ATD paperback cover

[Monte Davis]

Dave Monroe:
 
> Tullio Crali, Nose-diving on the City, 1939, oil on canvas
> 
> http://www.simultaneita.net/tulliocrali.html

> Any comments on the use of a Bltz-eye-view painting by a fascist
sympathizer? 

For what it's worth, Italian aviators got in a lot more strafing of
Ethiopians (and Spanish Republicans) than they did "blitzing" of any urban
targets. Italy never put anything like the German level of effort into
building planes (or training) for medium-to-heavy bombing, let alone what
the UK and US would do. Its artists were world-class in Futurist-Dynamist
imagery, the way Mussolini was world-class in his "place in the sun"
neo-Roman-Imperialist rhetoric... but in both cases the real-world execution
was mostly _opera buffa_.

Beyond that, I think it's a smart design choice. The closing pages of ATD
feed directly into that between-the-wars pop culture of the Future, the
comic books and Sunday supplements of TRP's childhood and Tyrone's
adolescence,  that played such a big role in GR. One could assemble an
international gallery of Radiant Cities, radio-vision in every home, and
sleek trains, planes and rockets, all with a shared or strongly overlapping
visual style.

Without labels only an expert could tell the Italian from the American from
the German from the Russian. It would be harder than we might like to think
to quarantine the "Nazi art" and "socialist realism" from our own healthy
heritage..

http://paleo-future.blogspot.com/search/label/1920s
http://paleo-future.blogspot.com/search/label/1930s