Exo Zone

Figure 1. Into the Exo Zone.

Here in this blog post I'm going to take a rather random walk through science fiction of the year 1958. That was the year when a song called "The Purple People Eater" was on the radio. I have no idea if Sheb Wooley was a fan of science fiction or if he simply stumbled onto a way to make a buck off of the growing popularity of science fiction. 

Just for fun, I tried to get Wombo Dream to make an image depicting a one-eyed purple flying alien that could play music with the horn on its head (see the image to the right).

"The Purple People Eater" song was included in the 1997 movie Contact, which was inspired by Carl Sagan's Novel Contact. Soon after a radio message from deep space is discovered, thousands of excited space enthusiasts flock to New Mexico and the radio astronomy facility which first detected the alien signal. In a light-hearted moment, "The Purple People Eater" is played in the movie sound track.

Published in 1958. Click image to enlarge.

 The Origin. I came into existence in the year 1958. In the June 1958 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,  there was a poem by Karen Anderson called "Origin of the Species". Darwin's On the Origin of Species had been published a hundred years earlier.

 Where do we come from? For stories set in the Exodemic Fictional Universe, I often try to imagine how genes originating from distant planets might have been brought to Earth and inserted into Earthlings. Karen Anderson went as for as to imagine that cats had an extra-terrestrial origin. I'd like to know more about the aliens with tentacles, or something. There are more cats near the end of this blog post.

Plying in the Animal League.

 Extra-terrestrial sports. In that June 1958 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, a book called "The Great All-Star Animal League Ball Game" that had been published by Vincent Starrett was reviewed by Anthony Boucher. Last year, I tried to find and read every science fiction story about baseball, but I missed this one by Starrett. I was named after my uncle, in the hope that I would also be a good baseball player, but instead, I was obsessed by science fiction.

 First Contact. Back in 2022 I made an illustration for a 1955 story called "Joy in Mudville". Here in 2023, I tried to use Wombo Dream to make a better illustration of a baseball-playing alien (see the image to the right). This is actually a composite image. I pasted together parts of seven different AI-generated images to make this illustration of First Contact with baseball-playing aliens (the Hoka from planet Toka) who look like Earthly bears.

Book cover by DALL-E 3
and WOMBO Dream

 Detective mystery. Also in the June 1958 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction was a story called "The Questing Tycoon", a Simon Templar story by Leslie Charteris. The story is about a clothing manufacturer who becomes interested in Haitian zombies. Might it be possible to turn clothing factory workers into zombies, not have to pay them, and in doing so boost profits? Apparently, this story was first published by Leslie Charteris in The Saint Detective Magazine in December 1954.

For the imaginary book cover shown to the left, I first had DALL-E create an image for this text prompt: "Book cover for ”The Questing Tycoon" by Leslie Charteris, a Simon Templar story in Haiti featuring a beautiful Haitian girl who is dressed Victoria's Secret style, tall and slim beautiful Haitian woman in a pink jumpsuit, jungle background". Then I used the image from DALL-E as a reference image with WOMBO Dream. 

Figure 2. In the Exo Zone.

Starting in 1966, there was a television series called "The Saint" in the United States. I was too young to be interested in those television shows. The 60th episode was called "Sibao" and it was set in Haiti, but it has a different plot than "The Questing Tycoon". The only science fiction plot element in "The Questing Tycoon" is the idea that some drug (see fictional chemistry) might be able to turn a person into a kind of "zombie", unable to exercise free will.

 Into the Exo Zone. I don't know when I first saw The Twilight Zone (in reruns, probably sometime in the 1970s). One of the episodes was "Nick of Time" in which William Shatner struggles to not be turned into a "mindless zombie" by a fortune-telling machine. Apparently, the origin of The Twilight Zone can be traced to 1958 when a Rod Serling story called "The Time Element" was produced by Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball for Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse. 

Tyhry accessing the
Sedron Time Stream

For the image in Figure 2, I had DALL-E make a depiction of "a high resolution movie still of a young man and woman with an alien fortune-telling machine". Then I used the results from DALL-E as a reference image with WOMBO Dream. I paste in an image of William Shatner's face and used this text prompt with Mr. Wombo: "a high resolution movie still of a young William Shatner and cute woman with an alien video-conferencing machine, a humanoid alien is seen on the video screen".

 "The Time Element" was a kind of time travel story. I'm a real sucker for time travel stories, but my favorite one is Asimov's The End of Eternity. As was also depicted in the "The Time Element", for my own science fiction stories I often like to imagine that some people are able to receive information from the past or the future by an unconventional means. In the Exode Saga, I make use of the Sedron Time Stream as a way to move information through time in ways that defy known physics.

1958 cover image by
R. S. Lonati (source).

 The End of Eternity was first published in 1956, but a German language version became available in 1958. I've often tried to imagine a sensible way to depict time travel in a single image. I have no real quarrel with the way that R. S. Lonati tried to show Andrew Harlan altering the flow if Time (see the image to the right), but I wish he had included Asimov's character Noÿs Lambent in his artwork for Utopia. There are two more images with cover art from Lonati that are shown further down in this blog post.

Noÿs Lambent, time traveler.

Imagine a young Noÿs Lambent in her homewhen, a time some eleven million years in the far future of Earth, where she is using advance Reality Viewing technology to examine the possible ways of putting an end to the Eternity time travel system. I asked Mr. Wombo to create a: "high resolution movie still showing tall and slim Kate Jackson holding a remote control device in her hand, Kate Jackson is dressed in black lace Victoria's Secret style, Kate Jackson has long black hair, Kate Jackson is twenty years old, Kate Jackson has very large eyes, fractal complex sparkling laser lights in the background". Maybe some of that fancy Hi Tek™ equipment rendered by Mr. Wombo in the image to the left has something to do with time travel.

Advances in wired controls.

I've learned not to ask Mr. Wombo to make depictions of time travel machines. I'm more likely to get an image that I like by asking for something like a physics laboratory or a remote control device. For the image shown to the right, Mr. Wombo not only provided a wire for the remote control device (click on the image to enlarge it), but there are two wires, just to be safe. That's the kind of technological advance I expect in the far future. Sadly, Mr. Wombo has real serious problems drawing hands and he has no concept of what a hand and fingers looks like while holding an object.

Noÿs by Flora.

In The End of Eternity, Asimov depicted Noÿs as traveling from the far future of the 111,394th century to the 482nd century, a time when the women of Earth could reproduce by totally artificial means. Asimov described the clothing fashions of that time period which did little to hide the bodies of women. For the image that is shown to the left, I wonder why Mr. Wombo suddenly got tired of creating depictions of Noÿs completely dressed in black. This image was made by the "Flora" style of WOMBO Dream and seems to have abandoned the physics laboratory. Maybe that is an orange planet in the background. People of the 111,394th century had traveled out into the Galaxy where they ran into alien species who had already taken control of the good planets, prompting her people to destroy Eternity.

Figure 3. Gift horses from Mr Wombo.

 Shift to If. The June 1958 issue of If magazine had a story called "Gift Horse" by A. Bertram Chandler. At Wikipedia it is suggested that "Gift Horse" is the start of Chandler's rim world series, but never having read anything else by Chandler, I have no opinion to offer on how this story fits together with his other work. "Gift Horse" is an actual time travel story in which what at first looks like a spaceship, turns out to be a time travel machine that carries a group of people into the far future, to a distant time when humans have become extinct. 

 The invention of time travel technology. In "Gift Horse", the lonely robots of the future, designed to serve humans, apparently invented time travel just so that they could obtain some replacement humans. It seems like there could have been far simpler solutions to their problem, but maybe the invention of time travel technology is child's play for machines with artificial intelligence.

another human-alien hybrid

 Gift hybrids. I've long had an interest in human-alien hybrids (for example, see Ottengla), so after I was done with Figure 1 (see the top of this blog post), I asked Mr. Wombo to make some hybrids that genetically are part human and also part purple alien with horse-like features (see Figure 3, above).

Chandler's 1958 story about a 'gift horse' features no aliens and no actual horses. However, horses have been on my mind this year while writing science fiction stories that are set in Earth's past (see the Mosy Saga).

Figure 4. Anti-gravity water lifter.

 Anti-Gravity. The June 1958 issue of If also had "The Songs of Distant Earth" by Arthur C. Clarke. This was one of the first stories by Clarke that I read when I was in my golden age of discovering science fiction (probably in a copy of this book that I read in a library). At the time, I was discovering Isaac Asimov's robot stories and I had also read Clarke's Against the Fall of Night, which featured robots. I was fascinated by the idea of artificial intelligence and robots and I could not understand why robots did not have a larger role in "The Songs of Distant Earth". 

Clarke did suggest that robotic spacecraft could travel between exoplanets of the galaxy delivering mail and recorded music. The one part of "The Songs of Distant Earth" that I liked was the idea (mentioned casually by Clarke) that a few hundred years in the future, there will be no large cities on Earth, only rural settlements.

Figure 5. Mr. Wombo's wet dream.
Maybe this is a water slide.

I could never accommodate myself to Asimov's vision of a future where people lived in "caves of steel". Clarke made the cogent point that with constantly available sophisticated communications systems, people would no longer need to be packed into cities. In the future depicted by Clarke in "The Songs of Distant Earth", there was also anti-gravity technology, so you could just pick up your house and move. For my own science fiction stories, I also prefer to imagine future times when cities will no longer be important.

More Sci Fi prophecy. However, in the February 1958 issue of If was "The Feeling of Power" by Isaac Asimov. In that story, Asimov suggested that in the future when electronic computers were common, people would no longer be taught how to do simple mathematics. I have to count this as a clear-headed anticipation by Asimov of a social trend that is happening now.

Figure 6. by DALL-E 3.

I never saw the Mel Hunter cover art for "The Songs of Distant Earth" until long after I had read the story. My imagination of what it would look like to use anti-gravity technology to send water up into orbit was quite different than what Hunter painted.

For Figure 4, above, I started with Hunter's painting, but I also had DALL-E generate a "a high resolution movie still of futuristic gravity physics research, lifting a spinning column of water out of an ocean". I pasted the Hi Tek™ device that DALL-E created into Mel Hunter's painting and then asked Mr. Wombo to create an image showing "a high resolution movie still of futuristic gravity physics research, a complex mechanical device is lifting a spinning column of water out of an ocean, sparking yellow electrical force fields are guiding the water up into the sky, ocean waves in the foreground, mountains in the background". The image in Figure 4 was made using the "Steampunk v2" style of Wombo Dream.

Fifty Feet poster by Mr. Wombo.
Sadly, I could not get
Mr. Wombo to put human
feet at the end of tentacles,
so imagine that each
one ends with a foot.

Some of the images generated by Mr. Wombo without the "anti-gravity pump station" provided by DALL-E were rather silly (for example, see Figure 5). Arthur Clarke did eventually write stories about space elevators. Maybe for Figure 4 there is some sort of super strong nanofilament pipe for sending the water up into orbit.

Jack Vance published quite a few stories in 1958 including "Parapsyche", a kind of "alternate universe" story. Also arriving on the big screen in 1958 were a number of truly bad movies that are often labeled as "science fiction" (for example, see this). 

The most amusing movie title of 1958 was Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. I had DALL-E and Mr. Wombo help me make the movie poster that is shown to the left. Shown in Figure 6, above, is what DALL-E generated for this text prompt: "high resolution science fiction movie poster from 1958 showing an alien octopus woman with many tentacles, a beautiful human-like head and fifty human-like feet". Unfortunately, Mr. Wombo would not put feet at the end of tentacles. 😔 

from 2022 (source)

 Positronics. Isaac Asimov published a positronic robot story in the January 1958 issue of Infinity Science Fiction. "Lenny" is an interesting story because Asimov actually addresses the idea that it might be useful to have positronic robots that can actually learn in much the same way as a newborn human baby. I discussed "Lenny" last year in the context of my science fiction story The Historical Institute. For that 2022 blog post I made an illustration showing R. Nyrtia, a positronic robot (see the image to the right on this page), but I was not satisfied with that depiction of Nyrtia.

Updated R. Nyrtia image.

 New for 2023. I had Mr. Wombo use the original image of Nyrtia as a reference with this text prompt: "a high resolution movie still showing a beautiful girl with long black hair and very large eyes, big hair, fluffy hair, pink lips, twenty years old, blue sky and a futuristic red iron building in the back ground". The new depiction of Nyrtia is shown in the image to the left. I don't really imagine buildings inside Observer Base having that sort of appearance, but... who knows?

As a positronic robot who could alter her appearance as desired, I think R. Nyrtia would have taken great care to maintain a close-to-flawless physical appearance, going to levels of perfection that surpass human biological constraints.

Figure 7. A tall human variant.

 Speaking of tall women... Published in the May 1958 issue of Venture Science Fiction Magazine was "Cosmic Casanova" by Arthur C. Clarke. In this story, a spaceman is cruising across the galaxy when he makes radio contact with a very loooooong lost colony of Earthlings. How long has this colony been isolated from Earth? Long enough for the residents to evolve into a unique human variant. At the other end of the radio conversation, on the planet that holds the long-lost colonizers from Earth, is a woman. 

In "Cosmic Casanova" our space-faring hero has been in space too long and he's horny. He makes arrangements to meet the woman as soon as he lands. However, he quickly discovers that the humans on this planet have evolved to be extra large and so he's only as tall as the woman's knees. His dreams of a hot sexual encounter with the woman quickly fade.

A gray human variant (spaceman).

I read "Cosmic Casanova" about fifty years ago, but that mental image of the small spaceman and the very tall woman has stuck with me. I asked Mr. Wombo to make a scene depicting, "a high resolution science fiction movie still showing Megan Fox in the role of an alien woman with blue skin, Megan fox meets a spaceman in a spacesuit, he is standing beside a beautiful alien woman who is fifty feet tall, alien megastructures in the background". The image shown in Figure 7 is a composite. The spaceman was generated by DALL-E (see the original image here).

 A happier ending. For the image to the left I used, "high resolution science fiction movie still, a spaceman and Margot Robbie in the role of beautiful space alien with very large eyes, Margot is dressed Victoria's Secret style in sparkling clothing, Margot Robbie has blue-gray skin and gray hair, a planet seen from orbit and stars in the background".

Figure 8. image source

 Telepathy, too. Also in the February 1958 issue of If was a short story called "Out from the Sun" by Arthur C. Clarke. I've previously blogged about the idea that there could be life inside a star. In the story "Out from the Sun", Clarke depicted some poor living creature coming out of the Sun and crashing into the planet Mercury. How did the resident humans on Mercury know that the big hot thing from the sun was alive? The humans on Mercury had telepathic contact with the sun creature just before it died.

Mind Transfer

 Mind Transfer. I've previously blogged about mind transfer (for example, see this old blog post and this even older one). Apparently, in 1961 there was a comic about experiments with mind transfer that somehow went wrong, bringing a "sun creature" to Earth (see Figure 8, above). In this confused comic, the alien's mind was swapped into a human body.

One of my favorite stories from 1958 is Asimov's "S As in Zebatinsky" which includes an alien who can transfer his mind into a human body (discussed in this blog post).

For the image that is shown to the left, I used this text prompt with Mr. Wombo: "a high resolution movie still of a mind transfer experiment, blue aliens, move a human mind into an alien body" and a reference image from an Avatar movie (the central part of this image).

Figure 9. New cover
image by Mr. Wombo.

 Lucky Asimov. I've previously blogged about Asimov's novel Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus. The last of his Lucky Starr novels was published in 1958. I discovered the existence of these Lucky Starr stories sometime in the 1970s, but I never read them all. Asimov was an expert at marketing his stories, so in 1973 there was The Third Isaac Asimov Double: The Rings of Saturn, The Moons of Jupiter with cover art by Bruce Pennington. Feeling that this cover by Pennington was lacking something, I went searching through other examples of Pennington cover art.

human figure by Mr. Wombo

In 1968, Pennington broke the nipple barrier with his cover illustration for Glory Road. Sometimes it is fun just to see what Mr. Wombo can do when asked to make a variation of a science fiction book cover. I used Pennington's cover as a reference image and this text prompt: "full color science fiction paperback book cover showing a hunter with a bow, a tall and slim woman with long blond hair, a short alien in the background, painted in the style of artist Bruce Pennington". Mr. Wombo seldom includes nipples in his renderings, but he is less bashful about the bottom (see Figure 9). I took one of the AI-generated images produced by Mr. Wombo and pasted it into Pennington's 1973 "rings of Saturn" painting (see the image to the left).

A poster for The Fly.

 The Fly. I know of no good science fiction movies from 1958. One film that came out in 1958 was The Fly. I saw The Fly in the mid-1970s. There was a television station in Boston that broadcast horror movies late on Saturday. As usual for a horror movie, the science content of The Fly is minimal. I made the fake movie poster for The Fly that is shown to the right using a painting (source) by R. S. Lonati. I never understood how a half-fly and half-human chimera could survive, but see "The Tissue-Culture King" by Julian Huxley. I've never seen the 1986 version of The Fly. I have no interest in horror as a genre.

by R. S. Lonati (image source)

 The Nipple Barrier. In 1957, Lonati began with a cover painting for "Ralph 124 C 41 plus" (see) and then his career really took off in 1958. Much of his artwork was made for horror stories. Another cover image by R. S. Lonati is shown to the left. His cover art for The End of Eternity was already shown, above in this blog post.

In illustrations for my science fiction stories, I'm constantly searching for better ways to depict human-alien hybrids. I had Mr. Wombo use that "snake woman" image by R. S. Lonati as a reference image along with this text prompt: "high resolution movie still showing a tall and slim Kate Jackson in the role of a snake woman in her laboratory, Kate Jackson seen in profile view".

Inside the alien-human
hybridization research laboratory.

I used only the right side of Lonati's painting, the part with the snake-woman. In the AI-generated image that is shown to the right, Mr. Wombo inserted a second figure into the scene, originally a woman with a human head, standing behind the snake woman. I could not resist splicing in a snake head, converting her into some sort of alien-human hybrid (in my imagination).

1958 alien biology research.

For the image that is shown to the left, Mr. Wombo separated the woman from the snake. In my imagination, the snake is actually a snake-like alien. 

In this image, I like how Mr. Wombo gave this alien two tiny legs. Both of these snake images are composites. In the image to the left, I had to paste in a second smaller snake to hide some of the anatomical errors in her leg. In the other image, the skull in the lower left part of the image came from another AI-generated image that Mr. Wombo created for this scene.

A 1958 drawing machine creating
the cover art for Galaxy magazine.

 Galaxy Magazine.       The September 1958 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction had a short review of Lucky Starr and the Moons of Jupiter by Paul French (the pen name used by Isaac Asimov when he wrote these stories). The lead story was "Lastborn" by Isaac Asimov. He soon changed the title of this story to "The Ugly Little Boy". I blogged about that story back in 2017. Also in that issue was "The Stroke of the Sun", a really bad story by Arthur C. Clarke. 

The final story in that issue of Galaxy was "Thing of Beauty" by Damon Knight. In "Thing of Beauty", there is a mysterious machine that can draw pictures. An expert on computers in the story predicts that it will be several centuries before researchers can make a computerized system for creating images. The image to the right is a modified version of the interior art for "Thing of Beauty" by Wallace Wood.

"The Robotic DALL-E" by DALL-E

"Thing of Beauty" has taken on new meaning for me this year as I have experimented with artificial intelligence systems such as DALL-E and Wombo Dream as a way to create illustrations for my science fiction stories. 

I asked DALL-E to make a "full color science fiction paperback book cover for the 1958 novel "The Robotic DALL-E" by Damon Knight showing a robot that is painting an illustration for a science fiction magazine cover". The resulting image (shown to the left) looks like a book by someone named 'Dame Knight' that is titled "Dati Dall-ie" and has a robot painter at work, creating what might be a piece of black-and-white interior art for a science fiction magazine. I wonder why DALL-E put all those human figures into this AI-generated image.

Figure 10. DALL-E's cat in outer space. (source)

 Cats in Space. I must mention one more story by Arthur C. Clarke that was published in the November 1958 issue of New Worlds Science Fiction. "Who's There?" is a silly story that concerns cats in outer space... {spoiler} specifically, cats in a spacesuit. 

I had DALL-E generate an image for this text prompt: "a high resolution movie still showing a cat in a spacesuit, the cat is about to perform a space-walk outside of a space station that is in low Earth orbit" (see the image to the right). However, in this image it looks like the cat is in space without a face-mask for the spacesuit.

Preparations for a walk in space.

For the image shown to the left, I had Mr. Wombo modify the original image (Figure 10) that had been generated by DALL-E. Here, I can imagine that these two cats are inside a space station. The second cat that was added by Mr. Wombo is helping get the other cat suited up and ready to go outside for a space walk. 

In the image that is shown to the left, it even looks like the second cat is floating in micro-gravity. Based on this image, I must assume that ears and whiskers pose a special problem for cats in space. Some of the images that were generated by Mr. Wombo had the cat ears sticking up through the top of the helmet. As an innovation for cat-friendly spacesuit design, Mr. Wombo put triangular protrusions on the top side of this helmet. Related cat: Félicette.

DALL-E's golden age (source)

 Golden Age.           I must ask: why couldn't Hollywood have brought some interesting aliens to the big screen in 1958 as had been the case in 1956? Sadly, the golden age of science fiction was over by the time I showed up on Earth.

For the imaginary book cover that is shown to the right, I had DALL-E generate a depiction of, "a colorful and dramatic science fiction book cover from 1958 with the title 'The Golden Age of Science Fiction'." I love how with the alien invasion in full swing, two Earth dudes still have time for a fist fight.

Related reading: 1953 and The Languages of Pao was first published in book format in 1958.

Next: First Contact.

1956. See this cover by Frank Kelly Freas.  Visit the Gallery of Movies, Book and Magazine Covers