Tag Archives: Terminator

Tuesday Night Party Club #10

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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.

Other Newsletters

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!

Tuesday Night Party Club #9

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Artstuff

In the summer of 2010 John L. Bell emailed to ask if I would be available to do illustrations for the next issue of Oziana. I enjoyed working on the 2006 issue and happily said yes. Above are the covers by Charnelle Pinkney (2009) and Tim McGloughlin (2010). This was a double issue of the magazine, produced in flipbook style, combining both the 2009 and 2010 editions. My illustrations seasoned the story “Invisible Fence” by John L. Bell. We’d originally planned for me to do more illustrations but 2010 turned out to be chaotic – I was laid off from my day job and went back to school for “retraining” as a computer programmer. That left me with less time than expected. Deadlines loomed. Fortunately, John was able to rearrange the issue’s layout so the illustrations spread out evenly and cut down on printing costs. A review of the story can be found on Eric Gjovaag’s Wonderful Blog of Oz.

Story Seed #33 

A sequel needn’t be a rerun: Alien 2

My previous story seeds featured story ideas that, basically, I’m giving away. If someone is inspired to grow a story from them they are wellcome to do so. No need to get my permission.

Using the ideas I’ll be mentioning in the next few weeks would require someone to get permission from the corporations that own the movies in question. The intellectual properties involved are not in public domain. All of these films have already had successful sequels. But part of the fun of having ideas is sharing them so …

Sequel (definition grabbed from Lexico): A published, broadcast, or recorded work that continues the story or develops the theme of an earlier one.

Alien. Terminator. Blade Runner. All three of these science fiction films had sequels. The sequels didn’t come immediately. They came years, even decades later. I enjoyed all the sequels as much, if not more, than the originals. That’s pretty rare. Most sequels are pale shadows of the originals. So my sequel ideas are suggestions, not of better stories, but of different directions the “franchises” could have taken.

Alien was released in 1979. It was the first released of the films I’m “sequeling” so I’ll write about it this week. It tells the story of the crew of the spaceship Nostromo, who are required to investigate a distress signal on an unknown world. They find an ancient spacecraft and pick up a deadly hitchhiker.

A sequel to Alien, Aliens was released seven years later. Ripley, the lone survivor of the Nostromo, accompanies a group of marines back to the planet of the alien ship and they must combat a nest of xenomorphs to escape. Like many sequels Aliens cements the pattern of the rest of the franchise. For Alien it’s humans vs. xenomorphs with a seasoning of corporate manipulation and evil. By focusing on the xenomorph, every Alien installment is a bug hunt. Part of what makes Alien such a great science fiction movie is that it suggests a much bigger world outside the confines of the story of the film. Space travel is common and a regular part of life. It’s not fast but it’s predictable. Android technology is good enough that human beings won’t be able to tell the difference between an android and another human. Extraterrestrial life has been encountered before. It’s not clear if humanity has met living extraterrestrial civilizations but the Nostromo’s crew doesn’t react as if evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations has never been found before.

Imagine if, in Alien 2, the story expanded out. Word of the space jockey’s ship has gotten out, either leaked by someone at Weyland-Yutani or because Ripley was found and told her story. Multiple expeditions have come to investigate the ship – a team from W-Y intent on officially staking their claim, a team from a rival corporation, and a contingent of military from a government enforcement arm. The jockey’s ship is ancient but it’s not dead and it contains more wonders and horrors than clutches of xenomorph eggs.

By focusing on the mysteries of the ship and the interaction between different human factions, Alien 2 could depict more of the big complicated universe suggested in Alien. The W-Y team would have more knowledge of the ship and the xenomorphs than the other teams. W-Y directed the Nostromo to the planet with the intention that it bring back a xenomorph or two, so clearly some other humans had found the ship in the past. Unfortunately (for them at least) their focus on the xenomorph will make them unprepared for other dangers and wonders presented by the ship.

H.R. Giger‘s designs for the xenomorph, the space jockey and the ship are some of the most alien looking depictions of extraterrestials to appear in the movies. Later designers were able to duplicate and extrapolate from those designs but no one surpassed them. They suggest completely non-terran biologies and non-human technologies. Why was the ship carrying all those xenomorph eggs? Where was it going? Are they weapons? Tools? A slave race? Lunch? The space jockey appears to have been killed by a birthing xenomorph. What went wrong?

If the xenomorphs are weapons, who or what were they meant to used against? Other space jockeys? Another alien race?

Does the space jockey’s civilization still exist? Have they advanced? Decayed?

The franchise did try to answer some of those questions in Prometheus, but by that time the xenomorph had become the toothy face of the series. It was too late to redirect the focus and, honestly, the answers the film presented were both uninteresting and didn’t make a lot of sense. The space jockey became just another humanoid ET who committed the ordinary human sin of creating the thing that would destroy it. More imagination was needed. Writers and designers who could think in cosmic terms should have been employed.

Imagine what the Alien franchise could have been if the alien xenomorph had been downplayed in the sequel and the focus had been on the alien space jockey and its alien ship instead. What wonders and terrors could we have experienced?

Other Newsletters

Technocult News by “Damien” focuses a lot on technology and, especially, how human prejudices and cultural blinders are incorporated into that technology. Damien gives me a regular reminder that technology is a created thing and its human creators build in flaws and dangers without realizing it. Our assumptions limit our thinking. Technology will always be used in ways we don’t consider so more consideration and inclusion of diverse designers and users when creating technology is ideal.

Lifestuff

A couple of weeks back my brother, Glenn, sent me a link to the proposed 42 words anthology. This week, instead of writing about my life like a good newsletterer, I wrote and submitted a story. It was an interesting exercise. First I wrote the shortest story I could think of based on my basic idea. Then I revised. And revised. The story had to be exactly 42 words. This paragraph is 74 words.

If the story gets accepted I’ll post about it. If it doesn’t I’ll post the story. I don’t have a time frame for either. After I submitted my entry I paid a little more attention to the rest of the blog and realized that submissions were first announced in July of 2018. As of February 8th they have accepted 483 stories. They are wanting 1764 stories. Only 1281 to go.

They’re accepting up to four stories per author. I may submit more. If you want to give writing a short short story a try, please do!

That’s if for this week. Enjoy each moment. If that’s not possible, enjoy as many moments as you can.