Excited by finishing my scratch LAMAs I thought I'd look at it's first appearance [as far as I know] on the cover of the Sixties edition of Eric Frank Russell's novel Sinister Barrier.
The cover art is by that bastion of SWORD and SpaceX inspirations, the late great Ed Valigursky.
I really like Ed's cover LAMA. I've no idea if such a cosmic canon appears in the story but I think Ed's looks better than the SpaceX toy.
The light blue body, the more electrode-like black turret and the red checked rear end, reminiscent of the red check nacelle tops on the SpaceX toy ATS, all make for a really appealing vehicle. Why did Tria-ang choose metallic red instead?
The pilot is prominent too, which is less so on the toy I feel, although I have only ever seen photographs and not the actual toy!
It's probably just my poor eyesight. As a result I didn't put much effort into a pilot figure at all in the two LAMA's I scratchbuilt. Just a white pin head in the green one! Lazy!
Interestingly Sinister barrier, the title of the book, is taken from an excellently-written passage within it:
The scale of electro-magnetic vibrations extends over sixty octaves, of which the human eye can see but one. Beyond that sinister barrier of our limitations, outside that poor, ineffective range of vision, bossing every man jack of us from the cradle to the grave, invisibly preying on us as ruthlessly as any parasite, are our malicious, all-powerful lords and masters – the creatures who really own the Earth!
There must be some sort of canon in the story as this different - almost telephone speaker -like one appears on this particular cover. Has anyone read the book? Can you shed light on the meaning of the canons?
Although the above cover wasn't one of Ed Valigursky's he did paint more space canons.
Here's another one of Ed's, the turret of a sort of hover tank on the cover of Philip K. Dick's Clans of the Alphane Moon.
What do you think of this vehicle?
I can't think of any other cosmic canon-type toys from my generation. The exception was of course the Firebolt Laser Canon, which was one of the main vehicles of the Major Matt Mason toy fleet. I adored my canon as a kid and can recall vividly inserting Captain Laser's solid feet into its slots.
LP made a miniature version of the Firebolt. It was released as part of Imperial Toys' 1970 Apollo Moon Exploring carded series. A lot less detailed than Triang's LAMA, it is possibly on the same toy scale. It would be interesting to see the two canons together of anyone has both!
Here's LP's cool mini canon on its own as photographed on the blog by Scoop in 2012.
Can you think of more space canons or laser canons readers?
