Bold yellow lettering dominates the Mid-December 1987 cover of *Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction*, instantly signaling the magazine’s newsstand confidence at the height of late–Cold War genre publishing. The issue callouts—“192 pages” and the printed price “$2.00 U.S./$2.50 CAN.”—anchor it in its original consumer world, while the typography and layout feel unmistakably 1980s: big, declarative, and built to catch the eye from a spinning rack.
At the center, the cover art stages a striking collision of eras: an Egyptian pharaoh’s mask-like face rises above a gleaming, winged scarab ornament, set against a modern city skyline glowing with night lights. A tall, statue-like figure with animal-headed silhouette stands to the right, and the ground reads like a patterned floor stretching into the scene, giving the composition a theatrical depth. The palette—hot reds, metallic golds, and deep blacks—leans into pulp spectacle while hinting at time travel, ancient technology, or myth reimagined as futurism.
Text on the left foreground spotlights the fiction and features inside, including “Howard Waldrop” and “He-We-Await,” along with names such as “George Alec Effinger,” plus teasers tied to “Harlan Ellison’s” and “I, Robot: The Movie.” For collectors and readers, this scanned magazine cover is a compact time capsule of science fiction culture in 1987—where editorial branding, cover illustration, and table-of-contents marketing all compete on the same stage, promising big ideas in a single glossy frame.