GRAND OPENING!
MJ Arts announces the opening of its second retail store!
https://www.teepublic.com/user/mjartscom
Marty has dug through the image vaults from his 30-year illustration history, and combined his efforts with TeePublic. Wearable art in various sizes and formats.
Including new Doctor Who fan art, images from Marty’s Wildlife Preserve and Marty’s Undersea World. Sale going on now for some items.
Doctor Who art for book jacket
The above image [plus absent components] was created to replace the cover of a Doctor Who novel my son gave me. I found the original cover to be awful. I can’t tell if the character next to the Cyberman is supposed to be the Doctor, or one of the other characters in the story.
I watched a new CBS story tonight, Pure Genius. A Silicon Valley billionaire app developer turns his wealth to creating the most advanced hospital on the planet, capable of solving all—well, many—of the medical problems that face our age. The episode includes ‘technology that’s really out there—they just needed funding’—that really isn’t out there, after all. At least not subject to a quick Google search.
Would we have cell phones if not for Star Trek? Who would imagine that Captain Kirk uses a really old-fashioned flip phone…
Does science fiction create the future, or does it simply encourage us to think that the future is possible?
I recently stumbled across an old Outer Limits episode from 1963, The Galaxy Being. [Star Trek first aired in 1966…] In The Galaxy Being an engineer uses some broadcasting equipment for research he’s not supposed to be doing, and encounters a being from the Andromeda galaxy doing exploration that he’s not supposed to be doing. The Alien is a nitrogen-based creature made of microwave energy, rather than us carbon-based creature [if you remember your high school chemistry, “organic” means carbon-based…think about this the next time you shop for groceries]
The two explorers engage in a brief philosophical discussion:
What about wars? Do you have wars? Battles. Atom bombs. Radiation fallout?
Forbidden. Reason we are not allowed to contact you. You are danger to other galaxies.
What about God? Do you have a god?
Explain.
An all-powerful being. A force underlying everything.
Electromagnetic forces underlying all.
No, l mean an intelligent force… God.
Electromagnetic force intelligent. Matter, space, time: all the same.
All the same?
Different names. lnfinity. lnfinity is God. God infinity. All the same.
Of course, as with many science fiction movies of the sixties, a crowd gathers, and the military arrive to deal with ‘this monster’.
You people of this planet, you must not use force.
l do not see you, but l receive your brain patterns.
l have told you not to use force. Now warn you there are powers in the universe beyond anything you know. There is much you have to learn. You must explore. You must reach out. Go to your homes. Go and give thought to the mysteries of the universe.
l will leave you now…in peace.
Probably the most improbable part of the story is that the townspeople do go home to give thought to the mysteries of the Universe…
Then the closing narration:
“The planet Earth is a speck of dust, remote and alone in the void. There are powers in the universe inscrutable and profound. Fear cannot save us. Rage cannot help us. We must see the stranger in a new light – the light of understanding. And to achieve this, we must begin to understand ourselves, and each other.”
Words we need to hear now.
I was at my cousin’s house, in my early teens; possibly younger, when I saw the movie on TV that has stuck with me for something like 50 years:
First Contact; with Klaatu and Gort:
Gort is in the back; the low-tech rubber-covered ‘robot’ who acts as ‘Dirty Harry’ for the Universe. The cop who enforces justice upon the inhabitants of Space. The Earth had become too violent; Klaatu had come to warn us that if we were going to continue in our efforts to spread our violence beyond our home planet, there would be consequences…
I imagine that there is a string of warning beacons surrounding our Solar System, warning all other beings to avoid this place, because we are infected with the disease of greed and violence. Watch 15 minutes of the PBS Newshour. World-wide greed and violence.
With some moments of hope that we can become more than we are now.
My hope is that it isn’t just science fiction.
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Chronicles in Ordinary Time 