Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials/Great Aliens from Science Fiction Literature

Rating:
Summary: Just what the title says...
Review: A book on great alien races from science fiction. Classic fiction to boot. Most of us know about the Overlords from 'Childhood's End', the Puppeteers from 'Ringworld', the Guild Steersman from 'Dune' and even the Old Ones from 'At the Mountains of Madness'. But do you remember the Thrint from 'World of Ptavvs', the Cinruss from 'Hospital Station', or the Cygnan from 'The Jupiter Theft'?
A great source of information on alien races with full color pictures, lots of data on history, culture and habitat BUT also a great source for finding classic stories you never heard of!
Do you know the Pnume, Salaman, Triped or Merseian? Well, get this book and found out who they are!

Rating:
Summary: Just what the title says...
Review: A book on great alien races from science fiction. Classic fiction to boot. Most of us know about the Overlords from 'Childhood's End', the Puppeteers from 'Ringworld', the Guild Steersman from 'Dune' and even the Old Ones from 'At the Mountains of Madness'. But do you remember the Thrint from 'World of Ptavvs', the Cinruss from 'Hospital Station', or the Cygnan from 'The Jupiter Theft'?
A great source of information on alien races with full color pictures, lots of data on history, culture and habitat BUT also a great source for finding classic stories you never heard of!
Do you know the Pnume, Salaman, Triped or Merseian? Well, get this book and found out who they are!

Rating:
Summary: Innovative, entertaining stuff
Review: As a Middle School art teacher, I have found many students who are enthralled with this book. I must admit, I am also a great fan. It proves to be a valuable frame of reference to generate fantastic ideas for SciFi Art. I must now order the Fantasy book by Barlowe, and hope that it is as good as his first one.

Rating:
Summary: Fully colored aliens let you enjoy the book.
Review: Awesome. COOOL. A must get book that every sci-fi lover should have. It not only has pictures of the aliens but it tells its entire life!

Rating:
Summary: Awesome Artwork
Review: Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials is a really good book if you need to jumpstart your imagination. It has drawings of the different species, as well as back ground information like habitat, reproduction, things like that. I would recommend this book to anyone who loves fantasy artwork, fantasy/science fiction in general, and also who has a crazy imagination already!

Rating:
Summary: This work was well ahead of its time.
Review: I bought this book back in 1981, the first printing. Fortunately, I still have the copy, since this book has become a classic of the genre. This book was and is a motivator of the imagination. For readers of SF, it was wonderful to know that there were people out there who dared to visualize what we could only picture in our minds back in the days before sophisticated computer graphics made science fiction images so simple to create, and exotic aliens so commonplace. Two of my favorites were the Guild Steersman and the Puppeteer, being a Herbert and a Niven fan. Barlowe and Summers deserve places as two of the great pioneers of SF.

Rating:
Summary: Barlowe May Be Right On
Review: I bought this book when it first came out. I used it in my fifth grade classes before I retired in 1995. Fantastic art and imaginative captioning. If we do meet ET's they may match Barlowe'sideas.

Rating:
Summary: Very good, but seems to contain some errors
Review: I do want to say starting off that (1) I got this because, being a Sci-Fi fan into artsy books, this was a hole in my collection; (2) I have been a fan of Barlowe's art since I found a used-but-impeccable copy of EXPEDITION a few years back; and (3) overall, this book did not dissapoint.
The book seems (at least on the surface) to be a well-researched compendium of aliens renedered in paint fit to augment the fertile imaginations of readers everywhere. The aliens are mainly from books and short stories that I'm not familiar with (not surprising since this was published originally when I was aproximately 5 years old), but there is enough info about them included to make it not just pictures of things I don't know what they are.
I personally felt that the best part was the sketchbook drawings in the back. I would adore to see the Thype project finally completed. And I think that some of the sketches of the aliens are superior to the finished paintings, an opinion that I realize many readers may not share.
But my big beef with the book is based on the Guild Steersman. If you read the Dune books with any care you can figure out that steersmen are mutated humans. They are not at all in this book like they are portrayed in the novels and some of the facts here are quite wrong. That the steersmen are not aliens of an unknown planet but humans who are mutated by spice overexposure is used as a plot point in one of the Dune prequels and the fact is presumably taken either from Herbert's notes or the inferences from the original novels.
Now this in itself would not usually lead me to give a book a mediocre review. It does worry me, however, that one of the other races in this book was in a story I was reading at the time (I think it was one of the Poul Anderson stories, neither book is close at hand as I write this) seemed to have a few minor oddnesses with it as well. It makes me wonder if some of the other aliens don't have the same kind of factual problems between what is in this volume and what they're like in the original story in a way that's not simply a difference of imagination.
Bottom line: get it for the art and the glosses of the alien races, but don't be that surprised if the description or portrait of your favorite alien doesn't quite match what you've seen in your head all these years.

Rating:
Summary: A modern classic
Review: I first read this book when I was 10, and it freaked me out. It was one of the major reasons I began reading science fiction. This book can be reread endlessly without losing an ounce of wonder, for Barlowe's representations of alien anatomy are truly inspired. I constantly recommend this to my friends, and they are never disappointed, even the ones who can't stand sci-fi. Unfortunately, his paintings are much more interesting than some of the books they're taken from.

Rating:
Summary: High five
Review: I love, love, love this book. I got this book about 10 years ago, and it brought my imagination to life, and what an imagination. When there is something stressful going on in my life I pull out this book and just drift into another world.

The descriptions are so vivid, the pictures just come to life. I just wish there were pictures of Arthur C Clark's novels.