Rare science fiction illustration for a story by Arthur C. Clarke, featuring a lone Mars rover traversing a Martian plain.

Chesley Bonestell respected Arthur C. Clarke, although he was not a fan of science fiction as a general rule. A nearly identical sweeping and romantic panorama of Mars by Bonestell was used to illustrate Clarke's story, Transit of Earth, over three pages in the January 1971 issue of Playboy. A slightly different, but still nearly identical, version was used as the album cover artwork for the spoken word edition of 1978. This painting is identified as being a sketch for the story on the reverse.

It was Arthur C. Clarke who gave Bonestell one of the most glowing reviews for his 1949 book with Willy Ley, The Conquest of Space. In the 6 January 1950 issue of Aeroplane he had written: "This beautiful book, which has become something of a best-seller in the United States, is an outstanding example of cooperation between art and technology ... Mr Bonestell's remarkable technique produces an effect of realism so striking that his paintings have often been mistaken for actual colour photographs by those unacquainted with the present status of interplanetary travel..." (quoted in Miller & Durant, pp.61-62).