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[simon-roy]

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

[simon-roy]

A bit of a last minute entry for @simon-roy’s refugium contest. I was pretty on the fence on if I should join but I decided why not! And it was a good excuse to try some new brush techniques.

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An excerpt from the Altamira Book of Wildlife

An illustration of a male Towering Snappler, so named for the snapping sounds accompanying their feeding. Snapplers are aberrant grapplers that have taken up high browsing niches. The same raptorial appendages of the family are also useful for grabbing and manipulating the branches of foliage, and so they fill a similar niche to many earthen high browsers such as elephants, chalicotheres, therizinosaurs, and sauropods. Towering Snapplers themselves average around 35-40 tons, which is a similar size range to some iconic Jurassic sauropods such as Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus. Snapplers sometimes come into conflict with some Pentapods over resources as they too can sometimes fill similar niches, but these rarely become full confrontations as the photosynthesis and bio-voltaics of Pentapods allows them to go longer between meals.

The raptorial arms manipulate and crush foliage and bark using their claws and grinding teeth that are similar to elephant teeth. Food is then shoved down their powerful beaks to be further processed in a large crop before fermenting in their gut.

Towering Snapplers typically live in herds mostly composed of females and young with a few males, and they communicate using signaling via their tail brush. Males have bright blue dewlaps, and since blue is a very expensive color in nature, brighter blues are a good sign of fitness. During breeding season only one dominant male may get breeding rights, and so males compete with each other. They flash their dewlaps at each other and raise their tail brushes high, and if that doesn’t decide a victor then they may engage in a “parallel march” like deer to gauge the size of their opponent. If either party still doesn’t back down then the last step is physically fighting with their raptorial appendages. This last step rarely happens, but it can escalate to the point of being fatal. Old experienced males are adorned with scars from previous battles. The male illustrated here has only just reached sexual maturity and lacks any scars.

[simon-roy]

Didn't think I'd have the time but got my entry for the refugium creature contest done! Down to the wire as usual. More info on the life cycle found below!

I wanted to do a fun Squilloid line, but as fun belly worms! The life cycle is the host eats the eggs which hatch inside the digestive tract, once there the young attack each other and any other parasites they find. They 'eat' through absorption through their tails so their mouth parts are only for clearing out their living space, as a result most hosts generally feel a lot better once they are infected. The fools!

Once the role of top worm has been decided, the individuals morphs into the feeding stage of their lifecycle. Their tail sprouts a multitude of fringes to aid in absorbing food and gas exchange, while the mouth parts remain for dealing with any would be room mates! This stage of their life is by far the longest, lasting decades.

The burrowing phase is where the fun begins, this sub adult form can be brought about by age, stress, or most commonly lack of space within the host. In this phase they begin swelling grotesquely and once they reach maximum size, turn their mouth upon their host. They chew their way out to the surface, sometimes resulting in death, sometimes not! But they only stop once they are able to smell open air and then settle in to begin their final metamorphosis.

The dispersal phase adults only live for a few days, climbing out of the wound created in their host to fly off and find suitable places to lay their eggs. If their host died during the last phase they will generally lay their eggs onto the body, but some are always out looking to lay a trap for the next poor unsuspecting creature.

Hope you enjoy! There are so many fun entries, def go check them out!

[simon-roy]

Cutting it close, but here's my entries for the Refugium Creature Design Contest! @simon-roy

The rasparoos are large dog-sized herbivores who leap in family groups along rolling temperate lichenfields, using grazing mandibles to scrape lichens off of rocky surfaces. During the fall season, they fatten up on sugary fermented “honey”-filled pinwheels produced in hives in their territory, obtained by breaking in with their claws and using a long prehensile radula to reach inside, to hibernate in the winter. They fight fiercely to protect these against rival rasparoo family groups. They fight with their clawed forearms, along with their more powerful hind-claws by leaning upright on their stiff tails.

Honey rings are social pinewheels that live in nests as colonies in temperate lichenfields. Their caste system includes workers, the smaller motile form who go out of the colony to collect vegetable matter during warmer seasons to ferment in their stomach acids and store as “honey” in the hive for the snowy seasons. The other caste are the reservoirs, who are blind, sessile and much larger than workers, with characteristic spiral body cavities to store a maximum amount of “honey”. Some of it seeps out of their bodies to stick with one another securely in the hive, aided by their gripping legs clinging to the walls of the hive.

I had a lot of fun with these guys! You can see concept sketches here because I think they're fun.

[simon-roy]

A BRIEF REMINDER:

The final order cutoff for the Image Comics edition of GRIZ GROBUS is TODAY! So if you're a comic book store owner, a independent bookstore manager, or anyone who reads comics, consider ordering the book!

What is Griz Grobus? Here, from the solicitation text:

On a distant planet, a prying scribe, a sentimental constable, and a mayor resurrect a sleepy town’s long-defunct priest-bot. But "Father Stanley" is not what he seems. Meanwhile, in another universe, a hungry wizard accidentally conjures a war-god into the body of a goose. These two intertwined tales make up GRIZ GROBUS, the hit Kickstarter graphic novel sensation now at Image Comics!

Perfect for fans of Hayao Miyazaki, Asterix, and Arthur C. Clarke, and readers 12 and up!

Arriving: June 5, 2024 Lunar Code: 0424IM239 ISBN: 9781534397866

Nice things other comics professionals have been saying about the book:

 "Griz Grobus' dual dovetailing narratives let us discover an alien world and a human heart, full of Ghibli style and the finest Tor-novella poise. The team creates a universe, and is generous enough to let us live there." —Kieron Gillen, The Wicked + The Divine, Die, Phonogram

"Rich, beautiful and very funny—one of my favorite comics. Get every book Simon makes." —Tonči Zonjić, Lobster Johnson, Who is Jake Ellis?

"Simon's worldbuilding skills are yet to be matched, but on top of that his stories are both crazy and profound!" —Carlos P. Valderrama, Giants

“It’s amazing. You won’t get a better world builder than Simon Roy. He’s taking us places and I am here for it. Do not miss this.” —Daniel Warren Johnson, Transformers, Do A Powerbomb, Wonder Woman: Dead Earth

"When Simon Roy announces a new book it's an event - and a must buy for me and anyone who loves the medium of words and pictures!!!” —Geoff Darrow, Shaolin Cowboy, Hard Boiled

“Simon Roy’s science-fiction embraces heady ideas of futurism while never forgetting for an instant the foibles and frailties of the humans that exist in it. Griz Grobus is no different—an alien world made lived-in and real by the very human characters who exist within it, where at the end of the day, a full belly is what is worth aspiring to. Another extraordinary piece of work, an addition to a growing body of modern classic science-fiction, Griz Grobus continues the trajectory that began with Habitat.” —Jed McKay, Avengers, Moon Knight, Doctor Strange

“Simon Roy has a way of making strange & alien worlds utterly charming. His world building is unique & filled with quirky characters I strangely want to eat with. AND—I really want an Elaphure.” —Ben Templesmith, 30 Days of Night

"Griz Grobus combines beautiful art and mystical storytelling with an intriguing look at humanity on a world half-alien, half-familiar. A sly and often funny take on the creation of new myths and the rediscovery of the past." —Adrian Tchaikovsky, Hugo and Nebula award winning author of the Children of Time series

"Seriously, it's the perfect kind of Ursula Le Ghibli world and I adore it. The right measure of everything from the writing to the art." —Goran Gligovic, Dagger Dagger, Company of the Eagle

PS - If any of this piques your interest, I'm also running a kickstarter campaign for the hardcover edition of REFUGIUM, - the sequel to this very book! If you or your customers enjoy Wayne Barlowe's strange creatures, or the work of Dougal Dixon, it might scratch a particular itch for you...

[simon-roy]

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!

[simon-roy]

At long last - Image comics has posted up the (updated) trailer for GRIZ GROBUS, coming out as a softcover this summer!

[simon-roy]

I've included one of my own critters here- a small heat-seeking predatory squilloid! BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY, Our alien design contest, #refugium2024 closes tomorrow! If you want a chance to get your own critter into the REFUGIUM Hardcover, post it ASAP!

And if you'd like to pre-order the graphic novel that will include all these critters, take a look here!

[simon-roy]

the pinwheel pentaped a divergent pentaped species who uses it's limbs as a method to generate energy. Really cool but because they necessitate so much metal in their biology they are incredibly rare even on the island they evolved on.

[simon-roy]

Holy shit Carlos is bringing the god-damn HEAT with this one!!!!

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!

[simon-roy]

Stella really is one of the most perfect Creatures ever I think. few can Creature as well as she

[simon-roy]

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!

[simon-roy]

#refugium2024

I ONLY JUST FOUND OUT ABOUT #refugium2024 TODAY SO I SPEEDRAN THIS ENTRY ASIJDFUDSHDISKASDN

This is a Willoh (short for "will-o'-the-wisp"), these pelagic squilloids live in the deep sea in large schools but at night travel up in the watern column following the movement of smaller animals and Altamiran zooplankton which they feed on.

their bioluminescence not only confuses predators as they swim in large schools in the dark, but also as social signalling to let other Willoh know where they are, their schools can be millions strong and comprise a significant part of Altamira's marine biomass.

[simon-roy]

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!

[simon-roy]

My contribution to @simon-roy 's Refugium Bestiary contest

[simon-roy]

Brasília

Architecture and design by Oscar Niemeyer

[simon-roy]

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!)