Edd Cartier: the Interplanetary Zoo (Final...)

One year ago I wrote an entry on Edd Cartier's work. Cartier was a science fiction illustrator in the 'golden age' of SF. I had seen a drawing of an alien being from his hand in the seventies, and that made a lasting impression. His most intriguing aliens were drawn for a chapter in a book called 'The Interplanetary Zoo' by David Kyle. A year ago I found a collection of the drawings from that book on a Japanese site, from which I copied them and removed the yellow backgrounds. Since then I have showed some of his remarkable creatures on my blog (here, here and very recently as well), reasoning that some things are so good that they need to be nibbled rather than gulped down. On the off-chance that there might be something new on Edd Cartier I typed his name in once more, and was surprised by the large number of hits. It turns out that Mr Cartier died last December at the age of 94. Apparently, his death resulted in a large increase in the attention devoted to his work and life. A bit sad that it took his death to bring that on, but at least there is more of his work to find now. Those who are interested in his illustrations for 'The Shadow' and similar works can do a search of their own or try their luck starting here or here. But a real treasure of illustrations of 'The Interplanetary Zoo' can be found on a website by a Mr. Door Tree called "Golden Age Comic Book Stories". The relevant entry is of August 30, 2008. It has no less than 16 of these illustrations, and in an enormous size too. The quality is much better that the ones I had found. Of course, I immediately proceeded to store them for my own amusement. Here, I will show you two of them, and add a little discussion of their biomechanical properties.

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Walking on tentacles! That is a subject covered in detail in this blog, ending here, so let's not go into that again. But what an intriguing shape. The creature looks quite bulky, and his nether end with the short walking tentacles looks a bit underpowered. We will have to assume that this creature lives on a low-gravity world, or else tentacles will not function properly. There are no arms I can see (but perhaps it has them folded on its back?), but its proboscis ends in three tentacles. The middle one is long and ends in two fingers, so it looks like it would be useful as a manipulative tool. I take that as an additional indication that it lives on a low-gravity world, where it is easier to get away with boneless appendages than on a medium- or high-gravity world. The purple things look like eyes; they might be of the compound type, shared by many of Earth's creatures and by Furahan hexapods. Unfortunately, compound eyes have inbuilt problems limiting their resolution, so if they are to be good, they better be big. This creature has big ones, so it probably needs good vision. The bulkiness bothers me a bit, as low gravity allows a spindly build such as arthropods and spiders have on Earth. But allowing it is not the same as it being better, so perhaps there are other features that determine the evolutionary likelihood of being spindly versus compact than gravity. Any views on that?

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The colours make it slightly difficult to work out the three dimensional character of this being, but you can see it is a tetrapod looking back over its shoulders towards the right. The four limbs are spindly and equipped with long fingers and toes, giving it a feel like a race hound. The only thing wrong with that view might be the odd stance of the hind limbs. They are very columnar and do not visibly bend in the zigzag manner typical of Earth's mammals. Than zigzag bend is there for a reason; if gravity would be the only consideration, all legs would look like those of elephants: columns! The other reasons probably fall under the heading of manoeuvrability and speed. Otherwise, a beautiful design. The red thing is probably an eye. Just one eye does not provide much in the way of a safety margin for diseases etc., and this one does not look as if it provides all-round vision. This animal better have some superior other senses as well. Perhaps it has; its tentacles might be well-equipped with sense organs, or olfactory organs, or perhaps both. Oh yes, the same reasoning for tentacles applies as above, but tentacles dangling down may function much better than tentacles you need to stand on. The elephant's trunk is an example of a danglinfg tentacle, and that works pretty well. I think that this will be the last of my blog entries on Edd Cartier, unless something unexpected comes along. For one thing, I have no idea what the text was these images were meant to illustrate. I have not found any mention of that yet, but if it does come along, there might be a postscript.

One year on

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I started this blog on April 22, 2008, or almost a year ago. Has it been a success? Hard to tell, really. How do you judge the success of a blog? by the number of readers? In that case I should probably write about religion, politics and sex, preferably in combination. That suggests it might be more to the point to ask how you judge success of a blog devoted to speculative biology from the viewpoint of one person's particular take on the subject? You can't; suffice it to say that so far I like the number of visitors, which is growing, and like writing entries.

There were 39 entries in one year, not counting this one. Not exactly once a week, but not bad, I think. On May 19 last year I made a list of things I needed to learn in order to produce a good book on Furaha. Here they are again, with some comments:

* Photoshop: I use it regularly now, and am getting better, but still haven't really used it to paint.
* Blender: Nothing yet...
* Indesign: Yes! I am getting the hang of it.
* More species: Yes, but nothing detailed
* Cladograms: No, and at present they do not strike me as very useful.
* Textures: Yes! The astronomy page is proof of that.

And of course there are some things I did not foresee one year ago:
* Interesting contacts with several people, not just in the comments, but behind the scenes as well.
* Working on the blog takes away time from working on Furaha; hmmm...

To finish off and to celebrate, I will throw in a few images. The image at the top of this post was made as an experiment for a forum heavy on map making. Just for fun.
And some more:

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This is an Uther, a sophont from Epona. There's something in the wind about Epona...


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Surely you did not think I had forgotten the Interplanetary Zoo by Edd Cartier? The store of brilliant images hasn't dried up yet.

The Interplanetary Zoo III

More Edd Cartier! Once again, you can see that there were some really good aliens 50 years ago.

This time, it's a ballont. A what? You heard, a ballont. Or perhaps the word is new to you, as well it might be, seeing I invented it. It is meant to describe all lifeforms that fly, or float as the case may be, due to being lighter than air. All heavier-than-air flyers are labeled 'avians', even if they do not look particularly like Terran birds. Terran insects are avians too in exobiological jargon, like it or not.

Do ballonts make any physical sense? At first glance, they might not, seeing how on Earth man made balloons have to be enormous to lift just one human up into the air. Could such a design be made out of living tissue? In that case the lifting gas inside, no matter whether it is a light gas or hot air, would have to be supplied by the animal. That is no mean feat, and would probably require a significant energy expenditure, requiring heavy organs, making it impossible to lift them, etc. Even if the sac itself were made of dead tissue, not requiring any energy, and if the lift would be generated passively, for instance by being kept hot in some way by the sun (by being pitch black perhaps?) there still is the problem that there is virtually no way to move against the wind.

No, the thing is to adapt the circumstances rather then the organism. Would you consider a fish as a ballont? Probably not, but you would be wrong conceptually (you would be literally right, as fishes do not fly in air). If the fish has a swim bladder, it manages to float passively in the sea; it does so because it, as a whole, is just as heavy as water. And yet the fish itself, with its bones and its muscles, is made of material heavier than water. It is the swim bladder that is much much lighter than water, being filled with air. The combination allows the lifting forces supplied by the swim bladder to balance the sinking forces due to its heavy body: the fish floats...

The reason why fishes work and ballonts do not (really) resides in differences in mass: the fish isn't much heavier than water, but its bladder is much lighter than water. That's why a small bladder can lift a big fish in water. For a human in a balloon, the human is much heavier than the air, while the contents of the 'bladder', the balloon, are only a bit lighter than the air. Hence, an anormous balloon is needed.

The lesson is that ballonts will work better in heavy gases. That's why SF authors have them floating in gas giants. In the Furaha universe, ballonts in gas giants are so ubiquitous that people are completely bored by them. "Oh no, not another documentary on ballonts..."

Having ballonts on a terrestrial planet, a Gaean such as Furaha, that is a novelty. On the website there is I think as yet only one, on the splash screen. I am afraid to do the math, as I am afraid I will have to strike them from creation, and I rather like them.

Look at Cartier's ballont. You can see he understood the metabolic difficulties of the design: the limbs are frail and light, and most of the animal is in fact no more than a sac. You could probably work out the heaviness of its atmosphere by comparing the volume of the sac with the mass of the rest of the body. Fairly heavy, I would say; definitely not living on a Gaean.

The Interplanetary Zoo II

It's time to bring another of Edd Cartier's wonderful drawings back(I've found about 10, so we haven't run our yet)

Now thís is really an odd design. People who design alien lifeforms often try to get away from the shapes we know to enhance the alien nature of their designs. I have my doubts how far you take take that line of thinking, because biomechanics will work the same all over the universe. If you wish to swim, streamlining is efficient, given certain characteristics of size, density of the fluid, etc., etc. Leave that as it may be for the moment, and approach the problem from a different angle: perhaps an alien design works as such if you cannot immediately work out what the general build of the animal is. If you wonder 'how does this thing work?', then the designer may be onto something.

Like the previous one, this creature seems to have a rotund body slung between two walking limbs. The limbs divide in separate parts, but that is nothing novel: our legs also end is toes, and the prototypical arthropod limb also is 'biramous', meaning it has two branches. But this one is slightly different, in that the split into 'toes' happens fairly high op the limb itself, so the 'toes' take on an aspect of legs themselves. They seem capable of somewhat independent motion. If our legs would split into two separate 'leglets' at the level of our knees, would we say that we had two lower limbs or four?

Never mind, but the point is that this is a shape that takes some study before you start to see how it works. As such, it's delightfully alien.

Edd Cartier

Every once in a while I will show a painting or a drawing of an alien, a dinosaur or other extinct life forms that I find particularly appealing.

The first one is a drawing by Edd Cartier. I first saw it in the late seventies in a book called 'Science Fiction Ideas and Dreams' by David Kyle. The legend simply said 'Two aliens drawn by Edd Cartier for "The Interplanetary Zoo" in the Gnome Press anthology'. I wondered for a very long time how many such animals were in that book, other than the two I could find.

Today, of course, Google helps: The drawing appeared in a 1951 book called 'Travelers in Space'. here is the cover as shown on Wikipedia.


A page by David Kyle on his career in SF resulted in the following: 'I collaborated with Edd Cartier in several ways, the best being the illustrations for my story of the "Interplanetary Zoo"; this was an interesting project because the full color signature or folio in the anthology Travelers of Space was actually done from black-and-white drawings. All color was laid in by a talented printing plant technician who worked with me for the final results.' That is interesting, since it shows that the original drawing must have been in black and white.

More searching revealed a number of drawings from the book on a Japanese site.
The drawings there all have a very strong yellow background, which was not present in the book I first saw the drawing in, so I guessed it was a later addition. I mostly took the yellow away again, which brings the colours out more.


I still find this creature very appealing: it looks pensive and rather serious. Somehow it doesn't actually look very alien to me, or is that simply because I have known the image for long enough to have become familiar with it? Much as I like it, from a biomechanical point of view it is odd. What seem to be arms and legs at first glance turns out to be just one pair of limbs. These are attached to the body with what look like shoulders. In effect, the large head and small rump are suspended between these limbs. The creature must be top-heavy, and it can't have been a very elegant walker. The legs are wide apart, and it doesn't look as if its hands (feet?) can bend inwards enough to be placed directly underneath the body. That's a pity, because if you cannot do that, and still want to walk around on two feet, waddling is the only way.

Its restful appearance might be ruined if it starts to walk: it will probably draw laughs for the same reasons waddling ducks and penguins do (why is that, by the way?).