I bought a Switch 2 in the middle of 2025 (my previous games console was, and I keep having to double-check this, the original NES), and finally picked up No Man's Sky, a mere decade after it launched, looking for a chill space-themed exploration sandbox.
Every time I dip into this thing it accidentally generates cover art for never-written sci-fi novels that teenage me would have devoured.
Must try to dust-off the writing pen in the new year.
Spaceships spaceships spaceships! Here are some i have drawn DEFA sci fi set, vintage vibes for these interesting films, loved the rocket design too, Mixed painted areas with halftone textures in honour of the original film posters #art #spaceships
The limited edition prints for Reality Rift, seen alongside the original A3 drawings, one of which will go to a lucky buyer. Thank you all that have bought one btw. They have almost sold out.
#conceptart #SciFi #writing #scifiart #novel #illustration #darkshepherd #spaceships #bookillustration
Reality Rift Deluxe editions have almost sold out. Only 5 left if you are interested, and in the chance of entering the raffle to own one of the A3 originals of your choice.
https://www.newconpress.co.uk/info/book.asp?id=272&referer=Catalogue
#conceptart #SciFi #darkshepherd #gamedev #illustration #art #digitalart #spaceships #visdev
SpaceBourne 2 – v1.0.0
https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://fitgirl-repacks.site/spacebourne-2/
Reality Rift. Now available. Just in time for Christmas. Just saying:)
https://lnkd.in/enp-sCuX
#writing #conceptart #SciFi #novel #illustration #digitalart #spaceships #DarkShepherd
TTCombat's Dropfleet Commander: The Dreadhold starter set pits prison guards against space criminals attempting a jailbreak. Ship to ship combat, plenty of standard issue woooop woooop noises as ships go down, shields deplete and ... RAMMING SPEED! https://l.d20.ninja/huccypjz #ttcombat #spaceships #starshipCombat #sciFiMiniatures #dropfleetCommander
My favourite ship is the USS Aventine, with Captain Ezri Dax, a Vesta-class slipstream ship.
Conceived and named by author David Mack for the Relauch ‘Destiny’ novel trilogy, the Aventine was given form by digital artist Mark Rademaker, appearing first in the 2010 Starships calendar, and later made its appearance onscreen in Star Trek Online.
@virtualbri has mentioned that the vfx team for Picard had access to the STO renders but it wasn’t one of the ships that made leap to the show.
I still hope to see it onscreen one day. In the meantime, I am very glad to have been gifted one of the last of the Aventine models from Master Replicas.
https://modelermagic.com/aventine-vesta-class-starship-by-mark-rademaker/
Reality Rift, number 2 in the Dark Shepherd trilogy is now available for preorder from Newcon press.
If you enjoyed the first one I hope you enjoy Reality Rift as much as I enjoyed writing it.
And check out the website for a chance to own a Gambino original AW, a way to thank everyone who has supported me over the years.
#writing #SciFi #darkshepherd #spaceships #scifinovel
https://www.newconpress.co.uk/info/book.asp?id=272&referer=Catalogue
#bookwyrm 30 Day Book Challenge - Day 11 - Set Somewhere I'd like to Visit - A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers #beckychambers #foundfamily #scifibooks #cozybooks #aliens #spaceships #booktok #bookstagram #booksky #ttrpgpodcast #gamemastersbookclub https://www.k-squareproductions.com/gmbc
SHORTS 170: What Happens if you forget what the Outisde of Your Spaceship Looks LIke?
What Happens if you forget what the Outside of Your Spaceship Looks LIke? - From Into Your Head #podcast - IntoYourHead.ie #Podcasts #comedy #humour #PodcastClips #podcasters #podcasting #IntoYourHeadshorts #humor #funny #spaceships #generationship #StarTrek #scifi #startrekhumor #spacetravel #humour #SpaceshipPerspective #InsideOut #CosmicView #StarTrekHumour #SpaceTravel…
From shadows
And this is my scene based on Babylon 5. This is like Galaga or Galaxian of simple way of space simulation shooter. 8 bit only with simple 3d. So ships of – from shadows – are turning around. So slowly. And they confidence do turn around. Now they turn on their green lasers. And next purple lasers.
#space #shadows #mystery #galaxy #stars #spaceships #arcade #simulation #galaxian #scifi #coldstars #dark #darkspace #fromshadows
Book Review: Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark (1984)
4.5/5 (Very Good)
Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark (1984) is the final published volume of her Patternist sequence (1976-1984).1 It is the third novel according to the internal chronology of the series. Clay’s Ark is, without doubt, the most horrifyingly bleak science fiction novel I have ever read.2 It’s stark. It’s sinister. It’s at turns deeply affective before descending into extreme violence and displaced morality. The moral conundrum that underpins the central problem, the spread of an extraterrestrial disease, unfurls with an unnerving alien logic. Butler’s characters are trapped by the demands of the alien microbes, scarred by the pervasive sense that their humanity is slipping away, and consumed by the fear of starting an epidemic. A true confrontation of the moment cannot lead to anything other than suicide or the first steps towards an apocalyptic transformation.
Note: This novel is not for readers seeking happy adventure or diverting escapism. It is an absolute bludgeon of the novel with a litany of unsettling themes, power dynamics, and disturbing scenes (rape, incest, a beheading, etc.). I apologize for the short review. Despite my appreciation of Clay’s Ark in particular, I struggle to write about Butler’s work.3
As always, there are spoilers below.
The Geography of the Wreckage
California, 2021 A.D. Across an almost “primordial” desert a few scattered “communities were dead or dying” (18). A few foolish, and well-armed, souls brave the distances between urban “enclaves” in armored vehicles. In the cities, the enclaves are “islands” surrounded by “vast, crowded, vulnerable residential areas through which ran sewers of utter lawlessness” (32).
Blake Jason Maslin, a doctor of internal medicine, travels across the expanse with his twin sixteen-year-old daughters (Keira and Rane), both “naive, and sheltered” (32), on a final trip to see a relative. Keira suffers from an untreatable leukemia. She confides that she sees “herself fading away” (6). On the way they’re abducted by Eli, Meda, and their strange, unusually thin, ill-looking, followers. They take Blake and his daughters to an isolated homestead with gardens, solar panels, and strange children that seem to run on all four limbs. “Everybody here looks like me, sooner or later” Meda confesses (23). Under duress, Blake is paired off with Meda, who scratches his face. Rane with Eli. And Keira with Stephen Kaneshiro. The ritualized infection commences.
A few years earlier, an injured Eli, possessed by an extra-human will to survive, happened across the homestead and its original inhabitants, followers of an “angry God” (56). Despite comments about his race, they took him in and cared for him. We soon learn Eli, a geologist, was the sole survivor of a sabotaged spaceship, the titular Clay’s Ark. On their voyage, the crew encountered an alien pathogen that develops a parasitical relationship with those that survive the infection. In return for heightened senses, the infected must infect and impregnate others or bear offspring of the infected. After impregnating the three surviving women of the homestead, Eli plans his first abduction (101). He promises, as if to convince himself that he’s still a human with a moral code, to only spread the disease as much as necessary to satiate the new biological urge. He’ll gather his new “family” at the homestead. They’ll develop a strategy to convince the infected to stay. If someone escapes, the world will be transformed. But everyone knows that isolation will only last so long. Someone will escape.
Both the narrative of Blake and his family and Eli’s simultaneously map the new nature of the wreckage and presage the future apocalyptic transformation that looms.
New Families in the Wasteland
As academic study of Butler’s science fiction abounds, I will only briefly discuss an element that I personally found fascinating–in this instance the unnerving new sense of family and connection Eli and his followers create.4 Butler explains that the works in the Patternist sequence sought to write a good story about a “strange community of people.”5 Butler’s careful world building creates a pervasive sense of social and moral disconnect. The wealthy and privileged, like Blake and his children, rarely travel outside of their urban oasis. The world outside can barely be described as human: “what the rat packs did to each other and to unprotected city-dwellers was not something [Blake] wanted to expose his daughters to” (137). Thus, inside the oases they attempt to “recreate the safe world of […] sixty years past for [their] children” (32). Blake’s trip is an attempt to reaffirm the ties that bind: Keira’s illness, and the fear of imminent death, made her want to visit her grandparents “one last time” (4).
Eli’s arrival in the past at the homestead and his abduction of Blake and his children reveal the strange new family in the wasteland. These are connections formed by “guilt and grief” (87). These are connections compelled through violence and an alien biology. While the children of the infected appear inhuman, they are still children. These are connections welded by the desire to make some semblance of normality in the abnormality of it all. Even Gabriel Boyd, the patriarch of the religious community that took Eli in, must push away the knowledge that Eli caused the devastation, and begs him to take care of Meda, his daughter (85). Rane must confront her desire for Eli. Keira must confront her feelings for Stephen: “You’ve sacrificed my family to spare yours” (93), yet when he puts her arm around her, “she was surprised that the gesture did not offend her” (91). Both girls are underage. How much is the alien microbe responsible for their actions? Blake must juggle his parental responsibility to protect his children with the need to alert the world to the illness. And Keira, in the final calculus of it all, attempts to forge a connection. The effective rendering of the moral landscape, and its networks of power, of the new age is the novel’s most unsettling, and brilliant, element.
Final Thoughts
As with Mind of My Mind (1977), I found Butler’s brutal view of power–and its interplay with relationships, gender, and race–a heady mixture. Perhaps due to the vividly realized dystopian backdrop of the community surrounded by the dry desert air and looming hyper-violent doom, I struggled less with Butler’s deliberately stark, clipped, and direct prose than in the past. I even found a metaphor tucked in here and there that accentuated the horror of it all. Simultaneously, Butler’s use of the two parallel narratives creates a simple but effective way to reveal backstory and the horrifying dichotomy of Eli’s position as bringer of the plague and community builder.
Clay’s Ark (1984) supplants Mind of My Mind (1977) as my favorite in the Patternist sequence. I am including both Wild Seed (1980) and Patternmaster (1976) despite abandoning both (I’ll try one of them again next year). I even think Clay’s Ark challenges Kindred (1979), which I never managed to review, as my favorite Butler novel so far.6
If my earlier caveat did not scare you off, go find a copy.
Notes
For book reviews consult the INDEX
For cover art posts consult the INDEX
For TV and film reviews consult the INDEX
#1980s #bookReview #bookReviews #books #fiction #OctaviaEButler #paperbacks #sciFi #scienceFiction #spaceships
Lies, Inc.
https://library.hrmtc.com/2025/10/13/lies-inc/
#book #ColoniesSpatialesRomansNouvellesEtc #fiction #FictionFantasyContemporary #FictionLiterary #FictionScienceFictionGeneral #InterplanetaryVoyages #InterplanetaryVoyagesFiction #literaryFiction #philipKDick #review #ScienceFiction #ScienceFictionCrimeMystery #ScienceFictionShortStories #SpaceColonies #SpaceColoniesFiction #SpaceShips #SpaceShipsFiction #TPolyphilus #VaisseauxSpatiauxRomansNouvellesEtc #VoyagesInterplaneTairesRomansNouvellesEtc
// Trying to Make Spaceships Again
https://kaigulliksen.com/trying-to-make-spaceships-again/
If there is one thing I would love to do more of it’s modeling spaceships. But for whatever reason I find them to be incredibly difficult to do, which is why I mostly end up creating […]
#SpaceShips now.
close up on
HELIOSEV X from A-F INDUSTRIES
(chief executive idiot: me)
From SPACESHIPS VOL 1, the inaugural spaceship line.
An unusual ship inspired by retro rockets, sunrays and deep sea fish.
#art #ttrpg #spaceships
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:ymmxvxa2etxmgcfq3m3vvibd/post/3m2erk66uus2m
grotty scrungy sci fi spaceships! big ones, small ones, carriers, industrial and more! here's my art pack for ttrpgs, & some experiments I made with the artpack. There will be a sequel at some point! human made art, for human made games :-) 🚀📚🎨 carlydraws.itch.io #art #ttrpg #ttrpgart #spaceships
When Andrew Probert designed the new Enterprise-D for The Next Generation, he looked at real ships from different time periods to get an idea for how they changed in appearance as technology progressed.
And you can really see it when comparing the first Enterprise to the Enterprise-D, and looking at a battleship from 1906 and one from 1942.
I think the hull shape of the American Iowa class is very visible in the Galaxy class from Star Trek.
