THE INSANE AI / HUMAN HYBRID CREATED BY CONCEPT ART (2)
Faith V Fear in 'Salem's Lot
Last week I started to discuss my discovery of actual sci-fi concept artists' work on the internet, and in particular Ben Mauro. In particular he had produced an image (the front view of the one above) that showed a machine / human hybrid that I loved. It's in his Altered Carbon section.
Altered Carbon, by the author Richard K. Morgan, is one of my favorite science fiction novels. Ben had drawn a painting of a man’s head, but where the eye should be, there was a metal plate. I was struck by the external human appearance hiding an interior reworking of the body.
I’m also a huge fan of the original Blade Runner (well, d’uh). But one thing I’ve always had an issue with in that film was replicants being exact re-creations of humans, only better. It seemed to me in a world of flying cars and artificial intelligences, humans and machines will become evermore interlinked, not remain separate entities. (Yeah, I get the idea that replicants are manufactured biological machines, but if technology had progressed enough to manufacture such advanced beings, surely that tech would have grown outward to affect other aspects of society as well?)
I had already written the part in This Automatic Eden where Alice visits Charles Takamatsu’s research laboratory (I won't say anymore in case of spoilers), but I recognized Ben’s painting would fit perfectly into that abattoir of horrors. I contacted him the next day and bought the rights to use the image for a book cover.
While I have no regrets, I acted in haste. Arg.
The more I understood publishing the more I realized I needed my covers to be part of a cohesive series, not one offs, and it was unlikely my next book cover would require a portrait. So I haven’t used that illustration yet, instead I pinned it to my desk and went back and added this creature to This Automatic Eden.
Then he/it invaded my dreams.
Who was he before this?
What was he capable of?
What did he do now?
And so, over time, I named him Low-Bar and included him in The Paradise Factory and then the Contact Binary short story.
Another inspiration for Low-Bar’s character was the vampire Barlow from Stephen King's novel Salem’s Lot. (As to what, or how, that feeds into the Cortex series you’ll have to read Book 3, The Genesis Engine 😇 )
The make-up effects are weak with this one . . . Barlow from the 1979 Salem's Lot TV show. I pooped my pants as a 9 year old watching this 😆
As well as watching the TV show, I read the actual book ten-years later as a student in London.
I vividly remember sitting in my small bedroom with the glamor of mid-afternoon Notting Hill coming through the window, yet being terrified by what I was reading. The scene that hooked me was (Salem’s Lot spoilers!) the confrontation between Barlow and the priest Callahan, the one from the video above.
It was the culmination of many story threads, and a moment of great success and failure for the priest. That Callahan becomes a major figure in the Dark Tower series was a fantastic surprise for me, as decades after reading Salem’s Lot I was still disturbed by what happened to him...
I still find 'Salems' Lot to be the scariest book I've ever read. As for movies, well, it has to be this one:
You really, really shouldn't look into open Alien eggs if you find any 👽
I'd love to know which book, TV show or movie scared you the most! Send me an email and let's chat! The next page is going to discuss how the NYPD deal with riots in a city with 20+ million homeless and desperate people . . . its a good one!