Writers and artists have long been known to incorporate real people into their work as the basis for characters and countenances. In the SF field, this practice is known as Tuckerization, after Wilson Tucker’s habit of inserting thinly disguised friends into his narratives. SFF cover artists have also filched faces from time to time. I don’t think this should be called Tuckerization but I have no idea what it is called. Even if there’s no name for the practice, it is done in SFF. Herewith, four notable [whatever it should be called] covers, featuring some familiar faces.
Michael Whelan is known for (among other things) actually reading the SFF works for which he provides covers, a practice which is in no way universal. He is also known for producing covers whose characters bear an astonishing resemblance to Michael Whelan. Well, it is useful to have a model always at hand.
Take Tully, from C. J. Cherryh’s The Pride of Chanur, the lone survivor of a human ship that made the terrible mistake of blundering into Compact Space. Although obscured by the hani surrounding him, no doubt to protect the castaway human from predatory kif, that’s very clearly the upper half of Michael Whelan’s face, circa the early 1980s.
Ed Emshwiller was a popular and prolific SFF artist of the 1950s and early 1960s, one of a very small number of SFF artists who made anything like a living at the trade. Emsh (as he often signed his work) famously used wife Carol Emshwiller (an author and artist in her own right) as a model. One might very reasonably expect an example of one such illustration here. However, there are so many excellent examples that I found it impossible to choose just one. I have instead made a much more unlikely seeming choice of Emsh model: cartoonist Bill Griffith, pictured as a young man piloting a space ship.
Jody Lee may be best known to Tor.com regulars for the many covers she’s produced for genre books by Jo Clayton, Mercedes Lackey, and Midori Snyder. However, it’s her work in tabletop gaming on which I want to focus. Specifically, Lee’s astonishing cover for RuneQuest, 3rd edition, which features as models famed author Kate Elliott as well as her (Elliott’s) husband.
As you know, RuneQuest is a gritty simulationist roleplaying game that tries to provide verisimilitude where non-magical elements are concerned, thus the impressively realistic arms and armour on the two warriors. What you may not know is that that is also the standard equipment recommended when negotiating book contracts.
James Warhola, Andy Warhol’s promising young nephew, has somehow accrued four decades of experience despite having debuted in the 1980s. (I don’t really understand the New Math.) Among the hundreds of covers Warhola has created over the course of his nearly half-century career is the cover illustration for the 1999 Tor edition of Callahan’s Bar by Spider Robinson.
I note that one of the characters medicating life’s miseries with alcohol and mutual solace is a very familiar face: It’s author Spider Robinson. Well, I suppose actually frequenting the bar would make documenting events there easier.
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Hampered as I am by terrible eyesight and unfamiliarity with what most authors look like in real life, there are no doubt many worthy examples I have overlooked. Please feel free to mention them (or at least the flattering depictions) in comments, which are, as ever, below.
In the words of fanfiction author Musty181, four-time Hugo finalist, prolific book reviewer, and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll “looks like a default mii with glasses.” His work has appeared in Interzone, Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis) and the 2021 and 2022 Aurora Award finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by web person Adrienne L. Travis). His Patreon can be found here.
