The Amazing Art of Stuart Cowley’s ‘Spacewreck’

More utterly amazing space art from Sci-Fi Art’s channel on YouTube. In this very short video, he flips through Stuart Cowley’s Spacewreck: Ghostships and Derelicts of Space. Cowley took the art for various Science Fiction paperbacks and then wrote stories around them, publishing them as guidebooks to the spacecraft of the future produced by a global trade organisation, the Terran Trade Authority. I bought one of these when I was a schoolkid, Spacecraft 2000-2100, which pretended to be a guide to the spacecraft of the 21st century and with a story about humanity’s contact with two species of aliens from Alpha and Proxima Centauri respectively, and humanity’s and the Alpha Centaurian’s war with the latter. I can remember being absolutely amazed by the astonishingly beautiful art of these imaginary worlds and spaceships. Cowley published a series of such books and didn’t confine himself just to Science Fiction. He also created one from the cover art for a number of Horror novels as The Tourist’s Guide to Transylvania. Another book he produced was the alarmingly named Home Brain Surgery and Other Household Skills. I’ve seen a copy for sale in some secondhand book shops and left it meaning to buy it later. When I came back it had vanished. Which just shows that somehow you have to get something while you can. The artists featured in Spacewreck, according to Sci-Fi Art, include Angus McKie, Tony Roberts, Fred Gambino, Bob Layzell, Colin Hay, Jim Burns, Alan Daniels and the music is by All India Radio. I think some of their music has also been used for a video someone made of the spacecraft from Spacecraft 2000-2100 zooming around in CGI animation.

Grim Jim on the Role-Playing Games Based on the Terran Trade Authority Handbooks

The Terran Trade Authority handbooks were a series of SF art books by Stuart Cowley published in the late ’70s and early ’80s beginning with Spacecraft 2000-2100. Cowley took various paintings of spacecraft, published originally as covers for paperback SF novels, and turned them into a future history and typology of these fictional spacecraft. I’ve only got the first book, Spacecraft 2000-2100, but I think there were others on space wrecks, star liners and great space battles. The books were the fictional publications of a future governmental organisation, the Terran Trade Authority, and its subsidiary, the Terran Defence Authority, which regulated trade between Earth and the other planets and civilisations, as well as providing for the planet’s defence. In this future, humanity was only just expanding into interstellar space, but had encountered two nearby alien civilisations on Proxima and Alpha Centauri. These aliens were markedly similar to humans, although not so similar that their ships didn’t need modification for human use. These similarities were so strong that there was speculation about a deep kinship or common origin for the three different species.

I came across the book when I was on holiday and was really blown away by the art. This was by such great SF artists as Chris Foss, Angus McKie, Bob Layzell and others. And even now, about forty years later, the books are fondly remembered by SF fans. What I didn’t know is that they also spawned two Role-Playing Games set in their fictional universe, one published by Morrigan Press.

I found this video by Grim Jim, a game designer, who’s also a fan of these great books. Here he talks about the RPGs, which unfortunately failed to make much of an impact. According to him, the Morrigan RPG gamebook has been long out of print. If you want to play it, you’re therefore reduced to either finding a second hand copy somewhere, or pirating it. Normally he wouldn’t recommend the latter, but this is really the only option for people who want to play it. He talks about the mechanisms of the game system used, which seems to have been a generic game system. For some reason the book replaced the awesome paintings of the original TTA handbooks with computer art. This is fine, but doesn’t have the paintings’ quality. G J speculates that Morrigan may have had to use computer art because of problems over the copyright for the paintings. It seems that by the time Morrigan published the book, the copyright had reverted back to Cowley.

I’m not really into games, but a number of my friends are very much into RPGs, like the classic Dungeons and Dragons and so on. One of these is Traveller, an SF game which I think came out in the 1970s a few years before the TTA handbooks and the games based on them. People are still putting up videos on YouTube about the TTA books and their spaceships, including one which recreated them zooming through space through CGI. This isn’t politics, but I thought people would enjoy this video about a great piece of SF art and literature.

The Fantastic Space Art of Tony Roberts

This is another video from Martin Kennedy on YouTube, showing the work of another amazing space and science fiction artist from the 1970s, Tony Roberts. As you can see from the video, he was another whose art was used in Stuart Cowley’s Spacecraft 2000-2100. And as this video shows, he also painted the cover for a British edition of Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.

The Space Art of Bob Layzell

Here’s another video I found on YouTube by Martin Kennedy about one of the great space and science fiction artists of the 1970s, whose work appeared in Stuart Cowley’s Spacecraft 2000-2100, Bob Layzell. You may recognise some of the pictures from the previous videos I’ve reblogged on the book.

The Fantastic Space Art of Angus McKie

I found this great video showing some of the space art of Angus McKie, one of the artists, whose depictions of spaceships and future worlds was used by Stuart Cowley as the basis for his Spacecraft 2000-2100 and Great Space Battles books.

The poster, Martin Kennedy, describes McKie and his career in the following blurb:

Angus McKie is best known as an English science fiction illustrator whose work appeared on the covers of numerous science fiction paperback novels in the mid-1970s and 1980s, as well as in Stewart Cowley’s Terran Trade Authority series of illustrated books. His illustrations often present highly detailed spacecraft against vividly colored backgrounds and high-tech constructions as demonstrated by his pioneering work on The Dome: Ground Zero for DC Comics imprint Helix in 1998. Like Peter Elson, Tony Roberts, Chris Foss and some other artists of the period, he influenced an entire generation of science fiction illustrators and concept artists. This lasting influence is probably visible at its best, about twenty years later, in the visual look developed for the Homeworld videogame.

In 1993 he wrote and drew the first 2 parts of a science fiction comic published by Dark Horse entitled “The Blue Lily”, based on Dave Weir’s short story. As of 2011, McKie was reportedly working on the last 2 parts of the work in his spare time. He also wrote and illustrated a story entitled “So Beautiful and So Dangerous” for Heavy Metal magazine, which later became a segment in the eponymous movie Heavy Metal. (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_M…)

Ross Forster-Fraser on the Terran Trade Authority’s ‘Great Space Battles’

I’ve put up a series of videos this week about Stuart Cowley’s Spaceships 2000-2100, and the great space art on which it was based. The book was supposedly published by the Terran Trade Authority, a future international governmental organisation administering the world’s trade, particularly with other worlds. It was a ‘future history’ SF tale, about the spaceships that would take humanity first to the planets of our solar system, and from thence to the stars Alpha and Proxima Centauri and beyond. The illustrations in the book were taken from SF book covers, which were used by the writer, Stuart Cowley, as the basis for descriptions of these craft and their fictional histories.

Spacecraft 2000-2100 was one of series of similar books published by the fictional TTA. The others included Great Space Battles. In this clip I found on YouTube, Ross Forster-Fraser, another enthusiast for the books, talks about this book.