Infinite Worlds is divided into two lushly illustrated halves. The first half, "Doorways to the Future", is an eighty-odd page history of science fiction art. Di Fate goes back to Bosch and da Vinci, and then gives several pages to the late nineteenth century illustrators such as Robida and the early pulp artists before moving on to the genre work that fills most of the pages.
Di Fate's history is sound, and the stories are interesting, but he accompanies them with pictures that are distractingly gorgeous to look at and which make it hard to concentrate on the tale he tells. Page 34, for example, has a full page reproduction of the Startling Stories cover for van Vogt's "The Shadow Men" that shows a black robot firing a ray gun, with green rays shooting from its eyes, and a beautiful scantily clad woman struggling in its arms. How can you concentrate on the text with that sort of thing going on?
The second half (actually two-thirds by page count) of the book is called "Masters of the Infinite" and consists of (mostly) two page spreads of each of about a hundred artists. There's a little text too, maybe two or three paragraphs, to give you some context for the artist. Only the most influential get more than two pages--Freas of course, Frazetta, Whelan, Paul. Richard Powers gets four pages, which is good to see--he's not as well known now as he should be, perhaps because he did so much work for book covers rather than magazines; but he is a major figure.
There are a couple of odd omissions, which other reviewers have noted below. I'll just mention one: Chris Foss, who was perhaps the single most influential British sf artist ever. What makes the omission even more extraordinary is that di Fate acknowledges Foss' tremendous influence twice, on pages 82 and 84. Perhaps there were copyright problems, and Foss' work wasn't available; whatever the reason, it's a pity.
The only other negative comment I have is that the book is no more than a survey. Lovers of the work of any of these artists will have to go elsewhere for their fix of Bonestell or Finlay or Barlowe--no one artist has more than half a dozen works here. But that's what the book is designed to be, and *as* a survey it works wonderfully well.
