well into the modern age, and his artistry never slowed down. Here he perfectly captures the geometric nightmare of the Hexarchate’s math-punk ships in Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit for an excellent cover for Solaris. 

Anne Charnock – The Enclave (2017)

Moore also collaborated with indie publishing stalwarts Newcon Press, producing a series of interlocking covers for their novellas. My favourite one is this piece for Anne Charnock’s The Enclave (2017), which beautifully captures the high-tech wonder of the city as well as the grimy used future of the Enclave itself in the world Charnock originally created for her iconic A Calculated Life (2013).

Bonus: Editor’s Top Three

Beth chiming in here with three of my favourites: The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin, Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, and The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard.

I studied The Dispossessed in uni and it’s a cover (and of course book) that stayed with me ever since, so clearly envisaged. I’ve not read Flowers but I’ve always wanted to, and a large part of that appeal was Moore’s cover of this innocent white mouse juxtaposed against a circuit maze. Finally, TO Munro reviewed The Drowned World (read that here) and again, it’s a cover that stuck in my mind, this time just as an editor making feature images from it. He had such a way of illuminating an intriguing aspect from the world or story to draw you in.

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