Bold lettering dominates the July 1986 cover of *Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction*, framing a stormy, electric palette that feels equal parts pulp adventure and cosmic unease. The masthead and pricing—“192 pages,” “$2.00 U.S./$2.25 CAN.”—place it squarely in its era, when newsstand science fiction magazines competed with high-impact design and instantly legible typography.
Robert Silverberg’s featured “Gilgamesh in the Outback” sits prominently on the left, while the illustration leans into mythic futurism: a muscular archer posed against jagged lightning and red clouds, and above him a looming, spectral face emerging from blue shadow. At the bottom, a snarling beast adds a note of peril, hinting at the kind of larger-than-life questing that magazine cover art used to promise in a single glance.
Readers skimming the rest of the cover text find a snapshot of the issue’s literary lineup—Walter Jon Williams, Andrew Weiner, and R.A. Lafferty—alongside “Viewpoint” and Avram Davidson’s postscript on Prester John. For collectors and retro SF enthusiasts, this cover is a vivid artifact of 1980s genre publishing, where classical legend, speculative imagination, and dramatic illustration met in a few square inches of print.