The science writer Carl Zimmer was 10 years old when his family moved to rural New Jersey. He quickly made a new friend whose father was the prolific science fiction illustrator John Schoenherr.
Zimmer hadn’t read Dune, or seen Schoenherr’s unforgettable illustrations of sandworms. He was stunned by the realism of the artist’s imagination. “He was trying to make real landscape art,” Zimmer explains, informed by his studies of geology and the natural world. “He would try to paint some alien sandworm or Chewbacca-like monster as carefully as Dürer might have drawn a rabbit.”
That attention to detail made Zimmer look at life on Earth differently. “I started to realize that actually living things on Earth are aliens in a way,” an idea that’s the backbone of Zimmer’s own work. “I love writing about bizarre biology here on Earth because there’s no end of it. I started to appreciate that sitting in his studio and looking at these things he was painting.”
(Originally aired: January 24, 2014)
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Slideshow: Jack Schoenherr’s paintings
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