by Shaun Lawton
The subconscious mind is a funny thing. Pareidolia plays curious tricks on the eye. As in this image I managed to render during the beta run of DALL*E's Outpainting feature. There's a sort of KONG like narcissus silhouette thing going on that I like. But this is further outcropping generated randomly from the perimeters of the black and white pulp image taken directly out of a fall issue of Planet Stories, from 1946.
"With a soft padding of naked feet Sim's father ran across the cave."
Feeling very much like a creature doomed to be forgotten by time, I dig through the annals of legend and lore until I've uncovered the literary gems and poetic nuggets containing the core elements captured in a thriving interior world teeming with microscopic life in abundance.
Enough to satisfy my curiosity and hungry eye, the vivid illustration from the vintage Bradbury story The Creatures That Time Forgot afforded me the opportunity to fill in the missing upper left quadrant with an AI-assisted guesswork facsimile to fill in the space as best deemed fit by the parameters of the context.
I want to run the story as a nine part serialization in the Freezine, so the trick is generating nine (count 'em) images that could somehow justify stitching the whole thing together into a brand new presentation that more or less captures the spirit originally intended in the mid-forties. Just colorized and injected with a little post modern verve.
I can only imagine whatever little land-mines Ray dropped along the tributaries of his tale for those varied and sundry readers of today to tip toe around and hope not to get triggered by all that much in their carefree way. I barely have the time left in the day while editing it all together into it's nine respective parts to read the damn thing. This is the sort of thing I would say to Ray myself, were I to be placed in the envious spot of being his editor for some anthology or another, let's say. If I don't bust his chops whose chops can I bust, exactly? He's the modern forefather of dreams, the minister of hysteria, the cleric of carnivals, the usher of unease and deacon of despair, the writer most near and dear to my heart since I discovered him by reading stories from the Bantam paperback edition of The Illustrated Man I'd pulled down off my parent's book shelf when I was eleven years old.
The blue lagoon eye portion of this rendering eerily mirrors the blues and eye-shaped outline captured on the cover of my first collection The Cosmic Egg & Other Hatchlings. It's like two eyes coming up in the slots, a third and you might cash out. These signs and sigils line up with startling ease. The whole thing's mapped out before me just as easy as you'd please.
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