The Curious Circumstance of the Rocket that Devolved in the Night

Filed under Found on the Web

The unshaven, rum-addled crew* over at TOR Books’ web site has declared that October shall be a month of Steampunk. And so shall it be, inasmuch as anything having to do with tor.com is concerned, anyway.

But that as interesting as that may be, it’s not what I enjoyed most today at their site.

In order to celebrate the Month of Steampunk they restyled their already retro rocket logo to suit – and then posted an article showing the concepts and describing their process of narrowing down from way too many neat ideas to the one neat idea they really needed. I had a great time wandering through that process even though "iterate" is a word I learned to dread in my long years as an indentured servant.

The art’s by Gregory Manchess; art direction by Irene Gallo.

So here‘s your chance to thrill at the fighter planes, the finnified rockets, and the various airships that they didn’t use. Neat! Or, you know, edifyingly uplifting!

*I mean that in the best possible way, you know.

“Neo City”, an animated short film by Hao Ai Qiang

Filed under Computer Graphics, Found on the Web

Neo City is a wandering, beautifully visualized animation by Hao Ai Qiang (and company) that seems to show us what a futuristic city might be like if it had decided, one way or another, that we weren’t all that necessary. Or maybe we callously took off for parts unknown, leaving the city to evolve and amuse itself in ways that make sense to a futuristic city when it’s on its own. I couldn’t say, but I enjoyed viewing it anyway.

It’s a student film, and I haven’t had much luck digging up any more information about it. But the image below apears to be by the same artist, and it’s a lovely one.

A Collection of Roy G. Krenkel Illustrations at “Golden Age Comic Book Stories”

Filed under Found on the Web

Golden Age Comic Book Stories has collected a great selection of work by Roy G. Krenkel – some of it’s quite early work, like the one shown here, and interests me because the inking is so different from the distinctive style I remember from my days of whippersnapperhood.

There’s even a complete version of the only solo story Krenkel drew for EC Comics – it reads today like the paranoid, dystopian dream that a Libertarian might have after too much Welsh Rarebit.

Wonderful stuff throughout. I often wish that I’d held on to all my old copies of Amra, to which Krenkel contributed so many illustrations.

Raygun Gothic Rocketship counts down to its launch

Filed under Found on the Web

As I write, the countdown timer on its web site tells me that less than 13 days remain till the arrival of the Raygun Gothic Rocketship at its destination, which is either Burning Man or someplace a bit more interstellar.

If you’ve missed it, this is an impressive feat of construction – at forty feet tall! – by the same group of demented designers that brought us the Steampunk Treehouse.

Much as I like treehouses, this one’s probably a little nearer the mark for me.

They describe it in this way:

The Raygun Gothic Rocketship is intended to creatively explore our ideas about evolution and technology as they relate to our notions about progress and The Future. This project exists at the blurry edge where science and fiction blend and become both our reality, and the stories we tell ourselves about that reality.

For those of us who haven’t been to art school, my Disingenuizing Deconstructor translates that as:

We though this would be so cool to make! But we’re afraid that you won’t respect us unless we come up with some sort of ridiculous prevarication that makes us sound all… sort of intellectual, you know?

But disregard the pretensions. It is a richer world that has scenes in it like the one below.

A little Lewis Wickes Hine, a little Buck Rogers. Just the way I like it.

And with this post I’ve caught up a bit with the cool things that have been piling up while I worked away almost tirelessly in the Secret Laboratory: in the past three days I’ve written posts about robots, ray guns, and rocket ships. It’s the trifecta of retro futurism!

Nice retro future ray gun by Steven Melendez

Filed under Found on the Web

Steven Melendez is another visitor to the Retropolis Transit Authority who sent me a link to this cool video of the raygun he built recently. Neat!

He says he built it "…incorporating scratch building, laser engraving, and conventional machining with a mill and lathe. It has an auto enamel copper and silver finish with patina."

And it is indeed sweet.

As far as me updates go, I have at least mailed off a mysterious packet for one of those two super secret things I’m doing, though odds are I’ll need to do something else before the whole shebang is ready for its pitch. Back to super secret thing #2, I guess. More anon.

Robot assemblage sculptures from Lipson Robotics

Filed under Found on the Web

I’m still stapled to my desk, but cool things keep flying out of my monitor at me even though I’m doing my best to ignore them. I’m just that dedicated.

But I’m going to try to catch up a bit before the cool things pile up and spill into my coffee cup. So here’s one:

Retropolis Transit Authority customer Tim Hammell sends me this link to some wonderful retro robots built out of found objects from thrift stores and, for all I know, time traveling midden heaps – they’re by Lipson Robotics, and I envy Tim because he’s the happy owner of one of them.

The sculptures are assembled completely with nuts and bolts, which seem so much more fitting than adhesives. It’s as though they’re who they are, through and through, and I like that about them. Come to think of it, I like that about anybody.

The robots are up to 30 inches tall, and weigh up to 20 pounds.

Lipson Robotics is the brainchild of an animation director and producer with years of experience on stuff you’ve probably seen. But I prefer to think that his true calling is scavenging for robot parts, and putting them together. It’s destiny.

[tags]robot, robotics, lipson robotics, art, sculpture, assemblage, found objects[/tags]

Where the heck have I been? Plus ‘The Mercury Men’, an online movie serial

Filed under Found on the Web

I just realized that August is half over, and I’ve yet to post anything at all for the month. There are terrific reasons for that; I’ve been working very hard on two Really Interesting Things that I can’t discuss for now.

Honestly, I’ve hardly looked up. Like I said, Really Interesting.

So in the meantime, here’s something I stumbled over which is also Really Interesting, not to mention Really Spiffy. It’s the trailer for an online retro movie serial called The Mercury Men.

Enjoy the trailer, and then pop over to the web site. Subscribe. Have some popcorn. Enjoy.

I’ll be back before long.

Go Hero’s Buck Rogers action figures: now defending your desk against the perils of space

Filed under Found on the Web

Hop over there to gander at the features – everything from a detachable, glass space helmet to an internal audio device that plays old Buck Rogers radio shows (or whatever you upload to it via USB). Neat!

His gun is (of course!) a replica of Buck’s iconic Atomic Ray Pistol… and Go Hero is also selling a 10″ version of that famous ray gun. In fact it’s not an exact replica, since it combines features of the original toy Atomic ray gun with the postwar Disintegrator Pistol. Comes complete with pops and sparks.

And still coming down the retro-futuristic pike is Go Hero’s 1:6 scale Flash Gordon, a similarly detailed 1930’s version of the character based on Buster Crabbe in the famous movie serials.

All in all, a pretty wonderful line of retro space heroes and replicas, all ready and eager to defend your desk from evil emperors and the Awful Green Things From Space.

Rick Remender’s FEAR Agent in development at Universal

Filed under Found on the Web

Rick Remender’s FEAR Agent – the comic book tales of Heath Huston, hard-drinking alien exterminator in a retro future – is being developed for the screen at Universal. I’ve liked the series, and not only for its occasional homage to Wally Wood (or to Jeff Brewer’s Cool Rockets, for that matter).

Right out of the gate the stories had me going when Heath, in the middle of a pitched battle with aliens, was trying to figure out if they were intelligent enough that he’d get prosecuted for killing them. It’s a difficult future this guy has to contend with.

The series started at Image Comics and then made a slightly unusual sidestep over to Dark Horse. I wondered at the time whether this might have something to do with Dark Horse’s media contacts, and maybe I was right to wonder.

It’s early days, but this film – if it makes it through the gauntlet – could be loads of cliffhanging, drunken fun with Heath and his intelligent spaceship roaming the galaxy and getting into trouble. The news appears at the Risky Biz blog, and my thanks go to to Sci Fi Wire for pointing me that way.

Posthuman Blues Blog Serves up “Women in Tubes”

Filed under Found on the Web

Posthuman Blues has been posting a series of what I never dreamed is an indispensable theme in golden age science fiction pulps: women in tubes!

I wish that Mac’s posts were tagged so that I could link to the whole series, but if you browse through the posts you can find them. Who knew that this was a subconscious imperative that retro science fiction simply must express?

And as you might imagine, I’ve searched my own work for tube women and I have to confess that I come up short. I feel completely inadequate, in fact. I have a feeling that I’m just going to have to do something about that before long*. I mean, sure, I’ve put toasters in globes… but no girls in tubes? What the heck was I thinking?

And I wish that I were as clever as the commenter who called them “Tubular Belles”, too.

*Update: Yep, I couldn’t resist.