Now that the Furaha book is in the publisher's hands, I can use the time I used to spend on new Furaha paintings on something else. That something may well involve more blog-related activities, but I am not yet certain about that; time stays precious.
But there are a few things I have wanted to do for some time, and one is an interview with C. M. Kösemen - Cevdet Mehmet Kösemen. I have known Mehmet a long time, mostly through the internet, but we've also met in person a few times. People interested in speculative biology will know Mehmet's project to depict and describe life forms on his fictional planet Snaiad. If you do not know the project, please have a look at the current Snaiad website and the Wikipedia page.
The interview was conducted as a written dialogue. To simplify reading, my text is shown in italics with Mehmet's responses in normal type.
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Mehmet, does the word 'Snaiad' mean anything?
I wish I could give a profound answer, but I only came up with this name because it sounded interesting. The name ’Snaiad’ derives from an earlier childhood sketch where I drew animals from a planet called Snai-3. When I decided to compile Snaiad into a project I adopted this name because I wanted something that would be unique in web searches.
I wish I would have thought of that; I came up with 'Furaha' after I had visited East Africa. At the time, the word 'Furaha' was very rare on the internet, but of course the word in its original Swahili meaning is much more present now. What draws you to speculative biology art rather then, say, wildlife art or palaeoart?
Wildlife art or dinosaur art always creates a subtle sense of anxiety in me, because in those forms of art, the aim is to be accurate and realistic. Anyone who has tried to paint a living organism will quickly learn that it is very easy to make mistakes, and the 'uncanny valley' is very easy to fall into. In contrast, speculative evolution is a fun and carefree domain of art. If you make any mistakes, they can quickly be turned into features and you can actually create new concepts from such mistakes. I think the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor said it best when he said: 'How enjoyable, how very enjoyable and luxurious it is, suddenly to emerge from the stern labyrinth of fact onto these dawn-lit uplands of surmise!'
I see; I agree that painting animals on other planets allows you more freedom than, say, painting elephants. But you have done palaeoart; in 'All yesterdays', Darren Naish, John Conway and you elevated creative ideas about dinosaurs to a new and more fun view of palaeoart. But at the same time palaeoart seems to become more rigid in that there is a strong emphasis on correct anatomical proportions, so in that sense palaeoart is not 'carefree'.
True - even when you are freestyling in palaeoart, there is a nagging sense in the back of your mind that you are making a mistake somewhere.
How do the shapes of Snaiadi lifeforms come into being? Do they start with doodles that look interesting, or are they based on biological characteristics and principles? Or, as I expect, a hybrid procedure?
Usually I have brought outlines of body plans and clades in my head. I just think about one and start doodling randomly. I produce small doodles usually no bigger than a few centimetres in size. If I like any of these doodles, I enlarge them by scanning and printing them and create a second magnified sketch based on the first. This goes on that way for two more iterations until I have the base layout for a complete organism ready. And then I sit down and draw, draw, draw. This said, there have been times when I have just sat down with a blank piece of paper and created a completely new creature out of nothing -no sketches, no studies-, just the finished creature flowing out of my pen onto the paper. This is a rare phenomenon, but when it happens, it is always wonderful. Actually, some of the most memorable Snaiad creatures have been created this way.
Can you give us an example of one such creature?
Actually, the first few iconic Snaiad creatures came into being with this spontaneous process. Especially Kahydron and the Allotaur were spontaneous creations. Maybe a greater creative urge guided my hand there because they formed the basis of many creatures which followed.
How much of the physical background of Snaiad have you worked out? Is it a generally Earth-like world in terms of gravity, composition and biochemistry?
Unfortunately, I am not well enough versed in physics, chemistry and interplanetary mechanics to work out Snaiad’s exact details. So I am conservative and keep the planet as a roughly Earth-like, slightly larger world with a different arrangement of hydrocarbon protein analogues. Some of the more erudite fans of the project have pitched in with their ideas about Snaiad’s planetary dynamics and biochemistry, and in due time I might canonise their versions of how things work.
I agree; in fact, Furaha was consciously designed as an Earth-like planet for artistic reasons, as I wrote recently; no-one knows what a methane lake looks like from a viewpoint on its shores, but everyone immediately recognises all visual effects of water.
I think both of us primarily focused on the creatures so we don’t 'look under the hood' of the planet so much :)
Indeed; I do like to look 'under the hood' of Furahan organisms as far as their biomechanics are concerned, but I am much less bothered by their biochemistry, the atmosphere etc.
Most Speculative Biology worlds choose not to present many pages of insectoids or small plants, which is understandable. But a wider view might be interesting. Will you be showing examples of plants or the plant / animals in-betweens that live on Snaiad?
Actually, yes, there will be many pages of boring animals, small insect-like things and other creatures that live in the undergrowth. This is one of the neater things about nature. For every charismatic species, there are many 'boring' drab animals and commonplace related species that are hard to tell apart. For examples, if you look at a field guide to mammals of any region, you will see page after page of rodents and bats. The most unassuming animals are usually the most diverse. On Snaiad, there will be many small creatures that fill the niches of insects and other invertebrates and I am having a great time drawing them all, no matter how boring and insignificant.
Great! I love that idea. On your website you describe main groups of vertebrate analogues, but there do not seem to be invertebrates on that page yet. Does that mean the eventual book will contain different clades of invertebrates, each with a completely different Bauplan? If so, can you tell us anything about these completely new animal clades? By the same token, how about plant- or fungus-like clades? Do you already have a store of drawings of such life forms?
Yes, there will be many pictures of different clades from these additional phyla - especially a lot from the fish-like Arthrognaths. In some cases there will be wildly different body plans within a single phylum. Here are some sneak previews - stay tuned for more. There will also be lots of drawings of plants - good thing they are easier to draw and invent.
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| Click to enlarge; copyright CM Kösemen: "I am also working on illustrations of human colonists and non-diagrammatic, environmental scenes - stay tuned!" |
I am curious to see what you will come up with! Why did you decide to have people on Snaiad? Are they there to provide observers of the animals, or do they have their own stories?
I think people need a frame of reference to understand natural history. I want the Snaiad project to 'stand up on its two feet' like an actual book of natural history written on another planet. Thus I needed to have a human society to research and make sense of the animals on that world.
Of course, with our current understanding of the universe, travel to another planet and colonising it is flat-out impossible. But I have written a creative caveat around that and I think you will all be surprised when you read it. The presence of a human society interacting with the creatures on Snaiad also allows me to write many interesting stories about animals which I think will be very interesting to readers.
Once again, I followed the exact same reasoning for Furaha. In fact, my very first blog post about Furaha discussed why I decided to have humans on the planet in the first place.
On the Snaiad site, you speak of 'vertebrates' between quotation marks. The animals are of course not Earth vertebrates, but they have vertebrae.
Yes, they have backbones that resemble vertebrae as a result of convergent evolution. Differently from earth, Snaiad’s vertebrates have bones made out of hydrocarbons rather than calcium. In that respect, they are more like wood than bones.
That is interesting! You may find statements that bone is 'generally' stronger than wood, but 'generally' may not be useful in this context. Some Earth woods resemble cortical bone while others resemble more porous bone. Suppose Snaiadi 'woodbone' is as strong as vertebrate bone for the same volume. If it is like oak wood, it would weigh roughly 65% of the same volume of bone. Are Snaiadi vertebrates significantly lighter than their Earth analogues? I ask because I cannot help myself thinking about the mechanical consequences: swimming animals may need heavy 'swim weights', not light swim bladders! Likewise, flight may evolve much more readily. The ramifications are fascinating.
I think the density of bones is as variable as the density of bones or wood on our own planet. Now that you mentioned this, I will need to work around some solutions for how to derive bones that sink from this hydrocarbon-based tissue. The key visual I had while designing this concept was the possibility of bones that could burn and would fossilise harder.
I hadn't though of burning or fossilisation... Mind you, the relative mass of a skeleton typically increases with body size, so the weight gain would be most pronounced for very large animals. That would allow you to make them larger than their Earth analogues. Big flying animals might be much more feasible than on Earth. Snaiadi 'avians' might look down on Azhdarchids, for instance.
Most animals you show are drawn as side or front views. I would really love to see the animals in perspective view doing something in their natural surroundings. Will there be something like that in the book?
There will be some drawings of natural scenes and more indirect perspectives, but I just like the diagrammatic representation so much. So most of the creatures will be rendered in that style.
You do that exceptionally well, so the book will be the better for it. But please do some landscapes...
Alright, there will be some landscapes. Perhaps I could commission another artist to do them, giving them the schematics of my side-view drawings.
Will the Snaiad book be published by a regular book publisher, or are you going to publish it yourself, through Amazon or something similar? Can you give us an approximate publication date?
Publishing is a very tumultuous world at the moment, so there is no guarantee on how Snaiad will be published. In the worst case, I will publish it through Amazon self publishing, but of course I would be honoured if a respectable publisher picked it up. If anyone picks up an interest for Snaiad through this interview, please let me know. At the moment I cannot give you a precise publication date, but I can assure you that almost every day new creatures and classes are being produced for Snaiad. I want to create a magnum opus, a work that generations can enjoy so I am taking my time and looking in for the long run. Thanks to everybody for their patience.
Teşekkürler! (Thank you!)
Esas ben teşekkür ederim, iyi günler! (The pleasure is mine – have a lovely day!)
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Mehmet sent me a very large number of images, which is wonderful. However, I ran intro trouble putting all of them in one post, so what you see is just a first batch; the remainder is to follow shortly!
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| Copyright CM Kösemen: "One of the refurbished, herbivorous Allotaurs." |
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| Copyright CM Kösemen: "Illustration of a 'pitcher serpent' - one of the many new snake-like lineages." |
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| Copyright CM Kösemen: "A novel relative of kahydrons and pescidons." |
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| Copyright CM Kösemen: "A fast-swimming mullojiform with a flattened, fish-like body-plan. One of the many different clades of 'fish' on Snaiad." |
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| Copyright CM Kösemen: "Another mullojiform - a terrestrial, tree-climbing species with no exact comparable analogue on Earth." |