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LEXLOTHOR — Ad Astra
Published: 2008-11-06 04:45:21 +0000 UTC; Views: 1047; Favourites: 16; Downloads: 19
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Description
The Motto of the Royal Air Force is "Per Ardua Ad Astra" (With Difficulty to the Stars) derived from an ancient Latin source. This was sort of a recruiting poster for a space force of the future. The spaceship designs are based on Paleolithic spear points. It links the past with the future.This is a hand colored photocopy of a pen and ink work I did in 1983.
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Comments: 8
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I certainly understand that confidence in the future potential of space travel was quite high in those days...unmanned missions are still producing results that astound me, not the least of which would be the Mars landing.
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Wasn't there also a P-51B fighter with that title? I forget the pilot's name, but I'm fairly sure he made ace at least.
As for that incomplete work...good lord. All that effort to discover someone else has run through the same ground (much less the plagarism issue)? That would have put me in quite a mood.
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If so, the name can either be traced to Roosevelt's speech or the Hilton novel.
It was a exercise in learning how to write coherently and cohesivly. I would never dust this thing off and try to sell it. I've moved on. Besides, the novel is about a manned mission to Mars set in the 1981 Hohmann transfer launch opportunity. It may be hard for you to appreciate this, but during the Apollo Era, serious people from Werner Von Braun on down expected to see footprints on Mars by the 1980's!
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Amen to that, and pardon my baseless pop-culture comparison; the piece's date of completion threw me off. For the record, "Shangri-la" is a far more elegant (not to mention less cliched) flagship name.
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When I was in highschool I wrote about five hundred pages of a science fiction novel that was very derivative of "2001: a Space Odyssey". Before I could finish it, my brother brought home from the public library a new novel that plot point for plot point was identical to my own soon to be abandoned work. What this meant was that the author of the book was stealing the same ideas that I was stealing. I had an excuse. I was 14 at the time!
"Shangri-La" was the actual name of a WWII US Navy aircraft carrier. Immediately after the 1942 Doolittle Raid on Tokyo which was launched from the USS Hornet, President Roosevelt claimed that the bombers had come from America's "secret base in Shagri La". The name comes from the mythical Himilayan land in James Hilton's novel "Lost Horizon". Hilton was not pleased when a warship was later named after his eutopian society.
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Plenty of interesting elements here....those ship designs actually seem like they could feasibly transition between vacuum and atmosphere, and the spit-shined surfaces of spacecraft and suit alike, combined with the pilot's fresh-faced, rosy-cheeked visage, do indeed convey that recruitment-poster aspect. I'm especially impressed by the intricacy of the foreground gas-giant and helmet alike.
As for that suit...where to begin? That angular chest-piece is equally reminiscent of Darth Vader & Battlestar Galactica's Cylons (especially that grille), while the secondary helm's combination of rounded surfaces forms a fine contrast. The dual row of battery-esque cells (lights?) set into the helm's top is fairly neat.
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This suit design of mine goes back to 1974, three years BEFORE Star Wars. That year I drew a storyboard in pencil for a comic series which had the following plot elements: an alien race devastates the Solar System in a surprise attack on the Earth's space fleet. The forces of Earth scrape together a ragtag fleet of ships around a single surviving spacecraft carrier named the "Shangri-La". DOES THIS SOUND FAMILIAR? I called MY version of this story "Task Force One". Glenn Larsen called HIS version "Battlestar Galactica"! My jaw hit the floor when the theatrical version of BSG was released in 1978!
I still have my original dated drafts to prove I thought up practically the same story years before Larsen invented Mormon science fiction.
This is not a case of great minds thinking alike. It is only proof that a Hollywood producer is no more creative than a 17 year old highschool student!
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