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My #scifiDNA What’s yours?
Cover of Perry Rhodan #134.
A "Posbi" (a slightly goofy looking alien robot) mistakes a human for a damaged robot and is about to cut him open for some repairs.
Commander Ed Straker talking to lieutenant Gay Ellis during his visit to the SHADOW moonbase in the British TV show UFO.
Cover of a German translation of Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon".
The Enterprise entering orbit around M-113
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Cover of The World of Star Trek, by David Gerrold
Cover of the Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction
Thunderbird 1 landing
Cover of the TTA book Spacecraft 2000-2100
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@fulminata @nyrath The TTA series... legendary. Hit me the same time as Traveller... that version right there. A masterclass in it's graphic design.
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@nyrath
I hoped to find a full list of genuinely early stuff (pre-1980s, or at least me <10), but those memories have faded too much.
The Cygnus, from the 1979 film "The Black Hole." We didn't see this theaters, but on this new-fangled thing called "cable television" sometime in the early 80s.
Still from 1982's "Blade Runner" of a spinner car flying through L.A. skycrapers. I would've been eight when I was dragged to this. Didn't understand a bit of it, but it sure left an impression.
Macross and Genesis Climber Mospeada, seen as localized "Robotech" in 1986.
The Southern Cross chapter was so wildly unpopular I never actually saw it aired on US broadcast TV... I didn't see so much as a second of it until they released the series on DVD in the early 2000s.
Star Trek TOS, which my father watched every night in syndication reruns.
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Cover of japanese comic BLAME! A pale man in black clothes stands in front of a white background holding a gun.
Cover of Charles Sheffield's book The Ganymede Club.
Ghost in the shell movie poster. A woman holding a gun and wearing sun glasses is connected to a bunch of wires.
The Matrix poster. The poster has Neo, Trinity, Orpheus and one other guy.
The original Gundam standing with his sword drawn and shield held forward.
Halo ODST marine. A futuristic solider standing in front of a rainy ruined city
Poster for Terminator 2 movie poster.
Charlie Stross's book Accelerando
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@nyrath There are so many different ways to tackle answering this question. Movies? TV Shows? Comic books? Formative books? IPs? Versions I owned or consumed? Current versions of those things? Here is one way for me to answer what my #scifiDNA is -- these are the editions I first encountered of these products, although in three cases I was already familiar with the source material from other media ;):
The box cover of the 2nd edition of FASA's Doctor Who roleplaying game -- A painting of a rocky arch with vague mist coming out of it frames the figures of the 4th Doctor, turned slightly away and looking back at the viewer, and his companion Romana, in a cautious crouched pose with a prominent knife. Above them, a red and yellow rendition of one of the classic Doctor Who logos (I think the 5th Doctor, but I'm not sure). Above the logo is yellow text just saying 'The' and below more yellow text saying 'Role Playing Game'. Along the bottom of the box is more yellow text reading 'A game for 3 or more players, age 12 and up'. In the lower right corner is a yellow FASA logo.
A photo of the three well-used rulebooks of classic traveller on a table, fanned out in a spread, partially on top of one another, on a dark surface, with a ruler or meter stick under them to the left showing scale. The books are flat black, with a red line partially across the cover at about 1/3 up from the bottom, with the word 'Traveller' in large red text right justified with that line. Immediately below the word 'Traveller', in smaller white text, are the words 'Science-Fiction Adventure in the Far Future'. Above the red line, left justified, is medium-sized white text which identifies each volume: 'Book 1 Characters and Combat', 'Book 2 Starships', and 'Book 3 Worlds and Adventures'.
The cover to the first edition of West End Games Star Wars role playing game. The picture is a painting with Luke centered, holding a blaster pointed directly at the viewer, at whom he is also looking directly. To his left (our right) and slightly behind is Leia, shooting a blaster off to the right of the picture. To Luke's right, our left, and also behind and a little lower is Han, likewise shooting a blaster off to our left. Below Han's blaster are the heads of Kenobi and Grand Moff Tarkin. Below Leia is Chewbacca. Behind the central figures are primarily blue and red images of X-Wings, Tie Fighters, the Death Star, and other familiar ships fighting. Above and behind Luke and Leia is a dim image of Darth Vader, holding up a red lightsaber, his gripping hand between Luke and Han, and the blade extending up and do our left, off the top of the image. Across the top of the image is a solid red band interrupted. with the Star Wars logo in solid white. In the right hand portion of the red band is yellow text saying 'The Roleplaying Game'. At the bottom left is a flat yellow version of the West End Games logo.
The cover of the box of the FASA Star Trek RPG from the mid-90s -- specifically the 2nd edition cover. It's a color painting of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy with phasers drawn, cut off at the knees by the bottom of the cover. Behind them is a colorful nebula in reds and blues, and over their heads and far behind them is the class TV show Enterprise flying up and to the right, with trails of light coming off it's nacelles and lower hull. At the top, in bold white text in the same font as the show, are the words 'Star Trek', with the sub-heading in smaller type saying 'The Role Playing Game'. In the lower left corner is a small white FASA logo.
The box art of David Braben's 1993 video game Frontier: Elite 2.
The cover of R. Talsorian Games's 1990 tabletop role-playing game Cyberpunk 2020.
The box art of Games Workshop's 1991 6mm miniature wargame Space Marine.
Nichelle Nichols, DeForest Kelley, Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner in Star Trek: The Original Series.
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@nyrath Here’s mine. Neuromancer comes in there too, along with Blakes7 and Star Wars. The covers are the ones I first encountered.
The cover of CJ Cherryh’s “Downbelow Station” with the name and title set in silver. The image shows a shuttle powering into the open mouth of a space station docking port with a cloudy planet below. Across the bottom right is a red ribbon with white text that says “Winner of the HUGO AWARD”.
Paperback cover of Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation”, published by Panther. Black cover with a red jelly like abstract image below.
Cover of the Pan paperback edition of Arthur C Clarke’s “Rendezvous with Rama”. There’s a tag line of “His first SF masterpiece since 2001: A Space Odyssey”. His name is in strong white capitalised text, with the title below it the same but in orange. A silver yellow swirl is set below against a black background, an abstract image of Rama.
The cover of the Magnet paperback of Andre Norton’s “Postmarked the Stars”. The image shows a frozen tracker crawler with bird-like creatures circling above while an environment suited person examines the vehicle. Above, another planet shows.
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screen grab from the anime Patlabor, with a mech pilot standing in a control room full of seagulls
screen grab of an ending cutscene from the 1999 game Homeworld
screen grab from Stark Tek TNG, with characters at a poker table
jet fighter illustration from the anime Sentou Yousei Yukikaze
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@nyrath Here's some tougher ones from my childhood. They all have something in common.
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@johnhattan
#1 looks like something from Tron,
Pretty sure #2 is USS Palomino from The Black Hole
#3 is the dirigible from Island on Top of the World
#4 is a UFO from Return From Witch Mountain
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@nyrath you got 'em.
The Tron-thing was a "gridbug", and the Zeppelin was the Hyperion.
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@johnhattan
Obscure is my fondness for Space Angel by Alex Toth.
To this day that's what I think the interior od a spaceship should look like
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@nyrath My reaction to Space Angel, then and now, was "The guy who draws the backgrounds is really good. He should work on a far less terrible cartoon".
Same reaction as I have to the "Cerebus" comic :)
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I am pretty sure Alex Toth did the foreground characters as well. So you think they should have gotten another artist to do the characters.
For the record, Alex Toth did designs for Jonny Quest and his work included Super Friends, Fantastic Four, Space Ghost, Sealab 2020, The Herculoids and Birdman.
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@nyrath I don't think it was too big an ask to have foreground characters that actually moved.
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@johnhattan
Oh, that was not Toth's fault. The director was using the magic of Synchro-vox™ to drastically cut production costs. The only things that moved were static cut out drawings moved over the background, and the character's lips. Looked like crap but boy was it cheap!
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@nyrath @johnhattan My obscure SF "thing" is Odyssey magazine and especially its comic The Adventures of Ulysses. I've mentioned that comic before, and still have found extremely little info.
But let me share my favorite cover of Odyssey magazine. Look at this robot inspired by Pioneer/Voyager! It's incredible!
a somewhat mouse-like robot flying in space over Io. It has a Pioneer/Voyager style radio dish as its chest, with two robot arms and three robot lander legs.
An episode of The Adventures of Ulysses, a black and white comic with fine inked lines. The panels depict Ulysses, a robot, interacting with some other robots.
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@isaackuo @johnhattan
My obscure SF "thing" is an animated cartoon called Mr. E from Tau Ceti. Very few have heard of it, but I remember watching it on TV back in the 1960s
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@nyrath @johnhattan Nice!
I'm randomly reminded of a possibly obscure SF movie that I saw part of on TV and have never been able to identify. The main characters were walking around in a desert; I think the Earth was moving toward the sun. Anyway, they found an underground human settlement ruled by an evil overlord who castrated all the other male inhabitants, including his own sons, and was going to do that to the main male character.
The other inhabitants gave him a gun to fight with ...
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@isaackuo @nyrath
Coincidentally just a few posts up in my timeline:
https://toot.community/@openculture/114180022351233745
Coincidentally just a few posts up in my timeline:
https://toot.community/@openculture/114180022351233745
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@nyrath mine is:
* Star Trek
* Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers (all one and the same to my preteen mind)
* The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (radio)
* Traveller and Ogre
* But most importantly, the novels by Frank Herbert, Arthur C. Clarke and Poul Anderson
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Box art for PC game MechWarrior 2
Screencap from The Matrix featuring Neo and Trinity in the lobby
Book cover of Timothy Zahn's Star Wars: Heir to the Empire
Image of some of the mechs from the Robotech anime
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Lorraine Baines from Back to the Future, sitting in her bedroom
A few hunters standing on a levitated metal walkway, confronted by a menacing T-Rex. Illustration of a scene from A Sound of Thunder.
A nightmare of Sarah Connor, holding onto a chain link fence while a nuclear blast turns her into an exploding skeleton.
Adric with the 5th Doctor and a Cyberman, from Earthshock
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@isaackuo
Interesting!
illustration by Franz Altschuler for Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" which was featured in the June 1956 edition of Playboy. I'll have to look up Mr. Altschuler, I like his style.
I of course instantly recognized "A Sound of Thunder". It has been in a zillion magazines, and *all* of them have illos containing
[1] a magic levitating walk way
[2] a T-rex
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@nyrath The specific version of "A Sound of Thunder" I first experienced was from the radio adaption in Bradbury 13 in 1983.
But I wasn't satisfied with the Bradbury 13 cover art, so I went with a random illustration of that story (the one which featured time travel).
The levitating metal walk way, of course, is the feature which positively identifies which story the illustration is about.
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@isaackuo double-positive identification if there is a levitating walk way AND a stepped-on butterfly in the illustration
I remember seeing an illo featuring a butterfly in a footprint inset in the lower right corner
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@nyrath By my time, some illustrations were only of the smashed butterfly.
Seems like a pretty insignificant detail of the story, though. I mean, it's pretty implausible for the result of a POTUS election going the other way could be THAT bad, could it? What a quaint and utterly irrelevant fantastical thought.
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@nyrath
As I got older, I got into Alien Nation, Babylon-5, Dark Skies, Doctor Who, Earth 2, Earth Final Conflict, Farscape, First Wave, Andromeda, MANTIS, SeaQuest, Sliders, Space Precinct, Stargate SG-1 & Atlantis, The Sentinel, The X-Files & Millennium & The Lone Gunmen, Quantum Leap, Red Dwarf, and many more to include any horror/supernatural shows.
However, my #SciFiDNA is...
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@Karma_J
I did have a fondness for the old monochrome Outer Limits, because it would occasionally have spaceships. Not so much twilight zone.
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Cover of "Red Planet" by Robert A. Heinlein
"A Colonial Boy On Mars" at the bottom.
All in shades of red. At left, a human wearing a bulbous mask and wearing a pistol holds a spherical animal with three eyes in a triangle. Leafy planets surround them on the top, right, and bottom.
Cover of "Star Surgeon" by Alan E. Nourse.
A caduceus separates "Star" from "Surgeon."
Against a background of a spiral galaxy, a starship heads towards the lower right corner with a large fiery plume behind it.
The cover of Ruthven Todd's Space Cat, in which the eponymous cat bounds along the moon in a tomato worm spacesuit with a stylized starry sky behind him.
Illustrated by Paul Galdone
Cover of "Islands In The Sky" by Arthur C. Clarke
"A Science Fiction Novel" at the bottom.
A circular space station at the upper left with a small space capsule in the background. An arc of Earth in the lower left corner.
In the right bottom foreground a man wears a headset in a space suit with a tubular bottom instead of legs. He holds a red line connecting him to someone in a similar space suit between the station and the Earth.
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@cptbutton
I did like some Alan E. Nourse and Space Cat.
But the scifi books in my DNA are more E. E. "Doc" Smith, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Andre Norton.
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@nyrath
If we stick to radio/TV.
BBC WORD FOR WORD cover art
COMPLETE AND UNABRIDGED
DOUGLAS ADAMS
THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
Cover art has clips of the covers from books in the series with a purple arrow pointing at it. An old ring pull tab, a picture of the earth from space, the cover of the first edition of the book, a walrus, and the neon sign from the cover of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
Blake’s 7 intro logo against a space background with 5 planets.
Space:1999 intro showing the Eagle Transporter over the moon with the gibbous earth in the background.
Star Trek The original series crew picture against a blue background that fades from dark black on the left to light blue on the right.
Uhuru and Bones are standing behind Spock and Kirk who appear to be sitting in the foreground on the right of the picture.
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@nyrath
Fun topic. Also Arthur C. Clarke, Robotech, Lost in Space, and many others.
Cover of Asimov's Foundation showing Harry Seldom in front of a futuristic cityscape.
Cover of Larry Novel's Tales of Known Space with a picture of the Galaxy.
View from the cockpit of the Falcon, jumping to hyperspace.
Starship Enterprise firing phasers.
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A garish very late-70s, early 80s styled cover for Jeff Rovin's The Transgalactic Guide to Solar System M-17. A prism-shaped chrome space shuttle is above an orange planet, headed for a space liner shaped like a swan. 100% sure this obscure item launched my to-this-day obsession with world-building. Read it until it literally fell apart.
The classic 1958 cover to Have Space Suit -- Will Travel with the protagonist traipsing across a yellow lunar plain in a (would you look at that) red and black tomato worm spacesuit, as drawn by Ed Emshwiller. I never noticed before how similar it is to the Space Cat cover....
The cover of Ruthven Todd's Space Cat, in which the eponymous cat bounds along the moon in a tomato worm spacesuit with a stylized starry sky behind him.
Spooky stylized cover of the 1970 edition of John Christopher's The White Mountains my school library had when I discovered it about 10 years later. I've long forgotten if this or the contemporary Boys Life serialized comic of the trilogy started me on this one.
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@nyrath
I didn't have TV past when I was very young but on ABC radio as part of the Argonauts kids show had a serial that involved a Scottish kid being picked up by aliens and returned several centuries later in the then current time (1960's).
Look and Learn ran the Trigan Empire comic strip .
Mike Steele, Desert Rider had SF elements including a story line where aliens transformed them into "diskmen".
Biggles had at least one SFesque adventure.
Simon Black had Simon Black in Space.
And of course I followed the space race and watched the moon landing on a TV at school.
When I was very young (before grade 4) I remember Supercar and The Jetsons on TV.
Dad had some Argosy magazines where I read A Slight Case of Sunstroke by A.C.Clarke.
In high school, having read Run Silent, Run Deep, I went looking for more submarine stories and found The Dragon In the Sea.
Finally in about 1971 or 1972 I read The X Factor by Andre Norton and SF was revealed to me.
I didn't have TV past when I was very young but on ABC radio as part of the Argonauts kids show had a serial that involved a Scottish kid being picked up by aliens and returned several centuries later in the then current time (1960's).
Look and Learn ran the Trigan Empire comic strip .
Mike Steele, Desert Rider had SF elements including a story line where aliens transformed them into "diskmen".
Biggles had at least one SFesque adventure.
Simon Black had Simon Black in Space.
And of course I followed the space race and watched the moon landing on a TV at school.
When I was very young (before grade 4) I remember Supercar and The Jetsons on TV.
Dad had some Argosy magazines where I read A Slight Case of Sunstroke by A.C.Clarke.
In high school, having read Run Silent, Run Deep, I went looking for more submarine stories and found The Dragon In the Sea.
Finally in about 1971 or 1972 I read The X Factor by Andre Norton and SF was revealed to me.
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A copy of Chronicles of the Lensman Volume 1, its cover in colors like a fire or a sunset, with a somewhat abstract space station front and center.
The cast of Stargate: SG-1 in their green field uniforms.
The cast of Star Trek: Voyager.
The 5 main pilots from Gundam Wing, with a split image showing each of their war machines.
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@Lironah
Oh, yes! I encountered the Lensman series in the golden age of science fiction (i.e., when I was 12 years old). For years I thought it was the pinnacle of scifi.
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@nyrath My first exposure was via the anime adaptation of it, which was NOT the same story but had some very interesting characters.
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@nyrath That's such a hard question as there are so many overlaps. But if I have to be totally honest with myself...
A 𑐴𑐶𑐟𑐶 (hiti) is an ancient Newah urban water feature: a stepped, sunken courtyard with waterspouts and a central pool. These are fed through a remarkable network of pipes, reservoirs, and irrigation systems drawing water from mountain springs dozens of kilometres away. Every day, hundreds of people from the neighbourhood come to draw water, bathe, and exchange news. They are a unique and precious feature of Newa urban architecture through which neighbourhoods are created.
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