Thrilling Tales update: Osgood Finnegan and I are not in Tahiti

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

So here’s some proof that I haven’t packed up and taken off for Tahiti. Or is it? I guess I could get Internet access there, now that I think of it.

But, no – really!- I’m here in the wintry seclusion of the Secret Laboratory where I’m still making progress on the first thirty or so illustrations for The Lair of the Clockwork Book. (Quick recap: once those first pictures are done the story will start its regular updates at the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site, while I get to work on Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS – until the Clockwork Book starts to run low on updates, at which point I’ll scurry back over to that project again.)

I’ve got over half of these first images done with just a handful to go until I’ve finished Osgood Finnegan’s story. Once that’s done I’ll be a lot closer to the story’s launch than it seems.

That’s because the remaining images – though there are quite a few – all take place in the Clockwork Book’s room. As I’ve mentioned before, things go much more quickly when I’m using the same location a bunch of times.

I doubt now that the story will start by the end of the year, as I’d planned. But I shouldn’t be late by too much.

‘Startling Stories’ Pulp Magazine Covers at Golden Age Comic Book Stories

Filed under Found on the Web

Not to be outdone even by himself, the astounding Mister Doortree has posted a new collection of science fiction pulp magazine covers at Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

This time we see 49 covers from Startling Stories, spanning the years 1939 to 1955. And they’re wonderful.

The credited artists are Howard V. Brown, Earle Bergey, Rudolph Belarski, Alex Schomburg, Jack Coggins, Walter Popp, Ed Emshwiller, and Ed Valigursky. I was just looking at one of the Emshwiller covers yesterday, and found to my, well, startlement that he was also an early pioneer in computer graphics. It’s a small world, even when it has rampaging robots and sinister tentacles in it.

As, you know, it does.

[tags]pulp magazines, science fiction, cover, illustration, startling stories, Howard V. Brown, Earle Bergey, Rudolph Belarski, Alex Schomburg, Jack Coggins, Walter Popp, Ed Emshwiller, Ed Valigursky[/tags]

Signed copies of ‘Trapped in the Tower of the Brain Thieves’ are back in stock; also, other stuff

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

A little while back I actually ran out of signed copies of Trapped in the Tower of the Brain Thieves – but now I’ve got another batch of ’em, so they’re available again at the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site. (The unsigned copies, I hasten to add, were always available and still are.)

I’m not sure that my signature means anything but you also get a pair of spiffy Thrilling Tales bookmarks.

And since we’re talking merchandising here (well… I am, anyway, and you’re doing whatever you’re doing while I do it), there’s also a splendiferous series of Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual T-shirts, not to mention the uncanny Thrilling Tales beverage containment devices, which themselves are totally eclipsed by the outright wonder of the Thrilling Tales posters and 2011 Wall Calendar.

Which is quite a lot of wonder, now that I think of it.

So while you wonder about that, I’ll let you know that the first tale in The Lair of the Clockwork Book has now got all its illustrations. I’m working on the second set, for something that I think is called Osgood Finnegan and the Orb from the Stars, or Osgood Finnegan and the Mysterious Stranger, or Osgood Finnegan and the Tale That Has Yet To Be Named.

Indecision’s an awful thing.

I spent a ridiculous amount of time building and texturing Osgood’s 19th century wagon, so I guess I should cram it into as many of the illustrations as possible. Though that would be cheating.

Holiday Reading: the Automatic Detective

Filed under Reading / Watching / Consuming

Oh, no: we’re not talking about laying out on the beach here, noses buried in the latest action-packed political thriller to bombard the airport bookshelves. Nope, here in the Secret Laboratory “holiday reading” means packing up the snow shovel and burrowing (physically) into a pile of warm anythings while burrowing (mentally) into a few hundred pages of Something Else. Holiday reading is serious business.

Though that doesn’t preclude comedy.

The Empire City (also known as Technotopia) of The Automatic Detective is a place in which the cheerful exuberance of the retro future all came true, sort of, in ways that were a bit unexpected. So, yes, we’ve all got a shot at a flying car, but in practice the gadabouts of Empire City are not exactly standardized and the many models are each plagued by niggling problems like, for example, the Buzzbugs: you’d call them ornithopters, except that their plastic wings and their beelike bodies are based on insects rather than birds. They’re a swell idea, but they have this habit of stalling, which is not your optimal behavior in a flying car. Opting out of the Buzzbug, you might try a Hoverskid, unless you were quick enough to ask yourself what the “Skid” part of their name was all about. In fact there’s only one model in all of Empire City that rolls on wheels, or more accurately, on wheel: that would be the Unipod.

Every one of these vehicles is fatally flawed in a unique and inventive way. And that tells you a lot about Empire City. The City’s a victim of almost random invention. Yesterday’s advances get recycled and today’s ill-advised replacements show up to crash, burn, mince, and mangle all over again. The question of why, exactly, that is, is rarely asked. Until we meet Mack Megaton.

Mack is not an automatic detective. Mack is a cab driver, although originally he was an unusual (and unusually dangerous) robot built by a mad scientist intent on (you guessed it!) dominating the world. For one reason or another, though, Mack decided that he’d rather not go in for world domination – which led to his creator’s imprisonment in a place I really, really wish I’d made up myself. It’s the Moriarty Asylum for the Criminally Inventive.

Mack is better now. He’s in therapy. But folks are still just a little bit worried about what would happen if his original programming were to kick back in.

And that’s where we begin. The Automatic Detective invites us on a hard boiled adventure through this dysfunctional World of Tomorrow where we meet all sorts of characters we didn’t quite meet in Raymond Chandler’s stories – like Jung, the intelligent gorilla, who’s Mack’s best friend, and like small, green and sinister scientists, and like Lucia: a swell dame, maybe. And, you know, maybe not.

The real journey here is Mack’s passage toward something like humanity. The story’s propelled by his decision at the beginning to break into a domestic disturbance at his neighbor’s apartment and that, as mundane as it sounds, is the first step in both the mystery of what the heck made Empire City what it is, and Mack’s growth as a sentient, if mechanical, being.

An Automatic Detective, in fact. Just picture Philip Marlowe. But paint him red, add few hundred pounds of near-indestructible shell, and don’t forget a buried inner drive to Destroy All Humans.

Laser Eyed Cat on Flying Saucer Patrols for Mutant Mice

Filed under Found on the Web

Via Laughing Squid.

Art Deco Custom Computer Keyboard by Datamancer

Filed under Found on the Web

Just about everyone must have seen the incredible steampunk keyboards custom built by Datamancer – but this one was new to me. I guess he’s been busy.

And it’s pretty much right up my street, so if anyone’s got about $1500 or so lying around, well, Christmas is coming, right?

This art deco computer keyboard was a custom project for the counter at Cinema 16:9 in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania. It’s made of wood and chrome with bright white LEDs and reworked vintage typewriter keys. I’d sure love to spend my days hovering over one like it.

Some of his other recent work is a series of ‘Aviator‘ keyboards, which are sort of halfway between the Deco keyboard and his earlier steampunkery: the Aviator’s a Dieselpunk model. Among the notes and sketches at the Datamancer site are some other Art Deco bits in progress. I guess I’ll be checking back more often now!

Frederik Pohl: 91 years young, today

Filed under Hodgepodge

And speaking of Captain Future… or, more accurately, speaking of the Futurians and the Golden Age… why don’t you go wish Frederik Pohl a happy 91st birthday?

A History of Golden Age Science Fiction Pulps at i09

Filed under Found on the Web

At i09, Jess Nevins continues the history of science fiction pulp magazines by bursting into their golden age with the beginning of John W. Campbell’s long term at the helm of Astounding.

Nevins tracks the number of sf pulps across the years – through the war and its paper rationing, not to mention the military service of many authors (which, come to think of it, he doesn’t mention – but pulps being what they were, those publishers would surely have printed something if they were able).

It’s also interesting to see which writers were publishing in each market even though their dizzying array of pseudonyms would make a complete list nearly impossible. But if you look carefully you can see the progress of fan writers like the Futurians beginning to break into the kinds of magazines that they’d lately been reading.

Just last night I read Leigh Brackett’s The Veil of Astellar and Henry Kuttner’s We Guard the Black Planet! – both from the years that Nevins covers here – so this article was nicely timed for me.

Thrilling Tales: the adventure continues

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

I’m making pretty good progress on the illustrations for The Lair of the Clockwork Book, even though I’m not as far along as I’d like. I’ve just finished the last of the pictures that takes place in Lew Stone’s lab during his adventure (which may be called Big Headed Guy and the Big Ball of Doom) but I’ve taken longer to get them done than I’d hoped.

Because I Think Too Much, I’ve been considering why that is, and why that is interests me, although your mileage may vary.

The biggest difference between this and the mildly interactive Trapped in the Tower of the Brain Thieves is that this story’s linear. When Lew powers up the Chiralitron and begins his experiment he will always do that, in the same way, and the same thing will always happen. This is Captain Obvious speaking, by the way.

As a side effect of this linearity there are fewer things that can happen – and so fewer illustrations – in any one location in the story. Why isn’t fewer faster?

The problem is that building a complicated environment takes lots of time. Making a single picture in that environment takes awhile, too, but nowhere near as much. So the more illustrations that happen in one place, the less time – on the average – they take. You could say that I’m amortizing the time I’ve spent building the pieces that make the pictures.

So I built Lew’s pristine laboratory and made the four pictures that take place there. Then I had to build Lew’s demolished laboratory and make the four pictures that take place there. If I’d needed to make twelve pictures in each state of the lab, the average time it took to make the pictures would be lower. See?

Why didn’t I, then?

So it’s not terrible news – things are just a little bit slower than I expected. This really bothered me until I did the math and understood why. But for the final set of pictures in Lew’s story I have some very different settings to create and those, thankfully, will go much more smoothly than the sets up to now. I’m concerned about what that does to the Clockwork Book‘s launch date – I’d hoped to start posting the story by the end of the year – but I don’t think I’ll be set back by all that much.

iPhone & iPad Cases at Retropolis; Celtic Ornaments at Ars Celtica

Filed under Works in Progress

Yep, it’s that time of year when all sorts of new merchandise becomes available just when everyone would wish things could settle down a bit for the holidays. But we can handle it.

Today’s big news is that I’ve added these swell hardshell cases to my Retropolis site. They’re Speck® cases, which have a fabric back stretched over the body of the case, and it’s on that fabric that I’ve been able to print my designs.

The fabric back – in addition to looking pretty neat – gives the back of your iPad or iPhone a much more grippable surface, or in the case of the iPad, a little more traction on your lap. That’s a practical observation that has nothing to do with what you were just thinking.

I forgot to mention last week that I’ve also added a bunch of hanging ornaments (or pendants) to my selection of swag at Ars Celtica. They’re ceramic ornaments that measure nearly three inches across, with designs on both sides.

And of course in the middle of all that commercial product mongering I’m trying not to lose ground on The Lair of the Clockwork Book. I’m well along with the demolished version of Lew Stone’s lab, and once that’s all done I’ll be able to turn out the next four illustrations. This is always a crazy time of year for me; but if it was easy, they’d have got someone else to do it.