I’ve been making posters that, I’ve claimed, were from the First Interworld War. I’ve decided that, “really”, they’re from the Second Interworld War. The primary motivation for the change has been the realization that most of my inspirations are from WWII, not WWI. Also, this allows me to imagine, vaguely, that H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds was the First Interworld War. Here’s what I envision:

Wells’ Martians apparently did not have radio technology. It seems a pretty big lack, but who knows? Mars does not have a Heaviside layer, I believe, so the idea of long-distance transmission by radio might not have occurred to them. Also, there are signs that Well’s Martians were telepathic. If so, and if telepathy is not easily conveyed by electromagnetic fields, then they might never have gotten into that technology. If telepathy is then also short-ranged, we’d have the situation I want; to wit, that the Martians dying on Earth are unable to relay a warning about infection to the Martians at home. Since the Martians (justifiably) probably found it inconceivable that we resist their might, they might have kept chucking one or two cylinders a year as reinforcements, not knowing at first that the war was lost and later, not knowing why.

So, for the next decade or two, at random times spaced by a few months, these engines of death would come down on Earth. The Martian within would extricate the walking machine, lay waste to the surrounding area, but then eventually die from the same disease that brought down the first. Along the way, the powers on Earth would get valuable experience and technology battling the lander and then trying to recover it. This allows me to leapfrog tech when I need to, and explains the follow-up.

More below the fold.

Somewhere in the 1920s, the Martians catch on. I mean, they’re smart enough to cross interplanetary distances and invent heat-rays; they can’t be entirely stupid about biological peril. Eventually they figure out their weakness and make some compensation for it. Then they launch a second invasion. But this time, they’re not facing an unprepared humanity caught off-guard and still adjusting to the very idea of extraterrestrial life. This humanity is forewarned and forearmed, has played considerable catch-up on tech, and is looking for a fight.

The early advantage lay with the Martians, since they had the initiative. They could pick where the cylinders came down, which cities to target, and so on. And their tech was incontrovertibly more advanced, even after two decades of frantic research. But the sheer size of the Earth and the mass of humanity would eventually tip the balance. At some point, the Martians would be thrown off Earth; not long after, the great counter-invasion would be launched.

I don’t have a lot in my mind yet, although I cannot escape my vision of large bases, hewn from asteroids and passing each other at intermittent but predictable intervals. Maybe neither side gains complete control of the high ground — maybe cis-Terran and cis-Ares space is always contested, so that movement is unpredictable and reinforcements unreliable. Mars will have to be much wetter and more hospitable, of course — though I intend that it be drying out on a short geological timescale, prompting the Martian attack.

So far all of this is just a bunch of goofy posters. But it’s fun to play with.

More from the First Interworld War. One is an updated version of my very first Interworld War poster. The second has the tagline “See Action Now … Join the Rocket Service.”

My reasoning, and the actual posters, below the fold.

The revised poster arose because I never liked the background. I also changed “Transplanetary Expeditionary Force” to “Federated Expeditionary Force”, for a few reasons:

1. Two words ending in “ary” in a row are dysphonic.
2. “Transplanetary” is too long a word to roll off the tongue.
3. I wanted something evoking the A.E.F., or Allied Expeditionary Force. (And yes, I know that the “Allied” bit is from World War II; in WWI, it was just “American Expeditionary Force”. But I wanted something more international.)

The second piece is inspired, again, by something from Posters of World Wars I and II. In the original, there are a bunch of men on the deck of a submarine, with a Japanese ship sinking in the distance. The tag was “See Action Now… Join the Submarine Service”. Well, the obvious analog to the sailors who served in the tiny tin cans cut off from the outside world for weeks or months at a time, would be the spacers locked in the similar tin-can rockets, cut off from both worlds for weeks or months at a time.

I went with the “Mongo” design I have, mostly because I needed windows to see out. (Inexplicably, the “retro rocketship” design does not have viewports.) For the target, it would have to be a Martian, of course. Sadly I don’t have any Martian cylinders lying around. Instead, I took the Walker that I do have and I turned off all the legs. That made it into a satisfyingly saucer-shaped object, though the center was off (since much of the “mass” was now invisible). At first, I used a “DV Fighter” just to set the scale and figure out where things had to be. But I got used to it and ended up liking it a lot, so it’s in the scene. Also, I have another Mongo coming in from the above-left because, well, I like rocketships.

Obviously having the people outside on the “deck” wasn’t an option, so I had to change tacks. Instead I came in close in the cockpit, so that the other ships were visible through the viewports. A few explosion FX help to set the tone. I used a Michael 3 figure (with the semi-hilarious Krk [sic] morphs that someone has put out on the Net) as one of the rocketeers. For the other, I was torn. I have a nice HoverDroid from DAZ Studios, and it looked OK. But I want to keep the counterfactual trend that the Space Services are gender-integrated. So instead, it’s a Victoria 4 with a generic bodysuit that looks vaguely ST:NG-ish. I don’t really have a lot of good retro sci fi things for the V4 figure (or the M3 one, for that matter) so I’m still improvising there.

I then updated the tag. I like the sound of “Rocket Service”; it’s just archaic enough.

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Researching for this(!). I came across a great book called You Back the Attack — We’ll Bomb Who We Want, billed as “remixed war propaganda”. An artist named Micah Ian Wright took World War II propaganda posters (some from the Bad Guys) and reworked them to put a Bush Jr. spin on them. It’s snarky, obnoxious, and really hilarious — though sobering in a way, too.

As a bonus, Mr. Wright included all the original, unmodified posters as an appendix. So it’s easy to see how these were used and how they could be used. I expect I’ll be pulling a lot of inspiration from this book. The first such brainchild is offered below.

It’s based on a WWII poster that read, “Invest in Invasion … Buy War Bonds”. The graphic was a rugged airborne trooper in the doorway of a plane, gritting his teeth and getting ready to jump. Many parachutes dot a darkening sky. This immediately struck me and I knew I’d have to make an analog. It’s a little tricker than it sounds, because of course I’d have to set the sci fi background explicitly. The 1940s artist could assume the viewer would know what an airplane was and why someone would be jumping out of them.

Luckily, I have in my Poser inventory the “rocketship Mongo”, which became the carrier vessel. Hiding the door and positioning a Michael 3.0 soldier there gave me the airborne ranger I needed. Of course, this being pulp science fiction, I couldn’t use anything as prosaic as a parachute; so I used a jetpack instead. I face my first issue there, as the jetpack wings were way wider than the door. The wings can be folded up (thank you, creator of this object!) but then it looks a lot like a guy about to jump to his death.

So then I began to cheat. After positing “Alex” in the door, I cloned him and placed “Bob” out in the air. Bob’s wings are extended and the jetpack lit. Then I put a duplicate of the rocketship up and to the left of the original. I had to show the entire rocketship to the viewer, of course, to establish the scene. I added some more clones of winged troopers to take the place of the earlier parachutes and to set the scale.

I kept the text virtually unchanged (“Invest in Invasion — Buy War Bonds”) but supplemented it with the tri-ship logo of the Transplanetary Expeditionary Force and the slogan “Third Transplanetary Liberty Drive”. To top it all off, I rendered with a transparent background and overlaid it all on a picture of the night sky.

All in all, considering it took only a couple of hours to make, I’m pretty happy with it. Now I need to start thinking about the next one…

from a war that was never fought. I haven’t really decided if all of Mars is noxious (in this reality) but since Well’s had “the Black Gas”, I figure the TEF had better have gas masks. And while it might seem unthinkable that women would carry arms in Victorian/Edwardian society, it’s a fact of the 20th century that major wars break down mores, and a truly interplanetary war fought with turn-of-the-century technology would conceivably accelerate that process. Plus, I needed another model.

So I haven’t stretched my creative muscles very much lately, and I’ve been looking for something to do. Playing around with Poser and some models I got from the Net, I decided I was going to make propaganda posters from the First Interworld War, loosely conceived as the follow-up to H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds. I know it’s far from unique but it struck my fancy and I’m going to try my hand. The first, very rough, effort is below. The tagline is “Take the fight to them… Sign Up For The Transplanetary Expeditionary Force”

I’m certainly open to suggestions for future posters. Right now, all I have is the image of a man or woman in Vitcorian space gear and gas mask, with the tag “He risks breathing poison… So you can breathe free… Support the Third Planetary Bond Drive”.