The (Alarming, apparently) Star of LIfe

Cafe Society
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I picked up a calendar with each month illustrated by a cover from a “Classic” Science Fiction magazine. I love these, because so many of them seem so absurd and outrageous. They practically demand their own MST3K-like comments.*

This month’s is the cover of Startling Stories for January 1947, with a cover painting by Earle Bergey illustrating Edmond Hamilton’s The Star of Life

I haven’t read the story (it was apparently expanded and published in hardcover and paperback in 1959, even if I didn’t get the magazine), but it sounds kinda like Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, but with more action. But what the cover could be illustrating, I have no idea. The man and the woman seem to be exiting a spaceship without space suits, but the blue aura around them makes me suspect that they still have some kind of protection. The woman, though, seems alarmed by this. Her mouth is open and her eyes are wide. Maybe she just didn’t expect to get kicked out into zero-gee. The man doesn’t seem concerned about his own state, but maybe is concerned about the woman’s distress. I suspect the cover is really supposed to generate some false anxiety, because at a quick loss it looks as if the woman has been precipitated out into the Stellar Void without protection, a la Gamora in Guardians of the Galaxy, and is facing a quick death, but it has plausible deniability built into it so that the magazine editors could say --" Nah, she was safe all the time. We fooled ya!"

Anyway, what really drew my attention was the weird umpteenth century fashion Bergey drew. The guy is simple enough, with his red pajama suit and boots. But the woman’s dress has that weird venting around her hips (that seems to be billowing out in the non-breeze of space), along with that apparently anomalous green strap going from one bra cup to snake around and over her upper arm. It looks like a parachute release or so9mething . Maybe if she pulled that ripcord her bra cup would come undone and function as a parachute. Whatever it is, is seems pretty pointless, not to mention asymmetric – there’s no corresponding green strap on the other side.
So what’s going on? Are we in mid-wardrobe malfunction? what the hell is that strap and the hip vents supposed to be?

*Almost a decade ago I commented on another magazine cover used as a calendar picture, which featured what appeared to be a guy and a Buddha fleeing on a jumping insect from kangaroos armed with slingshots on flying steam-powered Devo hats over a green Grand Canyon. Great stuff

https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/archive/index.php/t-578203.html

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I think the things on her hips are just ruffles, with no purpose other than decoration.

The green strap puzzles me. Maybe it’s supposed to drape over her elbow, like a feather boa?

I am also curious about the gold-colored item above her belt buckle. How rigid or flexible do you suppose it is?

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From the little I recall, the title refers to a strange green star whose radiation grants immortality to anyone who lives under its light long enough, and whose inhabitable planet is controlled by immortals who prevent anyone else from going there. It turns out however that this is because the children of anyone rendered immortal by the star are superhumanly intelligent psychopaths. Something the protagonists only find out *after *they’ve managed to reach the planet and get themselves exposed in an attempt at immortality.

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I’ve got a pulp magazine from the late '30’s. It seems to be a collection of some of the most well known sci-fi and fantasy stories of that time. Of course the cover is a picture of a woman being menaced by a green alien monster.:rolleyes:

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I think the man is trying to save her. She looks shocked and surprised because she was expecting to be on the cover of a Conan book (although maybe she’s too well dressed for that).

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The fluttering green strap used to be attached to the other side of her dress, I think–the reader is supposed to imagine that her dress is coming apart, and might even come off. Oh, no!

Here’s a similarly-constructed dress. Name would involve ‘halter,’ I think:

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Yeah, I agree that the purpose of the random floating green strap is to vaguely suggest that the nice lady’s clothing is just gosh-darn-it not as securely fastened as it could be.

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It’s the Theiss Tittillation Principle in action, long before Theiss