Credit: Far Out / Christopher Hopper – Elektra Records / Album Cover
Thu 1 October 2026 12:00, UK
“There was a man who hated men because they would not obey him like robots. Then he got a robot…,” starts the tagline to Tom Goodwin’s 1953 novella The Gulf Between, which many people first read inside the October issue of a magazine called Astounding Science Fiction, and one of those readers was a future rock and roll drummer named Roger Taylor.
While music is ultimately what brought him into contact with guitarist and astrophysics student Brian May in the late 1960s, the two bandmates also bonded over a fandom for science fiction, and it was that ongoing shared interest that inspired them to suggest a rather unusual idea for the cover art of Queen’s sixth studio album, 1977’s News of the World.
Rather than sticking with the established Queen insignia designs that had graced the covers of their previous ‘Marx Brothers’ albums, A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races, Taylor and May proposed a fairly aggressive left turn into the world of 1950s sci-fi illustrations, with the former specifically nominating an image from the front cover of that 1953 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, featuring a giant robot with a dead man in its clutches.
It’s not clear if Freddie Mercury loved the suggestion or was merely willing to throw his nerdy bandmates a bone. In any case, the idea advanced to the copyright analysis stage, which led Taylor to seek out the original creator of the giant robot image, American illustrator Frank Kelly Freas.
One of the masters of mid-century sci-fi art as well as a key illustrator for the hugely popular satirical magazine Mad, he was 55 years old at the time and thoroughly unfamiliar with Queen or most other rock and roll bands; he was more of a classical guy. Nonetheless, he was open to the idea, including a request from Taylor to update the original illustration, replacing the single human corpse in the robot’s hand with four new victims: the members of Queen.
Credit: Christopher Hopper – Elektra Records
Freas avoided listening to Queen’s music at first, worried it would throw him off, but he did dutifully take on the album cover project, much as he had for hundreds of writers and publishers across several decades.
“I’ve always seen my function as illustrating and interpreting the story,” he told Interzone in 2001, a few years before his death, “But it’s most important to me to get the spirit of the work; basically to express the concept for the reader in visual terms that the author would not have been able to express… You will always sacrifice scientific accuracy for aesthetic quality. You will not sacrifice the story.”
To capture the essence of Tom Goodwin’s story in the original 1953 illustration, he knew that the mechanics of the robot itself were secondary to its facial expression; the complete disregard for the welfare of human beings, or more accurately, a lack of understanding of the concept of mortality. Instead, the robot is holding up his dead human like a broken toy, inspiring the artwork’s original caption: “Please, fix it, Daddy?”
Queen’s News of the World didn’t share the same dystopian, robot-takeover narrative themes of ‘The Gulf Between’. Instead, at the time of its release, Taylor called it a “kind of self-examination” record. Pushed a bit by the punk movement, “We wanted something that was more raw, more immediate”. The first two tracks on the album, ‘We Will Rock You’ and ‘We Are the Champions’, don’t actually feel very punky at all, considering that they’re two of the all-time massive super-anthems in rock history.
There was certainly a little less cuteness going on here, though, and the evil robot, AKA Frank, who can be found reaching into the Queen “audience” to crush more humans on the record’s inner sleeve, seems to signify that. Just last year, Roger Taylor took to Instagram to share a photo of his copy of the magazine that started it all.
“This is the original picture of our Robot friend Frank, from my copy of Astounding Fiction [sic], October 1953,” he wrote, “I loved the image and got in touch with Frank Kelly Freas, who very kindly agreed to paint the outer and inner artwork of our News Of The World album. Frank became very well known as the album became a big hit and even had an episode of Family Guy dedicated to it.”
Credit: Alamy
The success of News of the World might have helped Freas’s profile in his later years, but most Queen fans had no idea about the origins of the artwork at the time, and many still don’t, unless they happen to stumble across the original magazine at a book fair or sci-fi convention. These days, Goodwin’s ‘The Gulf Between’ feels ripe for a new influx of appreciation itself. While The Terminator is everyone’s favourite example of a sci-fi piece warning about the evil potential of AI, many writers were covering that turf decades before, including Goodwin.
There’s a particularly relevant and terrifying passage in his novella, a conversation between a character called Cullin and another named Knight, the latter of whom has just built a super-powerful AI.
“They claim it can outthink a thousand men,” Cullin says, which Knight acknowledges, before explaining, Of course, among a thousand men, much of the knowledge they possessed would be common to all of them. The Computer is valuable in that it can combine and correlate the specific knowledge of men in all the different fields of learning.”
Cullin then tells Knight about an article he’d read, which proposed that “the Master Computer, with all its knowledge and its ability to devise weapons, could rule the world if it only had a means for manual operations, such as tentacles or hands, and if it had a means of locomotion instead of being bolted to a concrete floor.”
Finally, “I read the same article,” Knight said, smiling a little, “The writer, as is true of all writers for that particular ‘news’ weekly, was following the editorial injunction to make it interesting, and never mind the facts. I’m surprised that you were gullible enough to believe it.”
Tech oligarchs pooh-poohing the threat of all-knowing machines. Just the stuff of old science fiction, right?
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