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[danbensen]

Pictured are some of the autotrophes of Petrolea. Titan is too far from the sun for photosynthesis to be effective. Instead, native mechanoid life harnesses wind power, ultimately drawing power from the tidal effects of Saturn on Titan's atmosphere. Energy not used immediately is stored as the liquid hydrocarbons that give Petrolea its name.

Read Petrolea, on Patreon, Royal Road, and Substack.

[danbensen]

Cadurcodon ardynensis was an odd-toed ungulate that lived in what is now Mongolia during the late Eocene, about 37-34 million years ago.

It was around 2m long (6'6") and, despite its very tapir-like appearance and lack of horns, it was actually closer related to modern rhinoceroses – it was part of a group of early rhino-cousins known as amynodontids, which convergently evolved both hippo-like and tapir-like lifestyles.

Cadurcodon was the most tapir-like of the tapir-like amynodontids, with a short deep skull and retracted nasal bones that indicate it had a well-developed prehensile trunk. Males also had large tusks formed from their upper and lower canine teeth, which may have been used for fighting each other.

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References:

Averianov, Alexander, et al. "A new amynodontid from the Eocene of South China and phylogeny of Amynodontidae (Perissodactyla: Rhinocerotoidea)." Journal of Systematic Palaeontology 15.11 (2017): 927-945. https://doi.org/10.1080/14772019.2016.1256914

Громова, В. [Gromova, V.] Болотные носороги (Amydontidae) Монголии. [Swamp rhinoceroses (Amynodontidae) of Mongolia.] Trudi Paleontol. Inst., Akad. Nauk SSSR 55:85-189 (1954) https://www.geokniga.org/books/13983

Prothero, Donald R., and Robert M. Schoch. Horns, tusks, and flippers: the evolution of hoofed mammals. JHU Press, 2002. http://www.rhinoresourcecenter.com/pdf_files/141/1415340780.pdf

Wall, William P. "Cranial evidence for a proboscis in Cadurcodon and a review of snout structure in the family Amynodontidae (Perissodactyla, Rhinocerotoidea)." Journal of Paleontology (1980): 968-977. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1304363

Wikipedia contributors. “Amynodontidae.” Wikipedia, 17 Dec. 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amynodontidae

Wikipedia contributors. “Ergilin Dzo Formation.” Wikipedia, 12 Feb. 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergilin_Dzo_Formation

[danbensen]

Here's my entry for the spectacular #Refugium2024 contest, arranged by @simon-roy on the occasion of his comic Kickstarter!

Because there were five different clades to choose from, I ultimately picked the photosynthetic "pentaped". It wasn't my first choice, though, as I love the idea of the crustacean-like "skilloids", but the five-legged plant animals seemed like they could be a hell of a challenge. So here is the Helioceros (aka Cherubic Pentaped), an alpine species that stores and uses sunlight as an energy source and for displaying behavior.

Hope you like it! And hey, do not forget to support the Refugium comic! Not every day do we come across projects as cool as this!

[danbensen]

The Crone's Mantle

Traipsing through the marshy lowlands of Western Altamira's south, one may come across an unusual member of the pentapoda, colloquially known as the Crone's Mantle.

This shallow-water specialist, standing 7 feet tall at the peak, spends the warm months similarly to most large pentapods, feeding on water plants and drawing much of its energy from the sun. Come the shorter days of the cold season, however, the Mantle seeks a different source of energy.

Conserving what limited energy it can draw from sunlight during the short days, the Mantle roots itself in place along shallow stretches of rivers and streams. Its unusual downturned sails create shade that attract small squilloids, which, upon sensing the movement with its bristly legs, are snatched out of the water with its anterior appendage and flung into the Mantle's ventral mouth.

The Mantle shares its home with a variety of semiaquatic rasps, wading terrestrial squilloids and - most notably - predatory grapplers. The slow-moving Mantle defends itself with loud trumpeting from two respiratory organs atop its conical back, and if that's not enough, its ventral sails secrete a foul-tasting oil that deters most predators.

Hopefully not too late @simon-roy

[danbensen]

Now I’m only antiquated to the WEBTOON comics but I noticed amongst the Griz Grobus sequel lore book there was a tidbit on Hive-men, I’m assuming that was a bit of a reference to Humanity Lost? And if it’s alright can you go into more on this lore?

Ah this is an interesting wrinkle - not to toot my own horn too loud, but by god, my hive men predate humanity lost by a good few years!

They first arose while I was working on Prophet and collaborating with my friend Matt Sheean on a story about hive-men on mars, back in 2013 (that never quite materialized into a solid story)- with the main thrust of the tale being not about the hive as an inexorable mindless mass, enslaved to a queen (which is the usual villainous hive depiction), but with the hive as a sort of beneficial, eusocial, communitarian approach to living on a hostile world - contrasted well against the individualistic, identitarian and ultranationalistic worldviews of the earthmen trying to conquer them. (Ive read enough sci fi with the same mindless hive army...)

(below - one of matts drawings for the hive city)

But their first visual appearance of my version was sometime in 2015, i think, for the Island magazine cover posted below. (Trade between baseline humans of some type and the hive men, goods being carried by silk-line to the great dyson tree...)

The first tale of the hive men i made (second ever story on my patreon) was drawn in 2017, and covers a dyson-tree habitat (in this case, grown around the comet hale-bopp) encountering a voracious organism of the void:

The latest story of the hive-men, drawn in 2021, is about an interloper earthman, a deserter from an invading army, who has found a new living among the martian hive-people, in a story called "A Portrait of the Artist as Hive Parasite" (colored by my longterm collaborator, Sergey Nazarov - without him i would wither and perish)

These stories can be found on my patreon, and they'll also be showing up in print (at some point, probably next year) once I get my next short story collection sorted. Hell, they'll probably end up online on webtoons soon enough, too!

[danbensen]

From my Patreon

Dungeon Meshi - Every Thursday my life is a little brighter because there's a new episode of Dungeon Meshi. I describe the premise like this: "in order to cut costs, the leader of a dungeon-crawling team doesn't pack food. Instead, they'll eat monsters." It's like watching an NHK documentary about cooking, and the creator really knew her biology. My only complaint is the gore, which means I can't watch this show with my kids.

[danbensen]

I second Bruce Sterling's Distraction.

The idea of logging on a colonized alien planet brings my mind back to the planet Lalonde from Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn books - a world that had very hard wood as its only meaningful export, and was also stuck developing its economy from agriculturalism (due to investment shortages, though).

All this is to say - Hey! What are some foundational inspirations for your sci fi verse? You gotta have some like recommendations of classic or older sci-fi for us, right? What are some of your suggestions of books and authors to read?

OK SO - My sci-fi tastes have sort of ended up in some very specific niches. Growing up, I was a Larry Niven +Jerry Pournelle man, in part because my dad amassed a huge collection of their books - then gave 90% of them away before i was old enough to read them. So one of my teenage missions was rebuilding that library, trash and all!

Stuff like Footfall, Ringworld, Gil "The Arm" Hamilton, Protector (yes i attempted to name a comic series similarly, and paid for it) "The Mote in God's Eye"... you name it, I read fuckloads of these books. And while they tend to land on a sort of human chauvinist "mankind will win based on his inherent adaptive human-ness, and the aliens will fail because of their rigid alien-ness", this shit was very foundational to me.

Their more collaborative series, The Man-Kzin Wars and War World, also loom large in my teenage mind. The Man-Kzin wars are super fun - humans meet a race of tiger-men, and go from being NWO peaceniks to roughneck cat-skinners in a generation! PEACE AND LOVE WONT DEFEAT TIGER MEN!

Similarly, war world (like lots of that 70s/80s military sci fi) was a sort of catch-all for western military nerds to play with their favorite factions - it was a planet where all the un-ruleable ethnic groups and nationalities had been deported by the authoritarian earth government, and left to rot... until a race of genetically engineered fascist super men land on the world, and start trying to rule the place. Pretty fun shit.

As I got older, I turned hard into William Gibson, and read the absolute shit out of both the Neuromancer trilogy and the Bridge trilogy, as well as his short stories. Bruce Sterling was part of that wave for me, too, and I religiously sought his old paperbacks out too. In terms of novels, "Distraction" is my favorite coherent Sterling Novel - though the short stories in the "Schismatrix" novel/collection of his remain my absolute favorite space opera pieces.

At this age, too, I found my top-top fave Sterling Stories - "Taklaman" and "Bicycle Repairman", both gritty pseudo-cyberpunk stories of the highest degree, in this collection:

This thousand-plus page collection of short stories and novellas was basically my bible for a few years - i put sticky notes on each story i loved and meant to return to, until the book was so festooned with sticky note bookmarks i abandoned the practice altogether. If you have the chance, just buy this book and chew on it for a few years.

As i got into my 20s, Charles Stross became my lode star - his books like Accelerando and Glasshouse were total game changers for me. They come with their own peculiarities, but I loved his transhuman/posthuman musings (or at least i was obsessed with his stuff for a good few years - the venn diagram of his obvious interests and my own overlapped enough that his books were great fodder for a growing sci-fi loving brain).

But since then, my main literary squeeze has been the great man, JACK VANCE. Working on Prophet, my friend @cmkosemen made a remark about how much the early issues of the series reminded him of a book series called "Planet of Adventure" or "the Tschai Cycle", by Jack Vance. The book has a beautifully simple setup - a man from an entirely undescribed spacefaring human civilization crash-lands onto a weird planet. But on that planet, he finds four separate civilizations, each who possess a population of enslaved humans, culturally and physically molded to the needs of their masters. And each book of this series covers our generic hero's interactions with each bizarre expoitative culture. I was extremely intrigued.

Soon thereafter, I found my current absolute favorite book - "THE DRAGON MASTERS". A book about an isolated medieval world... which gets visited, once every few generations, by a black pyramid starship, flown by a reptilian race known as the Greph. The greph capture humans to (surprise surprise) breed them into hyper specific slaves... who in turn become Greph-like in their thinking and demeanours. But the last time the BLACK PYRAMID landed, a bunch of angry medieval dudes stormed the thing, blew it up, and captured a bunch of greph... who became the breeding stock for a whole new human world of slave labour. By the time we meet this planet, the two rival lords of the human-populated regions have been breeding greph slave warriors, or "dragons", for generations, for combat against one another. But soon, the black pyramid will return...

I love this book I even spent a good few months during covid talking with the Vance Estate and several publishers about developing it into a graphic novel, but nobody could quite agree on how it could get made with old Simon getting a paycheque... so sadly it fell apart. There are concept drawings floating around my patreon and other corners of the internet. But one day I'll use 'em...

My other favorite books of his, to name a couple of the MANY books of his I love:

THE BLUE WORLD: A caste system of humans, descended from a crashed prison ship, live on floating settlements on an ocean planet, paying protection to a giant long-lived intelligent crustacean. But one man is tired of giving up all his crops to this tyrannical megafauna...

THE MIRACLE WORKERS: Rival lords on a planet descended to medieval tech (surprise surprise) fight using armies... and rival SORCERORS who employ the powers of suggestion to voodoo each others' warriors... but when facing non-human intelligences, these sorceror's skills fall short.

But there are heaps more, and I love most (thought not all) of the ones i've read. They're generally short, concise, and full of all sorts of bizarre bullshit.

THere are more books i've read and enjoyed in my life, of course, but these are the core ones that I think of when I think of my career as a sci-fi reader... let me know what your top recs are!

[danbensen]

An excerpt from the guidebook section of REFUGIUM, the new graphic novel @jordankwalker, Sergey Nazarov, and myself have been slaving over this past year! Jordan was the main xenobiological art director on this project, and his words and pictures are entwined with the core of the tale...

At a week in, our campaign for the hardcover print version of this story is standing at a whopping 175% funded, with over $44k CAD raised and 570 people backing us! If you're interested, head on over to the page for the kickstarter, here:

And if you're keen on it, we're holding an alien design contest for inclusion in the book - make an alien based on the clades outlined above, and post it with the hashtag #refugium2024 before friday, and you're set up to be included in the hardcover printing (and to get a free copy of the book yourself!)

[danbensen]

To commemorate the success of the campaign, and invite others to join in, we've kicked off a little impromptu alien design contest!

The timeline is a little tight for this (mainly because i want to get all our files to the printer before end of april, to expedite the process and ensure timely book delivery) but a week to doodle a critter, and maybe win a book in the process? It's crazy, but it might just work!

(note - posting your critter to tumblr works too). Any skill level, and multiple submissions welcome! 

To get you in the mood for designing critters, take a look at this new youtube video all about the planet of Altamira from the great Curious Archive:

And lastly, if this is all new to you, take a look at our campaign here!

[danbensen]

My Refugium creature design contest entry

It's one sharp float.

[danbensen]

From my Patreon

Queen of Angels by Greg Bear - Way back in high school, I listened to this audiobook narrated by the prolific genius George Guidall. He's still the best thing about this book, which I wouldn't have revisited except that a reporter for the Economist mentioned it. I thought I might have missed something the first time around, but no, it's still just as dull and pointless as before. There's a vague sketch of a plot and a vaguer glimmer of a theme. Something about where evil comes from? You could easily read the first and last three chapters and get everything important.  

[danbensen]

A Giant Forest Walker

[danbensen]

Hey everybody, go check out @simon-roy 's new book Refugium on Kickstarter! If Simon's reputation on its own somehow isn't enough to convince you to back it, there's a whole mini specbio guidebook with entries from me and like a ton of your other favorite artists probably.

Here are my little aliens without the text and weathered effects

[danbensen]

From my Patreon

One Bright Star to Guide Them by John C. Wright - I started this thinking it was a novel. It isn't. It's a novel's worth of plot condescend down into an accelerated summary, with most of the major plot points taking place off screen and related by the main character in his conversations with other characters. I can see what Wright was doing, but I wish he'd just told the story. Anyway, the story itself is fantastic. How do you drive away evil? What do you do once you've grown up? Wright actually answers those questions, and answers them well.

[danbensen]

The first of several stunning entries from the insurmountably great Linnea Sterte (aka @turndecassette2 ) for REFUGIUM - a burrowing pentaped, photosynthesizing from a safely half-buried position...

Take a look at the campaign here

[danbensen]

The incredible Sawyer Lee designed this marvelous creature for REFUGIUM's guidebook section - the Baro Grappler!

Take a look at the campaign here

[danbensen]

Pictured is an astronaut on Petrolea managing a tame Punisher. This smaller relative of the orca-sized Dragon is only the size of an eagle, and useful in capturing specimens. It flies on four rotor-embedded wings and uses its forelimbs to capture prey.

Read Petrolea for free on Patreon, Royal Road, and Substack.