Image of the Dystopian Future: A Chinese Rooftop Slum

I’ve been reading a number of books on SF art recently. One of these is Prentis Rollins’ How to Draw Sci-Fi Utopias and Dystopias (Monacelli Press 2016). Rollins is a British artist, who has worked on a number of comics for DC and Marvel, as well as various a couple of graphic novels. The book’s subitled’ Create the Futuristic Humans, Aliens, robots, Vehicles, and Cities of Your Dreams and Nightmares’.

The first section of the book gives some basic information on drawing – the face, proportion, anatomy, perspective and so on. But much of the book is his own pictures of various science fictional scenes, which can be roughly assembled into a future history. These show cities devastated by nuclear war, roving tower blocks on tank treads, humans exploring alien landscapes, and the aliens monuments they discover, spaceships, human and alien, and land vehicles, including the trucks of the future. One picture also shows a secret time machine hidden in a bunker in Surrey, alternative histories, like a noble British steampunk family, a war robot created to fight the Vietnam War, new Martians evolved from human colonists, but which don’t look remotely human, meeting the terran emperor. Finally there is a picture of Earth’s distant, utopian future, in which the landscape is dominated by a huge city unlike anything now built.

Each picture is accompanied by Rollins’ own description of how he completed them, taking you step by step through the process by which he transformed his pencil drawings into the superb finished art. He also shows still from some of the great SF movies and TV that have inspired him. This includes Star Trek and Star Wars, Metropolis, Georges Melies’ A Trip to the Moon, and the Alexander Korda’s 1936 film adaptation of H.G. Wells’ Things to Come.

One of the suggestions Rollins makes in the book is that as the global temperature continues to rise, humanity will move higher into the atmosphere to escape the heat. This will result in a network of Earth-girdling buildings strung out on miles’ high skyscrapers. But before that happens, there will be more familiar high-rise slums like this one he depicts for Shenzen in 2100. The Earth’s population has expanded massively, with people crammed into such high-rise cities. Water is desperately short, so it is used only for drinking. There is none to spare for putting out fires, which are left to burn themselves out.

It’s a chilling prediction, and one that is alas all too credible. Especially as Rollins shows the photos he took of contemporary Hong Kong which he used as reference. I’m putting this image up because I feel that it could come true despite international talking-shops on climate change and the environmental crisis like COP26. An event at which our own prime minister showed once again what I bumbling clown he is. David Attenborough, who had the misfortune to be seated next to him, and Greta Thunberg are right: we need solid action on climate change. But we aren’t going to get it from Boris.

Prentis Rollins’ book is a great collection of SF art from the imagination of one of the comics industry’s many great artists. Like many artists, Rollins also uses computers as well as pencil, pen and ink, and I think this may be a little beyond some aspiring SF artists. But the art is great, and should fire the imaginations of its readers and inspire them to create their own great SF works in their turn.

Johnson Squirms and Blusters When Questioned About Not Wearing Mask at COP26

The world’s great, if not good, have gathered in Scotland to discuss the climate crisis and so far the conduct of our shambolic excuse for a prime minister has been of his usual standard: abysmal. As Mike and Zelo Street have pointed out, Bozo fell asleep at one of the talks, while sat between David Attenborough and the UN Secretary General. Our free and fearless broadcasters, both Beeb and ITN, did not show the footage. This suggests that they’re becoming the British equivalents of the official news services in dictatorships like Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia or Fascist Italy, where nothing that would possibly show the dictator in an unflattering light could ever be published. This even extended to the Gorbachev era. Although Gorbachev opened up a new era of democracy, openness, ‘glaznost’, and friendship with the West, the state media still acted to preserve the great man’s vanity. Gorby was born with a birthmark on his forehead, but this was carefully airbrushed out in the official pictures. Mussolini literally used to stand on a soapbox when he delivered his rants to the unfortunate Italian public, but this too was carefully airbrushed out of the photos. And then there’s that notoriously doctored photograph showing Stalin sat cosily next to Lenin on a bench. Now we have British television showing it’s quite prepared to do the same in order to spare Bozo’s blushes.

Bozo also didn’t wear the required facemask to protect everyone else from Covid as he was slumbering next to Attenborough. David Attenborough is 95, and therefore particularly vulnerable to the disease. Unlike Bozo, he was also wide-awake and alert, or at least he appeared to be. Nobody could blame him at his age if he had dozed off. But Attenborough generally appears far more intelligent than Boris generally, and much more popular. Also more accomplished in cross-species communication. After all, Attenborough found himself accepted into a family of gorillas in Africa during his blockbusting wildlife series, Life on Earth way back in 1979. It was one of the truly great pieces of natural history broadcasting. For all his background as a journalist, Boris has done nothing remotely similar, nor behaved with the grace, dignity and gravitas one would expect of someone who aspires to be a grand statesman. Boris is colossally graceless and inept, and when faced with difficult or not so difficult questions, his only recourse is to bluster incoherently.

And he did exactly this when questioned on CNN about why he didn’t wear the facemask and so risked Attenborough coming down with the potentially lethal disease. Alex Belfield posted this video yesterday, which shows the buffoon squirming in embarrassment. Of course, the mad right-wing internet radio host has his own reasons for posting the video. He vehemently opposes the lockdown, viewing it as doing more harm than good. It’s an attitude shared by much of the right. He early posted a video showing what he considered to be the hypocrisy of the world leaders in Scotland over the issue of facemasks. This showed them all posing for a photoshoot wearing them. As soon as the photographers had taken their pics, off the masks came. I don’t agree with Belfield about facemasks. I do think they are helping to protect the vulnerable. But I’ve got no problem sharing this video about Bozo’s hypocrisy and stupidity.