The Fantastic Planet: A World of Magic and Mystery (1980) is the third in Stewart Cowley’s Galactic Encounters series. You can totally feel the shrugs here — Cowley obviously had a pile of fantasy art that was going to waste and, even though this is still sorta part of the Terran Trade Authority universe, he was like “Eff it, let’s do a weird science fantasy book.” The result doesn’t work at all in terms of the standards of TTA, but this is probably my favorite of all these books because of the sheer audacity of it.

Lot of pictures cross the gutter, and thus don’t make for good copyphotos. But we have an uptick in space barbarians and chaos knights on horseback. Pretty sure Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are in one painting. Another is definitely the cover of the UK edition of Fred Saberhagen’s The Black Mountains (that’s the dog mutant holding the swordsman Chup). Several of these paintings would reappear the next year in Cowley’s horror/fantasy-themed Tourist’s Guide to Transylvania, which shares a similar tonal inconsistency that I enjoy.

I should note that I think these sorts of books were a unique and brief side-effect of the fantasy art book trend started by Gnomes in 1977. I suspect there are lots more (possibly by Cowley under different pseudonyms, like this series and the Transylvania book). I keep finding others, like Tour of the Universe, by Malcolm Edwards and Robert Holdstock (Mythago Wood), which is in a similar vein as TTA (and using art from the same agencies).