Spacecraft: 2000-2100 AD by the fabulous Stewart Cowley

Interior cover of Spacecraft: 2000-2100 AD by Steward Cowley depicting an AAF 212 Hornet

The central inspiration for my Instagram (@magnum_thrax), and this ongoing series of posts, is Spacecraft: 2000-2100 A.D. by Steward Cowley. The idea is simple but brilliant: find awesome sci-fi paintings (in this case of spacecraft) and then write descriptions or short stories around them. It's a sci-fi coffee table book in a sense, but more engaging: Cowley built a larger narrative through his spacecraft descriptions, telling the story of the TTA (Terran Trade Authority), its expansion out into space, and eventual war with Proxima Centauri. It's all done in a straight faced, matter of fact way that sells the whole concept. 

The details are so grounded and believable, you'd think this universe really existed.

My father bought me this book and Spacewrecks when I was maybe ten. It was Alien before Alien, ‘true’horror stories in space. I foolishly gave up Spacewrecks at some point, but I've held on to Spacecraft. I spent a good deal of time pouring over its pages as a kid over bowls of late night cereal. I've always thought the idea was fabulous and deserved repeating. 

There are other books in the series, but they weren't anywhere near as good. There's a revival series, using CGI versions of the original art, but it defeats (for me) the original purpose: adding depth to preexisting sci-fi painting. What I love really is how Cowley wove a story inspired by the art. The painting captures your attention for a moment. When you accompany it with a story that riffs on the visuals, it adds a whole new level of depth and meaning.

I was particularly fond of the Interstellar Queen. In just a couple pages, he built up a romance around a purely fictional ship design:

"Anyone who has visited a major spaceport will have seen the distinctive and elegant shape of the world's most advanced spaceliner poised for its next journey into deep space. The Interstellar Queen is the most recent of the Queen Line ships and the only one designed to operate between the stars. It was introduced in 2046 to meet the growing demand for access to Alpha Centauri, following the Trade Agreement signed with the inhabitants of the double star system in 2039..."

Yikes.

That's just a little over a decade away now. We haven't gotten anywhere near as far in terms of space travel as sci-fi writers thought we'd be, way back in the 1970s. We have some catching up to do...

The Interstellar Queen being approached by a shuttle craft

The military ships have details of the larger conflict embedded into their descriptions, allowing you to suss out the larger history of the Proximan conflict as you progress through the book. I thought this approach was fabulous: I was intrigued by the larger picture, but had to glean it out of the details, putting effort and concentration into it. The approach drew me in and made it all the more immersive. His writing style riffs off of books on real aircraft in particular, many of which cover WWII designs; these inevitably have some comment on the larger conflict (supply and resource issues, losses, successes, capabilities, what rendered them obsolete, etc). 

I loved the rivalry suggested between the AAF 212 Hornet and the K13 Shark, for example. Little touches, such as the Hornet turning ahead of firing, are a neat bit of riffing off the illustration that Cowley was referencing: 

"Extremely popular with the front-line crews, the Hornets did much to boost morale at a time when the enemy seemed to be gaining in technological superiority. The introduction by the Proximans of the new Shark interceptor had dramatically increased their defensive and offensive ability, and the appearance of the Hornet came as an unpleasant surprise. Although the enemy ship was certainly the faster of the two, the Hornets' superior armament earned the ship among enemy crews the nickname 'Sklathill', which roughly translates as dangerous fish or water creature. 

Rather ironically, the high degree of technological sophistication on both sides allowed a minor design aspect of the Hornet to give the ship an important advantage. The two upper laserlances were mounted at a pronounced angle to the directional line of the hull, permitting the ship making an attack to begin its escape turn fractionally before firing.To appreciate the significance of this manoeuvre it is necessary to remember that attacks of this kind were executed in fractions of a second."

So good!

Cowley also includes line drawings and cutaways of ships showing weapons layout or ship decks. The details are nonsensical and meaningless, but even so I loved them as a child. 

A line art diagram paired with the description and painting made it all the more immersive

There are some amazing Star Wars reference books I've browsed in the bookstore that have the most ridiculously detailed cut aways of spacecraft I've ever seen. The level of detail is mind blowing, and I love them. I imagine the artist must have based the machinery on existing ships and aircraft, and embellished from there, but the visual inventiveness of these has always left me gobsmacked. 

An ACM 113 Fatboy under fire by Proximan warships

I've tried to do something similar with my Instagram, with the help of MidJourney, detailing the history of the world Magnum Thrax and the Amusement Park of Doom is set. 

I'm not sure how successful that was, as Instagram is so image driven, and there are caps on how much you can write. I'm not sure many people even read the descriptions. I'm hoping to expand upon, and embellish, them here as motivation (and time, which I never seem to have enough of) allows. 

I don't have the mad sci-fi skillZ Cowley does, but it gives me something high to aim for. 

I haven't seen anyone else try the approach Cowley used, of an immersive sci-fi coffee table book, riffing off the best paintings in sci-fi, but it'd be great to see it again. 

As it is, these are forgotten books and vivid childhood memories.

If you like dead astronauts, ghost astronauts or dead alien ghost astronauts, this is the book for you!

Posting old Midjourney renderings to the Backwater Bathurst Blather Blog

Yesterday I was looking through my embarassingly large inventory of Midjourney renderings I have never posted to the @magnum_thrax Instagram account. I shut down my Midjourney subscription in December. 

But I was thinking it would be fun to post those images (and repost the Instagram ones) here as idea prompts. I intend to write little ditties, sparked by 'my' Midjourney renderings that already exist. 

Just for fun. 

Like this image of the elusive arboreal Burble, a post-apocalypse species of mammals in the Pacific Northwest that eats leaves twice, regurgitating the semi-digested leaf globs and downing them again to complete the digestion cycle. They also have a high mutation rate that endows them with malformed ear wings, which are rarely of any practical use but do serve to creep out potential predators. The gross out factor is probably their greatest defence, and according to the Seattle Rangers, while highly nutritious, they taste terrible.

Yeah. 

I'm hoping they will become more inspiring as I go. 

Part of the point of the Instagram account was to visually realize the world of Magnum Thrax, and have the images and the text mutually inspire each other. There was a very specific text from my childhood that influenced me in this, and I'll be posting about it later. 

Stay tuned...

The cute but elusive Burble can grow up to thirty pounds and live twenty years (although this rarely happens in the wild)

The Dream Pools of the California Hot Springs

Dream Pool rendered in Midjourney V4

These magnificent five star hot springs in Southern California feature Geo-Organic Architecture and full synthite service.

The Dream Pools are a marvel of psycho-hallucinogenic technology, capable of extrapolating from the neural net of the bather and injecting euphoria infused scenarios of pure bliss. 

Customers are restricted to three hour sessions for one week, after which they are expelled from the facility for a month. This is to prevent the customer from becoming an inert vegetable, unable to earn money or resources that can be used to pay the facilities. 

Images made in Midjourney V4.

Chysaora jellyfish Ambassador Fissussussoph

Chesapeake Bay Chysaora jellyfish Ambassador Fissussussoph (as close a translation from the Chysaoran as possible; it is at best a rough approximation, given our vastly different anatomy) in its ornate pressure suit, taking a stroll with Bend Alderman Erolk Fynn; Hell’s Bend Port would benefit enormously from the subsequent free trade agreement. 

Jellyfish were intensely curious about the terrestrial sphere, and once specialized pressure suits (and AI driven translators) were more freely available, hordes of adventurous ISTP jellyfish set off into the post-apocalypse American interior to explore. 

Few would return.

See on instagram.  

Rethinking AI Rendering...

Eric Bourdages provocative Midjourney creations 

I had a ton of fun with the AI renderer Midjourney, bringing the world of Magnum Thrax to life. I've left it up for the time being on Instagram @Magnum_thrax. I found the tool incredibly fun and addictive, and every time I turned around there was something else I wanted to try.

I've since stopped and cancelled my account.

Why? 

Unfortunately, the AI Renderer engineers scraped the work of living artists in building their program, without consent of the artists. That's not actually illegal, and it's how human artists train. There's never been a law against aping a style, likely because it takes years of work and the development of a skill set to do, and even then, individual artists bring their own strengths and weaknesses to the mix, altering it from the style they were originally trying to duplicate. Then they often go off in their own direction. 

AI, however, can duplicate someone's style as fast as it can analyze it, and produce pieces in a matter of minutes. Over the last month or two it's reached a point where it can start to take work away from living artists. 

I thought it'd take years to reach this point.

Some of the time, the AI Renderings have atrocious hands and all sorts of bizarre artifacts and visual gaffes, but this is occurring less and less. With a little bit of touch up work, I can get an AI Rendering looking... almost commercially viable, if I do say so myself. 

A good artist can make AI art really sing, but then, they'd be reduced to being touch up artists. 

Most people using AI Renderers were not giving out commercial art jobs in the first place, and much of the work on social media is not going to seriously impact anyone. It's not accepted by stock art companies, it's not allowed at conventions, and given the terms of service, it can't, or shouldn't, be charged for. You can't brand anything with it, given those terms.

Anyone is free to use it. 

That said, commercial art is heavily influenced by cost, speed and convenience. AI renderers are all that. And many times, as in say editorial illustration, you may not care if the image is used elsewhere. As the renderers improves further, I can see it being used instead of employing living artists. 

Commercial adoption of AI output presents some serious problems:

1) If the AI gets so good that its output is indistinguishable from that of a living artist, it threatens the artist's livelihood. Even if there are limits on what can be rendered (say only simple images) it still results in a loss of income. These artists are at the forefront of our culture, developing imagery after decades of investment in their skill set. This threatens the value of their work.

2) Who will go into the arts if there's no chance of making a living at it? Do we want to see the field gutted and left to AI?

3) If we don't try and set some reasonable and fair limits here, what is going to happen when the AI comes for other jobs? A bad precedent here could impact how AI is developed in the future, and not in a good way. First they came for the artists and I did nothing... etcetera.

Even if you aren't referencing a specific artist, their material can still wind up being leveraged to fulfill a prompt. It's part of the overall engine, so it's a small part of everything rendered.

That makes the entire engine tainted.

This is a terrible shame, given how amazing the technology is. It's absolutely mind blowing, and I can understand the engineers cutting corners in their single minded zeal to create the best AI possible. I'm sure they have a legal team that went over what they were doing in terms of obeying the letter of the law. Unfortunately, the law never foresaw something like this; so what they've done... it strikes me as being unfair, and even unethical. 

Artists should be compensated for what they've contributed to the engine, and have the ability to opt out. It should only analyze the creative commons, material not in copyright and not of living artists. That's not unreasonable. 

There are now millions of people subscribing to these services, which funnels a good deal of money to the developers. 

I don't know if the genie here can be put back in the bottle, but I do feel the artists are being treated unfairly, deserve compensation, and suspect that legislation is going to be necessary. 

That, of course, will take years.

Let's hope they work things out. 

It does remind me of automation's impact in the past. The Luddites were not so much anti-technology as they were against losing their livelihood at a time when job loss could mean starvation. There was no welfare or unemployment insurance then. The owners refused to profit share, refused to retrain workers, refused to even offer a little money to help the loom workers survive until they could find alternate employment. It was very polarizing, and resulted in mobs burning down factories and assassinating business owners. 

Something along this line is happening now, and it won't just be to artists. Millions, possibly tens of millions, of people are in danger of losing their jobs to AI over the next couple of decades. 

It's the dawn of a new era. 

We have to decide whether it will be a wondrous one, or a dystopian nightmare. 

Loader robots of Dallas and Hell's Bend

A Ruscon loadeer bot at rest on the docks of Hell's Bend

Dallas managed to continue as a key port, connecting the Mississippi River network, along with the American breadbasket in the Midwest, to the Eastern Seaboard and Hell's Bend. Hell was built over the ruins of Helen Bentley Port outside Baltimore, and became a renowned independent city state that had an outside influence over shipping thanks to its small but technologically advanced navy.

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