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maniraptoransThis month's late midmonth blog is the written component to my first university brief, Introduction to Illustration! The assignment for this project was to work on groups, create a theme relating to 'What is illustration for?' to create a magazine based around, and then go off individually and create a double spread for said magazine with a written component and an art component.
My group's magazine is called Portals, and is an exploration of illustration as a tool for immersion and creating/transporting people to other worlds. I knew I wanted to write something about sci-fi from the beginning, and ended up reading and referencing a bunch of sci-fi literature and art that's influenced my practice to create this essay, and format it into a magazine spread with my detested enemy, Indesign. 
Having a life-long struggle with communication and empathy, I was always enthralled by illustration’s almost magical ability to transform and convey feelings. Unfortunately, illustration is often considered not worthy of its own consideration on the basis of it being ‘communication’: derivative and less sophisticated than fine art.
As a child, I was always imagining something, building my own worlds and characters that transformed the world around me and my own feelings into something far bigger. This evolved into a captivation with science-fiction and fantasy, another bastard child of ‘fine literature’, and developed into my illustration practice.
Later, I would learn the source of both these things: undiagnosed autism. But my fascination with entering other worlds and bringing them into existence would remain. Key to the illustration and science fiction I found most effective is that sense of entering another world: immersion. However the viewer is placed in the world, they must feel like they’re truly there, whether as an observer, or a participant.
Science fiction and illustration are perhaps most connected together in the pulp covers of the 20th century, when sci-fi was primarily distributed through magazines. The first issue of Amazing Stories, the first pulp magazine dedicated solely to science fiction, had a front cover with a striking yellow sky to draw attention. (Robinson, 1999) The otherworldly colours and imagery of early pulp covers and sci-fi illustrations provoke people’s imaginations and invite them to imagine how the imagery might ever make sense. In order to widely appeal, these covers often included pulp cliches of the time: bug-eyed creatures, evil AIs, half-naked damsels and powerful male protagonists.
Author China Mieville seeks to create even less familiar environments: the strangeness and complexity of his novels engage the reader by asking them to imagine this new and unusual world for themselves. His novel Embassytown not only includes interstellar sailing below reality, living cities and factories, and a giant exploded space-ship in the sky, but also explores a language incomprehensible to humans. (Mieville, 2011) The alien-ness to us of the world parallels the alien-ness of the language to the characters, creating an attention-grabbing and immersive experience.
On the other hand, illustrators Moebius and Kilian Eng place the viewer as an observer looking into a serene and unusual world. While the landscape is still unfamiliar, colour and compositional choices convey gentle exploration more than confusion. These landscapes become places for us to imagine exploring and inhabiting as a resident.
Such worldbuilding, the act of creating fleshed-out and immersive worlds, is a corner-stone of science fiction and fantasy, and Ursula K Le Guin is considered a legend in that regard. Her work not only builds and explores rich alien worlds, but explores a world of concepts. The Lathe of Heaven focuses on a man whose dreams change the world around him, while his psychiatrist seeks to use this ability for his own means. (Le Guin, 1971) Le Guin builds, in detail, the alternate Earths that our protagonist creates, imagining what living in those would look like, but also takes us on a journey through the nature of power and protest, exploring and teaching.
Since its genesis, science fiction’s capacity to teach and be learnt from has been noted. In the foreword to the first ever issue of Amazing Stories, editor Hugo Gernsback (namesake of the Hugo Awards for science fiction and fantasy) wrote, ‘For the best of these modern writers [of science fiction] have the knack of imparting knowledge, and even inspiration, without once making us aware we are being taught.’ (Gernsback, 1926) Gernsback, even in 1926, speaks on how much the world has changed as to make science fiction feel more grounded in reality than most other fictions, and even attributes it a quality of prophecy.
Just under 100 years later, author Cory Doctorow would condemn this as one of the greatest flaws of people who read science fiction—mistaking purposeful commentary for prophecy. (Doctorow, 2012) The Lathe of Heaven’s writing on ecological collapse isn’t prophetic, it’s reflecting and bringing to the forefront anxieties about power and control and collapse that already existed. Doctorow adds, through these reflections science fiction brings into being ways of talking about what we’re dealing with. Over time, it’s focused on artificial intelligence, climate collapse, fascism, and many more prominent themes.
Illustration, too, with its powers of visualisation and communication, can help share and express new ways of thinking about the future. Although these are often looked down upon, aspects of storytelling and communication are constant between ‘fine art’ and illustration, (Hobbs, 1984) and their power to disseminate ideas is not to be overlooked. ‘Popular’ art or literature can introduce ideas and reach people in a way as impactful as fine art.
Some of my first experiences with the leftist politics that would come to shape my thinking and my practice was through radical illustration, distributed out in the world or online. Science fiction helped me visualise these new ideas and imagine better worlds. Illustration and sci-fi both gave me a portal into the world of radical politics, by making it approachable and demystifying academic and theoretical concepts, and once I was through that entryway, I could explore further and create my own work.
Once again, with the boom in machine-learning ‘AI’, reality seems to be catching up to science fiction. As these generated images threaten our current conceptions of illustration, we might need to look to science fiction to find ways to respond. And as science fiction tackles an uncertain future, we’ll be here to illustrate and share hope and change.
-Thanks for reading! Sorry for the relative lateness of this, I have just started uni & it's been taking up a lot of my time. Fun, but draining. Going to try to be a bit more relaxed and not overstress myself and hope the acclimatisation makes me les stressed. Very happy with this project though, think it went great. See ya soon! Ellis :)
