Thursday, November 19, 2009
JOHN SCHOENHERR / DUNE
First edition of Frank Herbert's Dune, with jacket artwork by John Schoenherr.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
THE HAUNTED EYE: MYTHS AND LEGENDS OF THE STARGATES
Haunted Eye: Myths And Legends Of The Stargates, excerpt from Tour Of The Universe by Robert Holdstock and Malcolm Edwards.
Stargates are distortions in space; they are also distortions in time, a fact that is often overlooked. It is also far too easy to think of a Stargate as a single 'hole' from one part of the Galaxy to another. Whilst there is certainly a main bore, or Eye, most Stargates have peripheral connections with other 'edge-sinks'; small, difficult to find, leading to unknown destinations, these sinks have nevertheless been the cause (and eventually the explanation) of a number of the early mysterious disappearances associated with Stargates.
But Stargate Trax is associated with one of the most celebrated vanishing tricks of any century. To this day it has not been satisfactorily explained.
On Christmas Eve, 2286, only twenty years after the first human Stargate city had been built on the decaying alien remnants, a small passenger liner piloted by Captain Kiril Taubman approached the Trax Gate from Earth. It was part of the Interstel line, a routine visitor to the Gate. Its passengers were dignitaries and their families from the Unified Church Of Sol, on the way to the Sacred World of Mecca, to the Unified Faith Conference.
The ship was the IS Ambassador, and she moored berth 27 for three hours while she was re-provisioned and boarded by a customs crew and engineering inspectors. The reports of these two groups show that a) there was no cargo on board that in any way could have been responsible for the events that would subsequently occur, and b) that the TMSD drive was in top condition, and had only recently been overhauled.
At 1530 hours Stargate Time (based on a 24 hour clock) the Ambassador slipped from her holding and negotiated her way to E-approach run 15. Stargate Trax has thirty different approaches to the central Eye. On this occasion fourteen were occupied by larger ships. Approach run 15 was a northerly spiral-magnetic runway. It was mainly used for cargo ships of the unmanned variety.
IS Ambassador entered the radius at a velocity of 100 kph, and at 1546 hours. A Pre-signal had been sent through to Stargate Tethys, the opposing Eye. In the monitoring console, above the approach way, two men waited for the signal capsule to pass back from the Tethys Gate, along signal route 23. The normal wait-time for such acknowledgement of safe arrival is ten minutes. At 1610 hours the alarm was raised, and Stargate Control alerted. All ships were held back from their approach runs. Signal route 14 was used to despatch a query to Tethys Gate. Almost immediately a signal was received, in response to the arrival zone not being occupied, declaring "IS Ambassador has not arrived". Five minutes later an acknowledgement to the question signal was received. "Occupation Zone for Ambassador showed momentary reverse charge on anti-quark vortex. No Ambassador. Will keep zone clear until advised otherwise. Have we lost a ship?"
Lost it certainly was. And yet not lost. Certainly as far as the Stargate was concerned the Ambassador was a ship that had vanished without a trace, and inexplicably. It was logged as such, and the log was left undisturbed for twenty years. A thorough search of all known peripheral 'edge sinks' failed to show any sign of the Ambassador. The disaster was concealed from the general public, and the disappearance of the passengers explained by 'ship crash'.
But the story of the Ambassador does not end there; twenty years later the file was re-opened, for the Ambassador became, overnight, the most celebrated mystery of the spaceways.
On June 15, 2306 Stargate Trax had only a single Pan-Gal cruiser in dock, waiting for an incoming passenger ship to clear the Eye. An advance signal was received at 0936 hours. At 0938 the Eye began to radiate purple light, and a glowing, multi-coloured aura formed about its tiny radius, at approximately one thousand metres diameter. The aura actually touched the eastern in-face of the city, but not physical effects were experienced. The emission of colour was captured on fine grain film but no particle emission was detected, although neutrino flux, monitored routinely, shows three sharp peaks in the ten seconds following the first appearance of the aura.
The Stargate Control had never experienced any such phenomenon before. A signal capsule was instantly dispatched to Stargate Tethys in response to Advance signal 046BB to hold their ship on its approach run. Unmanned drone ships entered the aura, and as they did so, the colour vanished; an intense, purplish hue remained about the radius of the Eye.
As a fascinated Gate crew watched so the nose shield of a ship appeared, edging its way slowly into Gate space. At first the crew thought this was the Tethys ship coming through despite the warning, but it soon became apparent that the ship was too small for that vessel. And it wasn't emerging smoothly. Rather, it seemed to nudge a few hundred yards forward, and then pull back. There were strange symbols on its side, and shapes moving at the tiny, circular portals.
The ship glowed with purple light. It emerged two hundred metres, and the name on its side became clear. Not an alien script, but terrestrial lettering reversed as if in a mirror: the IS Ambassador.
The Gate crew attempted to make contact, both EM and phase-shift, with the ship's crew, but heard only a high pitched burbling shriek. Two seconds of this was recorded. Slowed down it is a human voice speaking in reverse. The voice is that of Captain Taubman. It is a repeated and panic stricken cry for help. It was reference to 'the wheels'. "The wheels, all around. What the hell are they? Hello Stargate Control, can you see them?"
As unexpectedly as it had emerged, it then pulled back into the Eye. The aura vanished.
The Ambassador as emerged on two further occasions: in 2526 and 2547. On each occasion the pattern of emergence, and the burst of message, are the same. Wherever she is, the Ambassador is stuck in space and time. One day, perhaps, the fault will be diagnosed, and she will be brought back into the real Universe.
The same is unlikely to be said for the crew and passengers of the SIS Andromeda, a Sirian Spacelines colony ship that was granted access rights to Stargate Jarana on July 21st 2516. The Andromeda was a converted military cruiser, nose to stern nearly four thousand metres long. It had a Gate transit time of ten seconds, which is dangerously close to the limit of safety, since it is in critical phase-split for nearly a full second. Larger ships than the Andromeda have safely traversed the Gates, however, and for the answer to the particular mystery she poses one must look elsewhere.
The Andromeda, being an older ship, was manned by a hundred men and women. On this occasion she had a mere fifty passengers on board, not colonists but holiday-makers rescued from stand-by by the co-operative Captain of the vessel.
The Sirian ship waited for four hours for its access chance to the Gate; the gate was busy at this time, and after re-provisioning, the liner arrived safely at its destination. The Andromeda appeared to pass Stargate Jarana without a hitch. But when she arrived at Stargate Meriax she did not acknowledge the signal from the gate crew, but continued to drift slowly beyond the arrival bays.
Four tugs fled to the giant ship and were able to stop its impact with the side of the torus of the city. An investigating team immediately boarded the Andromeda and reported it to be empty. The crew and the passengers had vanished totally. All controls were operative. Two dogs lay unconscious in the kennels. A card table was covered with cards dropped in disarray, as if in the middle of a game. On a window a child had been drawing the shape of a Pan-Galactic cruiser. The shape was unfinished. Next to the seat where the child had been sitting, part of the fabric of a seat is torn, and the torn fragment located several metres away. A reconstruction suggests that the seat's occupant tried frantically to hold on, but whatever force was holding him or her was too great. A gruesome discovery was made by the second team that came aboard to investigate. At the fore of the main lounge a forty foot square area of ceiling was found to be covered with a thin layer of hornified human skin; the torn piece of fabric lay below this smear.
Were the occupants of the lounge sucked out into another Universe through that part of the ship, passing across the hull without disturbing the hull's molecular structure? We are unlikely ever to know. The flight recorder gives no indication of anything amiss, calm voices speaking routine instructions. At the moment of vanishing no-one was talking; the body monitors on the ship in the Captain's seat show that her body ceased to register on the temperature and neural activity controls at 1056.23.07; the co-pilot ceased to register at 1056.23.09. They vanished soundlessly.
Unlike the Ambassador, which most probably has fallen victim to a time vortex, the fate of the Andromeda cannot be explained by physical interference. Centuries ago, during the Age of Sailing Ships, the crew and passengers of a clipper known as the Marie Celeste vanished without trace. It took two hundred years before the grisly solution to that mystery was found. It is likely to take a lot longer to solve the mystery of the SIS Andromeda.
Stargates are distortions in space; they are also distortions in time, a fact that is often overlooked. It is also far too easy to think of a Stargate as a single 'hole' from one part of the Galaxy to another. Whilst there is certainly a main bore, or Eye, most Stargates have peripheral connections with other 'edge-sinks'; small, difficult to find, leading to unknown destinations, these sinks have nevertheless been the cause (and eventually the explanation) of a number of the early mysterious disappearances associated with Stargates.
But Stargate Trax is associated with one of the most celebrated vanishing tricks of any century. To this day it has not been satisfactorily explained.
On Christmas Eve, 2286, only twenty years after the first human Stargate city had been built on the decaying alien remnants, a small passenger liner piloted by Captain Kiril Taubman approached the Trax Gate from Earth. It was part of the Interstel line, a routine visitor to the Gate. Its passengers were dignitaries and their families from the Unified Church Of Sol, on the way to the Sacred World of Mecca, to the Unified Faith Conference.
The ship was the IS Ambassador, and she moored berth 27 for three hours while she was re-provisioned and boarded by a customs crew and engineering inspectors. The reports of these two groups show that a) there was no cargo on board that in any way could have been responsible for the events that would subsequently occur, and b) that the TMSD drive was in top condition, and had only recently been overhauled.
At 1530 hours Stargate Time (based on a 24 hour clock) the Ambassador slipped from her holding and negotiated her way to E-approach run 15. Stargate Trax has thirty different approaches to the central Eye. On this occasion fourteen were occupied by larger ships. Approach run 15 was a northerly spiral-magnetic runway. It was mainly used for cargo ships of the unmanned variety.
IS Ambassador entered the radius at a velocity of 100 kph, and at 1546 hours. A Pre-signal had been sent through to Stargate Tethys, the opposing Eye. In the monitoring console, above the approach way, two men waited for the signal capsule to pass back from the Tethys Gate, along signal route 23. The normal wait-time for such acknowledgement of safe arrival is ten minutes. At 1610 hours the alarm was raised, and Stargate Control alerted. All ships were held back from their approach runs. Signal route 14 was used to despatch a query to Tethys Gate. Almost immediately a signal was received, in response to the arrival zone not being occupied, declaring "IS Ambassador has not arrived". Five minutes later an acknowledgement to the question signal was received. "Occupation Zone for Ambassador showed momentary reverse charge on anti-quark vortex. No Ambassador. Will keep zone clear until advised otherwise. Have we lost a ship?"
Lost it certainly was. And yet not lost. Certainly as far as the Stargate was concerned the Ambassador was a ship that had vanished without a trace, and inexplicably. It was logged as such, and the log was left undisturbed for twenty years. A thorough search of all known peripheral 'edge sinks' failed to show any sign of the Ambassador. The disaster was concealed from the general public, and the disappearance of the passengers explained by 'ship crash'.
But the story of the Ambassador does not end there; twenty years later the file was re-opened, for the Ambassador became, overnight, the most celebrated mystery of the spaceways.
On June 15, 2306 Stargate Trax had only a single Pan-Gal cruiser in dock, waiting for an incoming passenger ship to clear the Eye. An advance signal was received at 0936 hours. At 0938 the Eye began to radiate purple light, and a glowing, multi-coloured aura formed about its tiny radius, at approximately one thousand metres diameter. The aura actually touched the eastern in-face of the city, but not physical effects were experienced. The emission of colour was captured on fine grain film but no particle emission was detected, although neutrino flux, monitored routinely, shows three sharp peaks in the ten seconds following the first appearance of the aura.
The Stargate Control had never experienced any such phenomenon before. A signal capsule was instantly dispatched to Stargate Tethys in response to Advance signal 046BB to hold their ship on its approach run. Unmanned drone ships entered the aura, and as they did so, the colour vanished; an intense, purplish hue remained about the radius of the Eye.
As a fascinated Gate crew watched so the nose shield of a ship appeared, edging its way slowly into Gate space. At first the crew thought this was the Tethys ship coming through despite the warning, but it soon became apparent that the ship was too small for that vessel. And it wasn't emerging smoothly. Rather, it seemed to nudge a few hundred yards forward, and then pull back. There were strange symbols on its side, and shapes moving at the tiny, circular portals.
The ship glowed with purple light. It emerged two hundred metres, and the name on its side became clear. Not an alien script, but terrestrial lettering reversed as if in a mirror: the IS Ambassador.
The Gate crew attempted to make contact, both EM and phase-shift, with the ship's crew, but heard only a high pitched burbling shriek. Two seconds of this was recorded. Slowed down it is a human voice speaking in reverse. The voice is that of Captain Taubman. It is a repeated and panic stricken cry for help. It was reference to 'the wheels'. "The wheels, all around. What the hell are they? Hello Stargate Control, can you see them?"
As unexpectedly as it had emerged, it then pulled back into the Eye. The aura vanished.
The Ambassador as emerged on two further occasions: in 2526 and 2547. On each occasion the pattern of emergence, and the burst of message, are the same. Wherever she is, the Ambassador is stuck in space and time. One day, perhaps, the fault will be diagnosed, and she will be brought back into the real Universe.
The same is unlikely to be said for the crew and passengers of the SIS Andromeda, a Sirian Spacelines colony ship that was granted access rights to Stargate Jarana on July 21st 2516. The Andromeda was a converted military cruiser, nose to stern nearly four thousand metres long. It had a Gate transit time of ten seconds, which is dangerously close to the limit of safety, since it is in critical phase-split for nearly a full second. Larger ships than the Andromeda have safely traversed the Gates, however, and for the answer to the particular mystery she poses one must look elsewhere.
The Andromeda, being an older ship, was manned by a hundred men and women. On this occasion she had a mere fifty passengers on board, not colonists but holiday-makers rescued from stand-by by the co-operative Captain of the vessel.
The Sirian ship waited for four hours for its access chance to the Gate; the gate was busy at this time, and after re-provisioning, the liner arrived safely at its destination. The Andromeda appeared to pass Stargate Jarana without a hitch. But when she arrived at Stargate Meriax she did not acknowledge the signal from the gate crew, but continued to drift slowly beyond the arrival bays.
Four tugs fled to the giant ship and were able to stop its impact with the side of the torus of the city. An investigating team immediately boarded the Andromeda and reported it to be empty. The crew and the passengers had vanished totally. All controls were operative. Two dogs lay unconscious in the kennels. A card table was covered with cards dropped in disarray, as if in the middle of a game. On a window a child had been drawing the shape of a Pan-Galactic cruiser. The shape was unfinished. Next to the seat where the child had been sitting, part of the fabric of a seat is torn, and the torn fragment located several metres away. A reconstruction suggests that the seat's occupant tried frantically to hold on, but whatever force was holding him or her was too great. A gruesome discovery was made by the second team that came aboard to investigate. At the fore of the main lounge a forty foot square area of ceiling was found to be covered with a thin layer of hornified human skin; the torn piece of fabric lay below this smear.
Were the occupants of the lounge sucked out into another Universe through that part of the ship, passing across the hull without disturbing the hull's molecular structure? We are unlikely ever to know. The flight recorder gives no indication of anything amiss, calm voices speaking routine instructions. At the moment of vanishing no-one was talking; the body monitors on the ship in the Captain's seat show that her body ceased to register on the temperature and neural activity controls at 1056.23.07; the co-pilot ceased to register at 1056.23.09. They vanished soundlessly.
Unlike the Ambassador, which most probably has fallen victim to a time vortex, the fate of the Andromeda cannot be explained by physical interference. Centuries ago, during the Age of Sailing Ships, the crew and passengers of a clipper known as the Marie Celeste vanished without trace. It took two hundred years before the grisly solution to that mystery was found. It is likely to take a lot longer to solve the mystery of the SIS Andromeda.
PETER GUDYNAS
Cover artwork for Greg Egan's Diaspora. Peter also provided artwork for Quarantine by the same author.
Artwork for Frank Herbert's Direct Descent. The bumf from the back of the book is reproduced below:
Earth was the archive of all learning, its small population dedicated to the endless task of finding and preserving new information, new truths. An isolated, sheltered haven, Earth was bound by galactic charter to broadcast and make available freely to the entire galaxy the greatest resource of all - knowledge.
But then the warships came. What good then was truth against the guns of the military, the megalomania of the dictator, the crude violence of the ignorant? Trapped, defenseless, the archivists only strategy was complete obedience to the oppressors. It seemed they could only save themselves by becoming slaves.
Return From The Stars.
Technovision X Space 5.
Unmanned Virtual Re-Entry.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
JOHN BRUNNER: CATCH A FALLING STAR / JOHN SCHOENHERR
Cover for John Brunner's Catch A Falling Star by John Schoenherr.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
ANALOG / JOHN SCHOENHERR
October 1965. Cover illustration is for Overproof by Johnathan Blake MacKenzie (aka Randall Garrett).
April 1966. Cover illustration is for the story Moon Prospector by William B. Ellern.
June 1967. Illustrating Computer War by Mack Reynolds.
August 1967. Cover illustration for Poul Anderson's Starfog.
September 1968. Cover illustration for The Tuvela by James Schmitz.
October 1968. Cover illustration is for Poul Anderson's The Pirate.
JOHN SCHOENHERR / GALACTIC PATROL
Nice Pyramid Books edition of E. E. "Doc" Smith's Galactic Patrol with cover artwork by John Schoenherr.
NORMAN SAUNDERS: NEWSCAST / MARS ATTACKS!
Painting by Norman Saunders for Harl Vincent's Newscast, featured in Marvel Science Stories, April/May 1939.
Norman Saunders is probably best known for illustrating the original series of Mars Attacks! Trading cards in the 1960s, but he also provided hundreds of paintings for SF, Detective and Western pulps as well as numerous Men's magazines.
JAMES GURNEY / QUOZL
Illustration for Alan Dean Foster's hilarious Quozl by Dinotopia genius James Gurney.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
BRUCE PENNINGTON
Here's more Bruce Pennington artwork. All of these paintings appeared on NEL (New English Library) editions of books in the 1970s.
A Princess Of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Indoctrinaire by Christopher Priest.
Pirates Of The Asteroids by Isaac Asimov.
SF Hall Of Fame anthology.
The Green Brain by Frank Herbert.
A Princess Of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Indoctrinaire by Christopher Priest.
Pirates Of The Asteroids by Isaac Asimov.
SF Hall Of Fame anthology.
The Green Brain by Frank Herbert.
Friday, November 13, 2009
KEITH PAGE
This is a bit of an anonymous image by Keith Page. It looks as though it could be an illustration for H.G. Wells' War Of The Worlds. If anyone knows where this is from, let us know!
SYD MEAD
Quick Syd Mead gallery - the final image is the Spinner car from Blade Runner.
Arriving Guests.
Disaster At Syntron.
Gold Droid Guards.
Megastructure.
Shuttle Launch.
Space Station Interior.
Spinner.
Arriving Guests.
Disaster At Syntron.
Gold Droid Guards.
Megastructure.
Shuttle Launch.
Space Station Interior.
Spinner.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
JEROME PODWIL: THE OTHER SIDE OF TIME / THIS PERFECT DAY
Artwork for Keith Laumer's The Other Side Of Time.
Artwork for Ira Levin's This Perfect Day. Levin would go on to greater success with the novels Rosemary's Baby (no, not SF) as well as The Stepford Wives and The Boys From Brazil. All three were made into films.
ED VALIGURSKY: BROTHER ROBOT / THE DELEGATE FROM VENUS
Two more classic Ed Valigursky paintings used on the cover of Amazing Stories, both are from 1958 and from stories written by Henry Slesar.
May 1958: Brother Robot.
October 1958: The Delegate From Venus.
May 1958: Brother Robot.
October 1958: The Delegate From Venus.
JACK GAUGHAN: THE BOOK OF POUL ANDERSON / FORBIDDEN REALITY
Painting by Jack Gaughan for the 1975 DAW books edition of The Book Of Poul Anderson.
Crop of a painting used on the cover of Philip E. High's Forbidden Reality.
VINCENT DI FATE: THE TRITONIAN RING
Is that Cthulhu?
Nope. This artwork was used on the cover for L. Sprague De Camp's 1951 novel The Tritonian Ring. Not really SF, but I make an exception since Vincent Di Fate handled the artwork. This novel was initially (and more famously) illustrated by Frank Frazetta.
Nope. This artwork was used on the cover for L. Sprague De Camp's 1951 novel The Tritonian Ring. Not really SF, but I make an exception since Vincent Di Fate handled the artwork. This novel was initially (and more famously) illustrated by Frank Frazetta.
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