Artstuff

My big project, at least for the first half of 2020, will be finishing the illustrations for The Lovecraft Country Holidays Collection. It’s an anthology of role-playing game scenarios written by Oscar Rios featuring a sextet of adolescent cousins living in (H.P.) Lovecraft Country i.e. legend haunted parts of New England featured in the Cthulhu Mythos. The project was successfully kickstarted in the fall of 2019 and I’ve been working images ever since.

Before it could run on Kickstarter, we needed promo art – a cover illustration and four interior illustrations. I did the cover first. Mark Shireman worked his design magic to create two great book covers. Above is the cover for the RPG collection. Golden Goblin’s publishing strategy is to publish fiction companions to go with its RPG collections. Below is the cover for the fiction collection. For the fun of it I’d done a monotone version of the cover illustration in the style of “olde tyme” photographs. Mark and Oscar went with it for the fiction anthology.
I like seeing process videos by other artists as they produce their work. I don’t yet have the ability to make an actual video of my work process but I thought it would be fun to put together a gif of some of the stages in making this illustration. The results are below.

Story Seed #34

A sequel needn’t be a rerun: Terminator

The Terminator was released was released in 1984. It tells the story of Sarah Connor, a woman who is destined to give birth to John Connor, the savior of humanity. A Terminator has been sent back from the future to kill her and prevent that birth. A soldier from that future has followed the Terminator in order to save Sarah.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day arrived in 1991. John Connor is 10 years old. Another, more advanced, Terminator has been sent back from the future to kill him. A reprogrammed Schwartzenegger style Terminator is sent back to stop save him. This film cements the pattern for the franchise – a killer robot time travels back from the future to kill a crucial human and someone else time travels back to stop it from succeeding.

One of the things I liked about The Terminator is that the time travel element is a closed loop. Skynet, the future computer system running the Terminators and other machines, has been defeated. It sends the Terminator back as a last ditch effort to save itself. Ultimately its effort to destroy John Connor ends up creating him. Time paradoxes are minimal. History is not rewritten.

Most of the Terminator sequels follow this formula – a Terminator comes back from the future to kill someone and someone else follows the Terminator to prevent it from carrying out its mission. The more times this formula is repeated, the more the flaws show. Both Skynet nor the human rebels act defensively. Skynet could simply send a Terminator back to establish itself sooner, to unlease a plague to wipe out humanity, or otherwise start its war before humanity has a defense. Killing single humans is inefficient. One would think an AI would have more imagination than that. Conversely, the future humans could send back agents with better operating systems to give Skynet a benevolent focus rather than a genocidal one. If they can reprogram Terminators they can reprogram Skynet, especially if they do it before Skynet launches.

To me, all the back-from-the-future stuff gets tiresome. If the future is not set, neither is the present. Skynet and the humans can keep creating new timelines but the conflict never really gets resolved. So, consider a sequel to The Terminator that doesn’t feature time travel.

Terminators takes place in 1997. John Connor is twelve years old. Unlike the John in T2 this John is a true believer. Sarah has taught him well. He’s well trained, he’s charismatic, he’s ready to be the savior of humanity. He’s ready enough that he wonders if it’s possible to stop Judgment Day. Kyle Reese told Sarah that Skynet would launch its attach on August 29, 1997. Sarah tries to convince him that the future is set. Trying to stop Judgment Day is pointless. John created himself by sending Reese back to save her.

John convinces Sarah to try. John and Sarah research Cyberdine, the corporation behind Skynet. They hack into its systems and discover that Cyberdine has already created Terminators by reverse engineering the model that tried to kill Sarah back in 1984. John insists that if Terminators already exist then the future is not certain and it might be possible to prevent Judgment Day. When Sarah remains unsure John sets out to take down Cyberdine on his own. Sarah pursues him.

From there? Well, this is a story seed, not a plot diagram. Perhaps the new Terminators have a plan to wipe out humanity in a less infrastructurally destructive way than a thermonuclear war. Perhaps the new Terminators are simply tools of the Cyberdine corporation and Cyberdine has its own plans for world domination. Perhaps John has been trained too ruthlessly by Sarah and is sort of a human terminator, willing to kill anyone who gets between him and his objectives. Sarah must deal with the human monster she has created. Perhaps Judgment Day is prevented. Perhaps it happens anyway.

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Karavansara is the website of Davide Mana. Mana is a working writer (that is, he pays his bills with his writings) living in Italy. He writes in both English and Italian in a variety of genres. He also blogs about his projects, movies he’s watched, books he’s read, odd bits of history and politics, and many other fascinating things on a daily basis. He’s currently in a part of Italy that’s under quarantine for the Corona virus. Yuck.

If his blogging entertains you I’m sure he’d appreciate you supporting him via his Patreon.

Lifestuff

And speaking of the Corona virus – it mostly exists as background noise in my world. I’m not downplaying it and I’m not ignoring it. I live in Seattle. There are outbreaks and deaths as a result of the disease but no one I know has been infected. I’ve had to work more overtime that I planned because more carriers that usual have been calling in sick. Staying home when sick is more encouraged than usual. Most of our work is done solo but we are all in one place when we’re putting our routes together in the morning.

Whether or not I’m scared or cautious of danger depends on my statistical awareness of that danger. I spend a lot of time driving. I’m more likely to be in an auto accident than to catch Corona. I walk a lot. I’m more likely to be bitten by a dog than catch Corona. People who are elderly or have weak immune systems are in danger of infection from just about everything. I’m basically healthy.

So far. So good.

May you stay healthy. Take care of yourself and look after your friends. See you next week!