ARTHUR'S PROMETHEUS AND THE OX WING

I was blown away by this cover art for Arthur C. Clarke's Prelude to Space from the 1950's. 

Just look at that ship! Its basically a set of super wings!

Don't know the artist but that huge jet-tipped hyper wing totally reminds me of the wings of our fave Century 21 space plane, the Zero-X!

Check it out! 

Below is Imai's plastic wing from their vintage OX Mars Explorer set. 

Its a dead-ringer! What do you think?

Clarke's amazing lunar plane is called Prometheus and predates the Apollo programme by over a decade. 

Prometheus is made up of two sections, Beta and Alpha, and flies to the moon and back in a certain way involving separation.

The novel, Clarke's first, written in 1947 and published 1951, concerns Dirk, a journalist for Interplanetary , who is sent to England and Australia because ...

 'The world's first lunar spacecraft is about to launch. The ship, Prometheus, is built from two separate components -- one designed to travel from Earth's atmosphere to the Moon and back, and the other to carry the first component through Earth's atmosphere and into orbit.'

Wiki describes the Prometheus' separation manoeuvre thus:

 'Beta is a nuclear-powered flying wing which carries Alpha into orbit .... Alpha separates from Beta' 

[above is an extract from a fuller description here]

This could almost be a description of the Zero-X uncoupling from its wing units in space, which we can clearly see in the movie Thunderbirds Are Go 

[courtesy of You Tube]!

Later editions of the book gave Prometheus a chromed finish 

but I still prefer the early cover art with the mega wing!

What about you?

Space Art: Michael Whittlesea

Well its good to be back at the helm and hopefully I can keep the blog rolling while Woodsy is on shore leave for a little while! The last time he had an extended leave of absence, I dropped a meteor on Moonbase and blew up the blog, but I promise not to do anything quite so dramatic this time. To start off, i'd like to revisit one of my favourite science fiction artists and also one of my favourite writers. Arthur C Clarke first came to my notice in the launch issue of Speed and Power magazine, a weekly aimed at boys and chock full of jets, cars, trains and all things powerful and speedy! It was a treasure trove of information, back in the seventies and each week, it included a short sci-fi story from Clarke, illustrated usually by an amazing artist, who was never credited in the issue. It was only very recently, by virtue of the all powerful internet, that I discovered Michael Whittlesea.

His bold, colourful illustrations complmented Clarkes stories wonderfully and drew me in to read every one, which for me was very unusual, as I was never fond of reading and very much taken by the visuals. Whittlesea's style was unusual in that it introduced a chunky, assymetrical style of ship, very much similar to the work of Chris Foss, famous for his Foundation and Lensman series of book covers.

The other attractive quality was the boldness of Whittlesea's line work, which was again very reminiscent of the style of Malcolm Stokes in the Project SWORD stories.

 As each story unfolded, it appeared that some of them were individual short stories, but it was later that I realised that some pieces were in fact discrete chapters from a larger work. The Journey to Jupiter sequence, was an adapted novella: 'Meeting with Medusa' which details the exploits of Howard Falcon, who journeys to the clouds of Jupiter following a life-changing accident on an airship.

 

Whittlesea captures the truly alien life amongst the clouds in glorious colour, showing the manta's and vast gas-filled medusan creature in beautiful detail.

 There is also a nice toy-like quality to the artwork, which at the time tied in nicely to my space toy collecting mania!