“It was fashionable at that time (we made it fashionable: one of our covert disinformation campaigns) to complain bitterly about the inappropriately erotic and ‘sexist’ cover art, that kept people from taking sf’s sober, intelligent, futurist speculation seriously. But we knew very well, and so did the men, that the art -all those air-brushed spacegirls in the crotch-hugging suits; all those wispily clad or bronze-breasted females ravished (as far as public decency permitted) by monsters or spacemen, told the honest truth. The real purpose of science fiction is to describe how Man gets out there to the edge of the known, grabs hold of a chunk of that alien dark, and pumps it full of his seed…”
