Sep 07
Galaxies are one of those things that it’s easy to create a picture of. I remember in the 1970s all an artist needed was an airbrush, one or two pigments, and a fine paintbrush for depicting individual stars. When Photoshop and other painting programs came along, you could do the same thing with digital tools …
May 04
Some vintage Ultraseven record and publication covers from Japan done in that inimitable colorful 1960s style, heavy on the primary red, blue, and yellow. Look closely at the first image, where Ultraseven has a mouth with a lower lip, and it is open! He also has human eyes behind his hexagonal ones. I wonder if …
Apr 28
Ultraseven Tsurubaya television series 1967 – 1968 Originally shown on Tokyo Broadcast System (TBS) and later syndicated I was eight years old when I was introduced to the original Ultraman, which ran midafternoon, after school hours, on a now-defunct UHF station from Philadelphia. Ultraman was a creation of Eiji Tsuburaya, the special effects guru who …
Mar 28
In this post I’ll examine Elder Thing depictions done in different media and styles. This is an Elder Thing stripped down its basic elements: starfish head, wings, cucumber body, five tentacle legs. I’m guessing it’s a petroglyph painted on some exposed shale rock, which since has been desecrated by bird poop. The creator of the …
Mar 26
In Part II of this series I’ll be taking a look at the Elder Things interacting with their natural environment — either the snowbound Antarctica of At the Mountains of Madness, or their titanic cities of long ago. This illustration of the creatures shows them checking out a ship that has been stuck in the …
Mar 24
Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky Translation by Olena Bormashenko Chicago Review Press, 2012 (Originally published 1972 in the USSR) [ Challenge # 34: A book by more than one author. ] Roadside Picnic is an SF classic. Originally published in the USSR at the height of the Cold War — and Communist censorship …
Mar 22
The Elder Things are one of Lovecraft’s crowning creations, an exercise in speculative biology that also includes the Yithians (The Great Race) and the Mi-Go, also known as the fungi from Yuggoth. These trifecta of beings stand the test of time even today of what an alien intelligence could be like. Lovecraft based his creatures …
Mar 10
The City of the Elder Things (it didn’t have a proper name) is the most well described of Lovecraft’s alien cities, which also includes Pnakotus, the city of the Great Race of Yith that lay in the Australan outback, and R’lyeh, Cthulhu’s tomb. Immense, alien, frozen in time both literally and figuratively, half of the …
Mar 02
At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft Originally published 1936 in Astounding Stories [ Challenge # 1: Reread a book you have already read. ] Finished my first challenge this year, H. P. Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness. I first read it back in college some decades ago, and enjoyed it, but …
