For anyone who grew up in the 1970s or 80s with a stack of dog-eared science fiction paperbacks, the name Chris Foss isn't just a footnote—it's a primal trigger. Before CGI, before concept art for Star Wars became ubiquitous, there was Foss’s airbrushed vision of the future: mile-long starships crusted with primary-colored hull plates, enigmatic alien city-ships drifting through nebulae, and impossible geometries rendered in glossy, fetishistic detail.
But these are minor quibbles. If you own a single Foss poster, you need this book. If you are a concept artist, a model-maker, or a writer of space opera, this belongs on your reference shelf. And if you are simply a fan of that specific, glorious era when science fiction promised a future of vast, colorful, slightly dangerous machinery, then Hardware will feel like coming home. Hardware- The Definitive SF Works of Chris Foss
What elevates Hardware beyond a simple art collection is its curation. The editors have dug deep into the archives. You get the expected classic covers for Isaac Asimov, E.E. "Doc" Smith, and A.E. van Vogt, but you also get the weird stuff: his conceptual designs for the unmade Dune movie (imagine a Lynchian Guild Heighliner drenched in Foss’s candy-apple red), his advertising illustrations for car manufacturers, and his strange, surrealist personal pieces. For anyone who grew up in the 1970s