Selene: City of Vampires and Ghouls

More images from the dark and mysterious City of Ghouls and Vampires. All images created using Midjourney, the AI renderer. Most were then embellished in ProCreate.

Product of ghoul medical necroengineering

Ghoul necroengineers at work in plastic sheeting, for theirs is a messy task

Helmet of a Selene warrior in sealed day armour

The latest vampire fashions in the city; they tend towards the flamboyant for all genders

A rejuvenated ghoul sits up after extensive necrosurgery, feeling refreshed... and hungry

A vast underground atrium; tall chambers were used to reduce feelings of claustrophobia

Security staff in sealed day armour; often as not, surface patrols would be undertaken by familiars or ghouls, rather than vampires

Ghouls with gurneys, awaiting the arrival of the raiding cruiser with fresh meat for the underground necromills

One of endless subsurface hallways. Many are marked with signs that are outside of the visual range of humans, but visible for vampires and ghouls

Dinner wear for a ritual live prey meal

Dinner parties tended to be lively affairs featuring desperate prey and plastic or other non-staining materials

A vampire-ghoul hybrid in the latest fashion. Interbreeding was initially frowned upon, but necroengineering made it possible with the use of forced surrogacy

CIty of Vampires

Cryptic glyphs adorn the windowless buildings of Selene, which is often shrouded in mist during the day. The mist is not entirely... natural.

Selene, the city of ghouls and vampires, is located behind a perceptual field in the Mojave Desert. Created by infectious bionitic viruses during The Fall, the vampire elite now feeds upon abducted human chattel; the ghouls use their remains for parts in their quest to build perfect golem husks for their consciousnesses to inhabit. 

Ghoul surgeons playing mix match with body parts

A new creation

The ghouls specialize in macabre medical tech, but much of it is unsuitable for export. The nanotechnology industry is strong with several vampire houses, who have powerful wizards, but the city itself is resource poor. Few human communities wish to trade with a city state of, essentially, intra-species predators, so goods are obtained by proxies, theft or unscrupulous AI intermediaries.

A stylish ghoul in line for a new husk to inhabit

A ritual feeding hall.

A quiet street... during the day.

Red is the favourite colour in Selene.

Red neon lighting is common in the underground labyrinth

The city is unusual in that few buildings have windows; like an iceberg, most of it is under the surface. The architecture is unusually ornate brutalism, embellished with glyphs to convey vampire house status. 

Humans are kept in pens; food markets open after dusk and close at midnight, but the blood bank is open 24 hours. Feeding is tightly regulated: every banquet must have a CDT (Corpse Disposal Team) of ghouls present, by law. Feeding chambers are sealed for easier hosing down after meals. 

A ritual feeding chamber, sealed for easy drainage after the meal

The city is eerily serene during the day; security is provided by familiars, synthetics (androids) and automatons. 

A member of House Kronysk of Selene. Selenites like to dress sharp.

The Selene Defense Force fields a multi-environment Atlas Cruiser, which is used to extort the ‘Seleneblut', or blood offering, from regional farming communities. Humans are abducted directly in raids further afield; some effort is made to keep the location of the city secret. 

All of these images were made with Midjourney (and some editing in ProCreate). 

Dressed for a night on the town, hunting humans. Called Helos, it is a ritual in which humans are set free throughout the city. Those who last until sunrise are pardoned. The rest... are lunch.

Creatures from the world of Magnum Thrax Part 2

 The post apocalypse world of Magnum Thrax and the Amusement Park of Doom is filled with all manner of strange creatures.

The majestic tortibear, which will fiercely defends its nest.

Unspeakable horrors emerged from the depths after the apocalypse; some welcomed them as the new overlords.

Peliwalri are ornery but adorable.

The horned giraffe of the Midwest plains.

A bionitic flying shark, kept aloft on utility fog. Technowraiths would use more evolved iterations as mounts.

The explosive rooster. Don't antagonize them.

An adorable bipid examines a button camera set on a rock.

The three eyed frog is almost impossible to sneak up on; it's eyes remain open even when sleeping.

Creatures of the World of Magnum Thrax and the Amusement Park of Doooooom Part I

The World of Magnum Thrax is filled with all manner of strange creatures, many of which were altered by rogue terraformer fog, mutagenic bionite viruses, or even old fashioned gene hacking by hoxsplicers. 

Not all of the new creations were viable, but then, The Apocalypse opened up a lot of niches in the ecosystem to fill. So there's that.

The following images were created in Midjourney, using the --testp --creative --upbeta tags (basically the Remaster button?):

The Turtlehawk: most likely a joke Hoxsplicer creation.

The Ruffle Throated Tree Frog, capable of beautiful singing and prized at lumberjack weddings.

The desert octopus, capable of changing its colours and blending in to any environment.

Cybernetic gorillas were used extensively in poorer countries as a less expensive alternative to robot labour.

The magnificent Bunnibison, which can be found in great numbers on the plains and prairies. Capable of long leaps to propel itself out of danger, its bones are reinforced with rigid nanite structures.

About that pink tank

Magnum Thrax and the Future Fossil has a pink tank in which Thrax and his foxy team zoom about. 

Early on, I tried to render it in Midjourney, along with a lot of other fantastical Magnum Thrax stuff. Some turned out better than others.

Dinosaurs? They turned out like bloody, twisted squiggly goop, like something that had been hit by a molecular rearrangement gun, leaving only a vague blob behind. I quickly abandoned that avenue. 

Fast forward 3 months and... Midjourney can do many things so much better. 

These were done within a month of Midjourney being released to the public. First up is the original, unedited version of the tank:

It's sketchy. Impressionistic. Very concept art. It has a nice, almost artsy edge, like someone took a palette knife to a bunch of photographs. Does the vehicle really have structure? Or is it more an impression of structure? 

And here's the edited update. I collaged in a tank commander from another rendering, gave the vehicle a barrel, hatch and antennae. 

Voila! Much more recognizable, at least to me, and significantly closer to what I wanted. 

Now? 

Midjourney's remaster button creates much more defined imagery, but at the same time, loses some of the... artsy, impressionistic flare that is so evident in the above pictures. 

I have mixed feelings about it. But I am not worried: their engineers are working on it. Iteration after iteration, it will gradually improve. A month, a year, ten years, a hundred years: where will AI renderers be then? 

The giant crab creature: before and after editing

The original prompt result

I thought it might be interesting to post a few before / after images, starting with early images from Midjourney. 

The image above was created with a fairly simple prompt (whatever the prompt was is now lost to the mists of time), and came back with 4 fabulous options. This was my favourite. As you can see, however, there are gaps in the rendering: there is obviously meant to be a person in front of the giant crab, but they are only partly there.

It's maybe 95% there right out of the bot.

This one was an easy fix, especially if the person is wearing a cape. I doodled a rectangle in using ProCreate, then cleaned things up a little bit, removing a few stray lines (obviously could have gone further), and adding tiny flags (for everyone, as Kodos would say) to the suggestion of a horde in the distance.

The (slightly) polished version

So with a little extra effort, the rendering can be polished up and the piece made even more compelling. 

It would take me... weeks? Months? Years?... to render the base image on my own, if I ever could. 

Gigantic cybernetic crabs leading armies of pirates... that's the sort of totally bonkers stuff I wanted to inhabit the world of Magnum Thrax and the Amusement Park of Doom.

With Midjourney, I can at last breathe some life into that vision. 

And have a lot of fun doing it!

I highly recommend playing around with the tool to any world building writer. 

Midjourney images on Instagram for Magnum Thrax

The Technowitch at The Nexus, where nanite swarms have saturated the rock, and can be called forth with the proper command node implant. The wings, the cubes, the hair, the head, the energy ball were all added in ProCreate

I've been continuing to bring to life Magnum Thrax in Instagram (@magnumthrax), using Midjourney renderings. 

Over the last couple of months, Midjourney has improved by leaps and bounds. On release, it couldn't do wheels. Faces were asymmetrical and disturbing looking. Hands and feet were nonexistent. Now, they're often warped, but they're there. You can get wheels, tracks, recognizable vehicle shapes. Things seem to have more structure than they did before, using the Remaster button (the initial version adds lovely texture and an artistic flare that is sometimes absent in remaster, which can sometimes be stripped down and simplified to the point of looking cartoonish. But that's gotten much, much better as well...).

It's astonishing. 

I can only imagine how good it will be in a year, or ten years. 

This is really going to change things, although I wonder how it will wash out legally, as Midjourney uses millions of photos to construct its images.

For now, I'm having a lot of fun. Midjourney's kind of addictive, and once you learn to roll with its limitations, you can produce a lot of fabulous imagery.

Most of the stuff I've generated is from the history of the Magnum Thrax and the Amusement Park of Doom world, the satirical sci-fi adventure novel I wrote in The Before Time. =

A technowitch tending the deep underground cryocrypts. Much of the arms and hands were added in post.

A gigantic 100,000 ton pirate megacrawler which terrorized the Arizona Sun Corridor for centuries after The Fall. It was armed to the teeth and powered by a fusion stack fuelled by... water, meaning it could keep going indefinitely, without access to fossil fuels. On the plus side (for its potential victims), the crawler was terribly slow and you could literally see it coming miles away. In the image above, you can see a vertical arcology they're about to loot. 

Priests of the infamous Cocainola Cola Cult at a formal soda blessing ceremony. They used dark tech to preserve their flesh long before it's Best Before Date. The gruesome faces were detailed in post.

Team Thrax's glorious Pink Tank from the short story, Future Fossil. Note the roughness of the rendering, which is typical of Midjourney early after release. The tank commander was collaged in from another rendering, and the barrel 'photoshopped'.

Emergency tactical response team assembles outside New York City during one of the bionitic zombie outbreaks that occurred before even The First Apocalypse

Wait till you see what's to come.

If you can't, find more images right now over on Instagram @magnumthrax. 

These images were all made with Midjourney (and some subsequent image fiddling in ProCreate... some a considerable amount of editing, some hardly any).