Colorize

Figure 1. Xylo, Talia and
Dave on Elemach-z.

 Last year (see The Tool Maker) I began experimenting with AI-image generating software to make updated versions of old black and white interior art from pulp science fiction magazines. In my previous blog post, I put on display results from my latest experiments that are aimed at celebrating and re-imaging old science fiction artwork. 

 Illustrations of Alien Life. Back in 2022 (see Memory Phantom), I read "Vampires of the Desert" by A. Hyatt Verrill, which was published with black and white interior art depicting a strange plant-like creature. I'm currently writing a Star Trek fan-fiction story called "The Fesarians" in which the alien Neoma of planet Elemacha-z have the appearance of a plant-like creature.

interior art by Wesso

I made use of some interior art by H. W. Wesso as a reference image for WOMBO Dream. The original black and white art is shown to the left and the resulting color image is shown in Figure 1. 

The image in Figure 1 is a composite with parts from two separate AI-generated images for the same scene. The human figure in the lower left corner of the scene that is depicted in Figure 1 was generated in a separate image and manually pasted into this image, allowing this scene to include three of the major characters from my science fiction story "The Fesarians". Poor Dave lost the helmet of his environmental suit. The air of Elemacha-z is Earth-like, but the climate is very hot. 😓

Figure 2. Talia and Dave
with a Noema.

In "The Fesarians", Talia and Dave eventually identify the alien Noema as being highly intelligent plant-like creatures of Elemacha-z. The Noema are artificial life-forms that can take on any convenient shape. 

interior art by Ed Emshwiller

 Plant People. The AI-generated scene that is shown in Figure 2 began with the reference image that is shown to the left, which is interior art by Ed Emshwiller for a 1953 story called "Escape Me Never" by J. T. McIntosh. The woman in Emshwiller's drawing has bare breasts, but sadly Mr. Wombo dressed her in a more conventional top.

I manually inserted into the scene a green, plant-like Noema that is playfully generating some leg-like appendages and having some fun with Talia and Dave.

cover art by Mel Hunter

For the Noema that is included in Figure 2, I tried to have Mr. Wombo make a plant-creature that long skinny limbs, like the one painted by Mel Hunter for the cover art shown to the right that was an illustration for "Man of Many Minds", a novel by E. Everett Evans. The plant creature on the right side of the cover illustration is telepathically linked to the other humanoid (yellow lines). Visually depicting invisible telepathic signals is a serious challenge.

Figure 3. Another synapex
experiment with a Noema.

 Synapex Experiment. I had Mr. Wombo generate another scene depicting the formation of synapex linkages to a Neoma (Figure 3). Here, the AI-generated plant-creature looks almost like an Earthly plant. As for Figure 1, I made a special effort to include Xylo, Talia and Dave in this scene. The bottom part the scene in Figure 3 originated from another complex black and white interior art image that I rotated 90 degrees and appended to the bottom of the reference image.

interior art by Paul

 Reference Image. I got started generating the scene in Figure 3 by making use of some 1929 interior art by Frank R. Paul that is shown to the right.

Some modifications of the alien plant that is in Figure 3 are shown at the very bottom of this blog post. 

Figure 4. Alien plant experiment.

The image in Figure 4 was not modified in any way from the raw AI-generated image. I asked Mr. Wombo to generate an image depicting a man looking at a strange alien plant.

interior art by Frank R. Paul for "Electronic Baby"

To generate the image that is shown in Figure 4, I made use of some old art by Frank R. Paul. The original artwork involved a device that could gestate a human embryo (see the image to the left). I wanted Mr. Wombo to depict an experiment with a plant-like Neoma from the exoplanet Elemacha-z.

Figure 5. Xylo is monitoring an
experiment with a telepathic Neoma.

 The Neoma. I suppose it was obligatory in the 1930s to have a male scientist in a laboratory and to depict a plant-like alien as having a bulging head. However, I modified Figure 4 by inserting Xylo and a plant woman. The resulting image is shown in Figure 5.

 Synapex Linkages. After Talia and Xylo begin to understand that they can achieve telepathic communication with the alien Neoma, they manage to bring one of the aliens into Talia's home. Talia has access to sophisticated nanotechnology that can form a direct physical connection between the nervous system of the Neoma and the human nervous system.

In "The Fesarians", when Bailey and Dani arrive on Elemacha-z, Xylo performs a scan of Dani and discovers that Dani is a robot. I had Mr. Wombo generate an amusing scene depicting how Bailey reacts to the revelation that Dani is not human.

Figure 6. Dani the positronic robot by Mr. Wombo.

 Dani the Robot. The image that is shown in Figure 6 shows Dani with a human head, but the rest of her body is mechanical. I had Mr. Wombo make Bailey look like Steve McQueen. 

Text prompt for Figure 6: "a very young Steve McQueen with a robot, Steve McQueen is twenty years old, Steve McQueen has black hair, Steve McQueen is pulling electronic components out of the body of the robot, electronic equipment is falling out of the robot’s chest, a fractal complex array of wires spilling out of the robot".

interior art by Harry Harrison

I had Mr. Wombo generate Figure 6 by making use of some interior art by Harry Harrison from 1951 as a reference image (see the image to the right). Dani's head was manually pasted in from another image in which I had asked Mr. Wombo to make Dani look like Cintia Dicker. In "The Fesarians", Bailey is reluctant to believe that Dani is a robot because she appears to be a human woman. Only later when Bailey gets telepathic confirmation from Ylyndra does he accept the fact that Dani is an artificial life-form disguised as a human being.

interior art for "The Masquerade on
Dicantropus" by Peter Poulton

The image shown to the left is interior art for "The Masquerade on Dicantropus" by Jack Vance (1951). I wanted to see if Mr. Wombo could convert these aliens with webbed fingers into a credible version of the amphibious Merovae of Elemacha-z.

Figure 7. Dani and Dave with some Merovae.

 Merovae. The image in Figure 7 shows the colorized version of the Peter Poulton black and white reference image that was generated by Mr. Wombo. Sadly, no two of the Merovae in this scene look very similar, but maybe there are different varieties of Merovae and natural variation. 

Alternatively, maybe the Merovae have some shape-shifting abilities, although not as advanced as for the Neoma. The Neoma are composed of femtobots. The Merovae are cellular, but maybe their form can be modified by developmental control nanites.

interior art for "The Fires Within"

The image to the left shows interior art from Arthur C. Clarke's story "The Fires Within" (1949). Clarke  tried to imagine a type of life that would be at home 15 miles down inside the Earth at high temperature and high pressure. See my discussion of Clarke's story at this 2022 blog post.

Figure 8. Talia finds the rock creature.

 Rock People. In Part 3 of "The Fesarians" I imagined a life-form that could live inside the exoplanet Martiz 23 where Talia and her sisters grew up. Figure 8 shows the colorized version of this scene that was created by Mr. Wombo by using the black and white drawing from "The Fires Within" as a reference image. 

When Talia meets the creature from underground, she and her sisters are searching the vast forest that is near her childhood home on Martiz 23, so I had Mr. Wombo put the red rock creature and Talia into a forest background.

interior art by A. Williams

I used interior art from "The World Is Mine" (1943) as a reference image in an attempt to get Mr. Wombo to create a depiction of a synapex experiment that is aimed at linking the minds of two humans. The original black and white image by Arthur Williams is shown to the left.

Figure 9. Connecting brains by synapex links.

The colorized version by Mr. Wombo is shown in Figure 9. In my imagination, this scene could be on Martiz 23, not long after Talia was given synapex nanites by the rock people. For Figure 9, I pasted the AI-generated foreground image into a real-world classroom laboratory setting.

To get the image shown in Figure 9, I tried asking Mr. Wombo to show Talia with a hair dryer on her head. I don't think the WOMBO Dream training set includes pictures of old-fashioned hair dryers.

Figure 10. Mr. Wombo and hair dryers. See also: Talia in a dryer.

Figure 11. In the dryer (full size).

 Drying Talia. Here is the text prompt that I used for Figures 9, 10 and 11: "a very young Kate Jackson is under a hair dryer, Kate Jackson a pretty twenty year old girl with long black hair, Kate Jackson is seen in profile view, Kate Jackson is sitting close to Meg Ryan, Meg Ryan is sitting under a hair dryer, Meg Ryan has blond hair, complex electronic equipment surrounds Meg and Kate". For Figure 9, a reference image was provided to Mr. Wombo. For the images in Figure 10, there was no reference image and Mr. Wombo was completely free to do what he wanted to do.

Sometimes Mr. Wombo seems too eager to please we humans. I kept asking for images of hair dryers, then finally Mr. Wombo put poor Talia inside a dryer (Figure 11). Maybe that is Gyulya who put Talia inside the dryer and her clone sister Lyssa can't believe what Mr. Wombo did to poor Talia.

interior art for "Curative Telepath"

The image to the left is interior art from a 1959 John Brunner story called "Curative Telepath". I love the idea of having a part of the brain specialized for telepathy, but Brunner imagined that our brains contain the organ of Funck, as discussed in this 2021 blog post about telepathy.

Figure 12. Gallery of life-forms from Elemach-z.

 Menagerie of Elemacha. Using the image to the left as a reference, Mr. Wombo made the colorized image that is shown in Figure 12. In my imagination, this could be a depiction of Talia and her two clone sisters with Dave Bailey as they gaze upon a collection of alien creatures from the exoplanet Elemacha-z.  

Figure 12 is a composite with interesting alien creatures collected from several different AI-generated images. Mr. Wombo provided Talia with a perplexed look on her face.

interior art by Edward Cartier

 She's on firsk. Back in 2020 I blogged about "The Potters of Firsk", which was published in Astounding Science Fiction, May 1950. The image to the left shows the black and white interior art by Ed Cartier, illustrating that the ladies on the planet Firsk routinely go around topless.

Figure 13. Potted plant person.

 Plant Pottery. I provided the interior art by Edward Cartier to Mr. Wombo as a reference image. I wanted to add to this scene some alien plant-person pottery. The colorized image that was generated by Mr. Wombo is shown in Figure 13. 

The AI-generated image in Figure 13 is one of the rare cases where the free version of WOMBO Dream actually generated an image with nipples. Mr. Wombo's nipples were only two small circles, so I manually gave them some color contrast. In order to avoid a boring background, I pasted the AI-generated image on top of another image with additional pottery. In my text prompt, I asked to have her holding a potted plant and Mr. Wombo decided to add multiple plants to the scene.

by Virgil Finlay

Jack Vance published "New Bodies for Old" in the August 1950 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. The image shown to the left is interior artwork by Virgil Finlay for "New Bodies for Old". The lady in this image might be Finlay's attempt to depict Letya Arnold, the character in "New Bodies for Old" who has invented a faster-than-light spaceship propulsion system.

Figure 14. By Mr. Wombo.

 I was interested to see how Mr. Wombo would deal with all the "bubbles" in this reference image. As shown in Figure 14, Mr. Wombo cleared all of the "bubbles" away from her face, hair and hand, but incorporated the "bubbles" into the pattern of her dress. As a demonstration of the power of these diffusion-powered algorithms, the sleeve leading to her hand was also cleared of all bubbles.

Figure 15. Dani with nanites.

I was trying to create a scene where Dani the positronic robot was being subjected to a modification of her positronic brain by femtobots that were deployed by the Neoma. Figure 15 shows the results from using Figure 14 as a reference with this text prompt: "Cintia Dicker inside a transparent cloud, a fractal complex cloud of sparkling lights surrounds Cintia Dicker, a very young Cintia Dicker as a pretty twenty year old, dressed Victoria's Secret style in a blue dress, Cintia Dicker has long red hair, Cintia Dicker is seen inside a cloud of sparkling flecks of silver and gold particles" Femtobots are invisibly small, but I imagine that if you had enough of them in a small area, they might appear to be a vapor or a cloud.

Figure 16. The nanites of Elemacha-z.

"The Lights of Zetar" was never one of my favorite episodes of Star Trek because the lights of Zetar were treated like a magical life-force, able to move through outer space at faster than light speeds yet also able to be driven out of Lieutenant Romaine's body by high pressure. Are the entities from Zetar "non-corporeal energy" or might they be physically composed of invisibly small nanites and thus present a serious challenge to a television producer who must visually depict them?

 Z as in Zetar. After several rounds of taking images like to one in Figure 15 and using them as reference images, Mr Wombo generated the view of Dani that is shown in Figure 16, which is an acceptable visual representation of Neoma femtobots moving into Dani's body when Dani arrives on Elemacha-z.

The Thought-Woman

 Thought Woman. "The Thought-Woman" was published in the July 1940 issue of Super Science Stories by Ray Cummings. The interior art on page 1 of "The Thought-Woman" (see the image to the left on this page) seems to show HiTek™ glass vacuum tubes. This interior artwork was uncredited.

Figure 17. Colorized by Mr. Wombo.

 Figure 17 shows Mr. Wombo's colorized version of this scene. Mr. Wombo spontaneously turned the woman around so that she could be facing the futuristic technology being displayed on the wall. 

I manually inserted the plant-like Neoma into the scene. Mr. Wombo also spontaneously turned the futuristic technology into some kind of telepathy experiment. In my imagination, that is Talia explaining to Bailey her attempts to telepathically contact the natives of Elemacha-z.

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Next: Part 5 of "The Fesarians".

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