Colorize

Figure 1. Xylo, Talia and
Dave on Elemacha-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 some results from my latest experiments that are aimed at celebrating and re-imaging old science fiction artwork while also creating illustrations for new stories. In the blog post below, I use WOMBO Dream to make colorized versions of 13 more examples of black and white interior art illustrations from old (1929 - 1959) science fiction magazines. 

 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 (see the image below this paragraph). 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,
click image to enlarge

 Swords in Science Fiction. I made use of some 1929 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 AI-generated color image is shown above in Figure 1. 

Orange Egg. 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. 😓 Mr. Wombo spontaneously inserted an orange ball into the lower right part of Figure 1. However, it is too large to be a Merovae egg (see Figure 20, below)

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. When first seen by arriving human colonists, the Noema are assumed to be plants, but they are actually artificial life-forms that can take on any convenient shape by re-arranging their structural components: invisibly small femtobots. 

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 (Figure 2) 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

 Walking Plants. For the AI-generated depiction of an alien Noema that is included in Figure 2, I tried to have Mr. Wombo make a plant-creature that long skinny limbs, like the telepathic plant-creature 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. 

Illustrating the Invisible. The plant creature on the right side of Hunter's cover illustration is telepathically linked to the other humanoid and the telepathic linkage is indicated visually by the wavy 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 from two people to an alien 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 had Mr. Wombo convert into control panels and glowing indicator lights. 

In the experiment shown in Figure 3, Talia is behind one-way glass and Xylo is secretly testing to determine if Bailey can "read" Talia's thoughts by means of synapex linkages that go through the alien plant. I intentionally darkened the part of the scene with Talia and appended it to the bottom of the main 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. I manually inserted an AI generated image of Xylo into the scene, replacing the many seen in profile view at the left edge of the reference image.

 Variations on the Theme. Some additional versions of the alien plant that is shown in Figure 3 are in the image at the very bottom of this blog post (see Figure 24, below). 

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 another old illustration by Frank R. Paul (see the image to the left). The original artwork involved a device that could gestate a human embryo. 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 mimic human anatomy. 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 into the scene. The resulting image is shown to the right in Figure 5.

 Synapex Linkages. After Talia and Xylo begin to understand how to 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 connections between the structural femtobot components 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 (and Dani is also telepathically manipulating his emotions). Only later when Bailey gets telepathic confirmation from Ylyndra that Dani is a telepathic robot 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

 Bug-eyed Aliens. 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.

My goal was to get Mr. Wombo to convert the two human figures in this black and white reference image into full color depictions of two characters from "The Fesarians": 1) the redheaded robot Dani and 2) Starfleet's Lieutenant Dave Bailey. I decided to move away from the big bulging alien eyes that had been drawn by Peter Poulton.

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 in their appearance. 

Alternatively, maybe the Merovae have some shape-shifting abilities, although not as advanced as for the Neoma. The Neoma are composed of femtobots, an advanced form of nanotechnology. 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 generates images of 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 (top, right) who is amused to see Talia inside the dryer while 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 (bottom, center) 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. 

Radioactive Nipples. 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. The AI-generated nipples by Mr. Wombo's 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 WOMBO Dream

 More Rare Nipple Sightings.  Mr. Wombo usually generates images such as the one shown to the left in which Talia seems to be wearing a transparent top. However, occasionally the WOMBO Dream image generating algorithm escapes  from its restrictions and makes an image such as the one shown below.

by Mr. Wombo

 Both of these images (the one above this paragraph and the one to the right) are not altered from the original AI-generated images. In this image (to the right), there are still some visual hints that she is wearing a very sheer transparent top, but in this case, Mr. Wombo could not be bothered to hide her nipple from view. Both of these images (the one above this paragraph and the one to the right) are not altered from the original AI-generated images.

Talia keeping cool on the shore.

 Night. Another example of a depiction of Talia that was generated by Mr Wombo is shown in the image to the left.

Talia by Mr. Wombo.

It is much more common for WOMBO Dream to generate images such as the one shown to the right. Both of these moon-lit scenes was spontaneously generated by Mr. Wombo from a reference image that did not show her nipples. 

I do like to imagine that when Talia is out at night investigating the Merovae, it might be cool enough for her to not wear a cooling suit. Why should she have to wear any clothing at all?

 Lyssa's tryp'At anatomy.

 New Bodies for a New Century. For "The Fesarians", I imagine that Talia and her clone sisters are human-tryp'At hybrids. The image shown to the right is a more realistic depiction of Talia's tryp'At-like anatomy which includes a double row of breasts. However, this is Talia's sister Lyssa.

 The tryp'At phenotype. In "The Fesarians", Talia has additional tryp'At features including pointed tips on her ears, two vaginas and a penis.

by Virgil Finlay

 New Bodies in the Previous Millennium. 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.

 The power of diffusion. I was interested to see how Mr. Wombo would deal with all the "bubbles" in this reference image by Virgil Finlay (above). As shown in Figure 14, Mr. Wombo "magically" 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 in my imagination 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 technology-assisted telepathy experiment. In my imagination, that is Talia explaining to Bailey her attempts to telepathically contact the natives of Elemacha-z.

interior art by Antonio Schomburg

The image shown to the left is interior art for Jack Vance's 1952 story "Sabotage on Sulfur Planet". In Vance's story, the alien creatures that Schomburg depicted as cactus-like plants were actually mobile drones, controlled by another mysterious alien creature that lived in pools of liquid sulfur. Each drone had a green "crystal" that allowed control signals to be received from a distant source.

Figure 18. Colorized Sulfur Planet by Mr. Wombo.

The colorized image shown in Figure 18 was generated by Mr. Wombo using Schomburg's black and white reference image (above). I could not resist the temptation of having Mr. Wombo add in a 1950s style rocket ship.

In "The Fesarians", the exoplanet Elemacha-z is very hot, but I do not imagine the hills around Port Cooway as being desert. Also, it was inevitable that Vance's story involved male explorers of distant planets, but I wanted to use Schomburg's  reference image to help generate a scene depicting Talia and her two clone sisters exploring Elemacha-z.

Figure 19. Talia and her clone
sisters explore Elemacha-z.

The image shown in Figure 19 was generated by Mr. Wombo by combining the three human figures from Figure 18 and another background image with alien plants (also generated by WOMBO Dream).

The green objects being held by two of the Talia clones in Figure 19 were placed there manually as a tribute to Jack Vance and the green sulfur crystals that he imagined for his story "Sabotage on Sulfur Planet". In this case, maybe the green globular objects are eggs that were laid on land by the amphibious Merovae of Elemacha-z.

Figure 20. Talia's cat
hunts juvenile Merovae.

 Green Eggs and Cats. In "The Fesarians", Talia's cats cause problems for the Merovae and their juveniles who feed on the land for several weeks after hatching. I had Mr. Wombo add in a cat to the scene of Talia finding a Merovae egg while exploring Elemacha (see Figure 20).

Figure 21. Juvenile Merovae.

I was not sure what a newly hatched Merovae should look like. I was thinking of a tadpole with legs, so I had Gemini generate an image depicting such an alien creature (see Figure 21, to the left).

I'm finding it challenging to use Mr. Wombo to generate a visual "look" for the alien plant life of Elemacha-z that makes the plants look alien but not absurd.

Figure 22. Another egg.

The image to the right is another AI-generated depiction of Talia with a Merovae egg. The alien flowers in Figure 22 were generated by Mr. Wombo in separate images and manually pasted into this scene on top of the conventional Earthly vegetation. In my imagination, one of the first colonists on Elemacha-z, Aethe (Xylo's clone sister), maintains a reasonably low temperature greenhouse for experimenting with native live-forms of Elemach-z. The juvenile Merovae are elusive (they only feed at night), but Talia brings some Merovae eggs to be hatched in Aethe's greenhouse.

Figure 23. Add a cat.

 As part of this experiment in the greenhouse, Talia and Aethe are able to determine which plants the Merovae juveniles prefer to feed on.

I had Mr. Wombo generate an alternative version of Figure 22 that includes one of Talia's cats. To get the image shown in Figure 23, I manually pasted in a cat and then used the "strong" setting to have Mr. Wombo integrate the pasted cat into the rest of the image. I also zoomed in and had Mr. Wombo re-generate the cat's head in order to get some additional details in the cat hairs. 

pumpkins

This cat is beginning to learn the relationship between the eggs and the Juvenile Merovae that Talia's cats like to hunt.

Next: AI-generated images of pumpkins.

Figure 24. Compare to Figure 3, above. Visit the Gallery of Movies, Book and Magazine Covers