Artist Chris Foss is known for his visionary presentation of future technology and weird vistas. He illustrated many book covers in the 70s, 80s and 90s including the Lensman series, Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, and Jack Vance's Demon Princes novels. His covers frequently feature spaceships that are sturdier and chunkier than the usual sleek space rockets you see on many other book covers of the time.

His cool vision of the future led him to be asked to work on production designs for Alejandro Jodorowsky's uncompleted Dune movie, in the mid 1970s, and later on Ridley Scott's Alien and Superman: The Movie.

As Alejandro Jodorowsky said in 1977:

And thus were born the mimetic spaceships, the leather and dagger-studded machines of the fascist Sardaukers;- the pachydermatous geometry of Emperor Padishah's golden planet; the delicate butterfly plane and so many other incredible machines, which I am sure will one day populate interstellar space. Chris Foss knows that today's technical reality is tomorrow's falsehood. Chris also knows that today's pure art is tomorrow's reality. Man will conquer space mounted on Foss' spaceships, never in NASA's concentration camps of the spirit. I was grateful for the existence of my friend. He brought the colours of the apocalypse to the sad machines of a future without imagination.

He has a website, ChrisFossArt.com, where you can see more of his work and buy signed prints of all of these images. And he has a group on Facebook, where you can keep up with his projects.

Pirate Ship, From Jodorowsky's Dune.
Harkonnen's flagship, From Jodorowsky's Dune.
Spice transport, from Dune.
Emperor's palace, from Dune.
Guild Tug, from Dune.
Breaking the Light Barrier
Awesome space image.
Awesome spaceship.
Image for ConceptShips blog.
Awesome spaceship.
Amazing space image.

As I was putting together this gallery, I noticed a few themes in the depictions of haunted spaceships. First, the ships themselves tend to be spidery or spiked looking - or in the case of Event Horizon, the ship seems to have a skull-like face. But the interiors of the ships also share characteristics, such as long, weirdly-lit corridors, and giant windows whose view onto a bright universe leaves the crew in demonic shadow.

The videogame Dead Space has some of the most magnificent portraits of haunted spaceships and space facilities, which themselves seem to have giant wounds.

Many of the spaceships we see depicted as haunted, of course, are ultimately suffering from some kind of weird phenomenon that can eventually be explained. The most common explanation - which we see in Solaris, Galaxy of Terror, Sphere, Blake's 7, and others, is that there is some kind of technology that manifests the contents of people's unconscious minds (this idea goes back to the Krell technology in Forbidden Planet). So people think they are seeing the dead, but they are just seeing what's in their own brains.

Thanks to TV Tropes!

The ship from Event Horizon.

Dead Space videogame

Dead Space

A monster from Dead Space
A haunted spaceship in Dead Space
Creepy spaceship from Dead Space.
Event Horizon, the haunted ship.
A spooky corridor inside Event Horizon.
A life-support pod is scary in Event Horizon.

In Hellraiser: Bloodline, hell comes to space. You know things are going to be bad when the GUI in your space habitat looks like goth boots with a million laces.
A robot is in charge of unlocking the box that is a key to the hell dimension in Hellraiser: Bloodline
The scary ship from Hellraiser: Bloodline looks sort of like the hell key box.

Recent flick Pandorum may not have been scary, but it did have a guy being haunted by a ghost from his past.
The creepiest image from Pandorum was this poster, depicting scary life support systems.
The actual life support pod in Pandorum was less impressive than the poster, though quite reminiscient of Event Horizon.

Star Trek is always there for you, even if your taste runs to haunted spaceships.

In Star Trek's "The Tholian Web," a ghostly version of the Enterprise is hovering between phases, causing the crew to see a ghostly version of Kirk (especially in the shower) while trapped in the alien web of the Tholians.
In British TV series Blake's 7, the crew of the (stolen) ship Liberator, pictured here, has a first encounter with the ship that involves seeing their dead relatives on board. This is a common theme in haunted spaceship flicks, and happens again in Sphere and Solaris.
Doctor Who story "Silence in the Library" isn't about a haunted ship, but it is a haunted space installation. Here's a look at the abandoned library structure, on a mysteriously empty planet.
From Doctor Who's "Silence in the Library," a creepy skeleton in a spacesuit wanders around with the ghost of its former owner still speaking from the voice buffer.
In Sunshine, the Icarus II ship is sent out to reboot the sun (don't ask) after Icarus I is lost. Except it wasn't lost, as the crew discovers when they encounter the abandoned ship and its one remaining, ghostly crew member.

Scary images from Sunshine.
In Solaris, a strange planet causes the crew of a ship in orbit to see visions of dead people. This is from the original 1970s Russian film.
In Solaris, a strange planet causes the crew of a ship in orbit to see visions of dead people. This is a picture of the ship's trashed loading dock from the original 1970s Russian film.
In Solaris, a strange planet causes the crew of a ship in orbit to see visions of dead people. This is from the original 1970s Russian film.

Solaris got an update in a recent remake from Steven Soderburgh.
Corridors are always creepy, as this image from the Solaris remake demonstrates.
In 1990s flick Sphere, based on the Michael Crichton novel, an alien ship at the bottom of the ocean causes the scientists examining it to see haunting visions.
In 1990s flick Sphere, based on the Michael Crichton novel, an alien ship at the bottom of the ocean causes the scientists examining it to see haunting visions.
In Galaxy of Terror, as in Sphere and Solaris, people exploring a ship see manifestations from their unconscious minds. One of which involves giant worm sex, as we showed you (NSFW) before.

These posters come from Visual Aid and Visual Aid 2, and are available as posters from the Visual Aid shop. Incidentally, they also have useful posters if you want to know how to make a balloon animal, how to play Cat's Cradle, or the different processes for mummification.

[Visual Aid via Core77]

At the moment, Anderson has only eight ships, though he's looking to make it all the way to 26 — hopefully with X and Y-shaped ships that don't too closely resemble the X-Wings and Y-Wings from Star Wars. If he does manage to finish and photograph all 26 ships, the result will make for a visually interesting, rather out of the ordinary alphabet poster.

[Andertoons Flickr via Brothers Brick]

MOC-005 A Fighter
MOC-006 B Spaceship
MOC-008 C Spaceship
MOC-009 D Spaceship
MOC-010 E Spaceship
MOC-011 F Spaceship
MOC-012 LEGO G Spaceship
MOC-013 LEGO H Spaceship

Four pieces of Pandorum concept art showed up over at DVD-Forum. This film is definitely looking like a lot of thought went into the designs, and it's a nice departure from the way-too-shiny Enterprise we saw earlier this summer. You can see the rest at the link. [DVD Forum via Dread Central]

Artist Peggy Chung is studying entertainment design at the Art Center College of Design in Southern California. I like the precise, smooth lines in her work. There's a mid-twentieth century feeling to many of her vehicles. But her alien environments and that giant robo-beast are clearly contemporary, and look like they should grace the covers of cool science fiction novels or manga.

via Peggy Chung's gallery and Concept Ships

1950s and 1960s:
Space vessel design in the actual Space Age tends to involve either sleek rockets or funny flying saucers — until Star Trek comes along, with the U.S.S. Enterprise's weird mix of saucer and rocket-like nacelles, bonded to a tuber shaped main section. Not to mention the fierceness of the Romulan warbird and the gun-like Klingon warships. Model design is already starting to change drastically:

1968 to 1977:

And then with 2001: A Space Odyssey, you start seeing more rugged, lived-in-looking ships, with weirder shapes, like the probe's long neck and rounded front. And ships start having more bumpy weird bits. This trend only continues with Space: 1999's squat Eagles, which look like they could survive anything (even blowing up multiple times) but aren't as elegant as an old-school rocket.

1977 to 1986:

And then Star Wars comes along, with its awesome space dogfights, and suddenly, hugeness and imposing scope are a must. It's no accident that later iterations of the U.S.S. Enterprise are way huger than the 1960s original. The crazy shapes of the T.I.E. fighters and other craft inspire some other weird models in things like The Black Hole. And the X-Wing fighters inspire everything from Buck Rogers' fighter ship to the Last Star Fighter's vessel.

1987 to 1997:

Star Trek: The Next Generation saw in a whole new era of space opera, but the main thing that changed in the late 1980s was the rise of CG effects, allowing spaceships to look much more diverse and weirder than models ever could. From the Borg cube to the many bizarre shapes of vessels in Babylon 5, starships no longer had to look like a few pieces stuck together.

1998 to present:

I can't think of one defining franchise of the past decade that has shaped how we view space opera the same way these earlier franchises did. Star Trek has kept innovating, but so have BSG, Farscape, Stargate and a number of others. CG has gotten a lot smoother and ships can move in much more natural, organic ways — just look at the Narada, to bring us back to our first example. At the same time, as nostalgia has reigned the genre, we've come full circle and resurrected a lot of classic designs, with a few tweaks.

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown.

One day, she was going to pilot one of those ships - leave behind these dingy hallways where kids peddled black pharma and her sister peddled something else to the extros looking for "sensual entertainment." She imagined how her ship would look, its sleek edges ruddy with the light of nebulae as she brought fresh fruit to the moons and ore back home.

But her mission wouldn't be all peaceful sunset colors. She'd be evading the heavy pirate ships designed to take out merchant vessels - not by shooting them down, but by swallowing them whole.

She'd seen a mecha chase down a pirate spy plane once. It had been nosing around the docks, looking for likely prey. Intercepting its radio signals, the normally quiet bot had roused itself to its full, 50-meter height, and smashed the little flier right out of the sky, bringing down a crazy rain of debris with it. She'd spent hours scrubbing smoke grime off her windows so she could watch the ships again.

Russian concept artist Dmitry (AKA Jim Hatama) creates sun-saturated images of alien worlds and the ships that travel between them. His pictures of space ships remind me of the covers on 1960s and 70s scifi novels. You can see more of his work on his Deviant Art page. (via Concept Ships)

I've been realizing a lot lately that the only reason I'm excited for both the new Star Trek movie and the new Caprica series is because of the territory they cover. I don't particularly want any more Trek, and I think I've already hit my limit of Cylons and eye-twitching. But I desperately want more movies featuring space battles. And I would fervently greet any TV show that explores the themes of artificial intelligence and dead children (among other things) that Caprica is staking out.

I didn't actually realize until last week that Caprica didn't start its life as a BSG spinoff at all. At Paleyfest, producer David Eick explained that co-writer Remi Aubuchon had pitched the show to the Sci Fi Channel as a new show about artificial intelligence. And the Sci Fi execs thought that because of those A.I. themes, it would make a good continuation for BSG, and they told Aubuchon to work with Eick and Ronald D. Moore to revamp it into a BSG show.

Reading about that remark, I'm now dying to see Aubuchon's original pitch for Caprica, before the Adama family and the other BSG continuity baggage got shoe-horned in. If you watch the pilot, it's pretty obvious the Adama clan doesn't fit - the storyline makes a lot more sense if you take them out. In the pilot, Zoe Graystone dies in a terrorist bombing, but it turns out she found a way to scan her brain and create a virtual avatar with all her memories. And then her grieving dad strives to load that avatar into a robot body, inadvertently helping to create a super-weapon. It has a certain elegance, no? Until you shoehorn in the idea that Joseph Adama's daughter could also be restored to life, based on her Facebook page and whatever other info Google can dig up. Adding the BSG elements basically transforms this story into a giant "WTF".

And I'd be much more interested in seeing where Caprica goes - if I didn't already know where it ends up. I can only really get super excited about Caprica if I pretend I haven't already seen the saga's ending: Bob Dylan, gelatinous orbs, angels, mass shipicide, etc. I actually enjoyed the pilot a lot, but I also kept wishing it would be its own thing, instead of a prequel for a show that had already spawned a history that was way too sweeping and nonsensical.

As for Star Trek, I'm excited for it and hoping it does well - but a large amount of that excitement comes from the fact that I can count the number of space-opera movies in the past decade on a multiple amputee's fingers. There's the Star Wars prequels, the Riddick films, maybe Supernova, Serenity... and Star Trek: Nemesis. I'm reaching a bit here, and some of those films are barely space opera. (I'm thinking interstellar spaceships, ideally shooting at each other in space.)

Just imagine how cool it would be if there was a new movie about space captains venturing out into other star systems and getting into firefights with aliens or other space captains - and we didn't know what was out there, because it was a whole new universe.

So when I root for J.J. Abrams' Star Trek to do well, I'm really rooting for Hollywood to realize that there's still a market for movies about people on super-awesome spaceships exploring, fighting, emoting and defying several laws of physics at once. I'm hoping that if Star Trek makes Dark Knight money, we'll start seeing a slew of fatuous articles in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter quoting various execs as saying this proves the masses love faster-than-light travel and energy weapons. And aliens with funny heads. Please.

This is the real evil of franchises, after all: they subsume genres. Space opera is a genre, not a franchise. But these days, the only way we get to see space opera on the big screen (or small, for that matter) is as part of a franchise that someone has decided is still a cash cow. And then you have that example, where the Sci Fi Channel hears a writer pitch a cool concept about artificial intelligence - and instead of saying "Hey, this could be the next Battlestar Galactica," they say, "Hey, this could be turned into more Battlestar Galactica." Like stories about robots automatically need to be branded as BSG, or audiences won't "get" them.

Where does this stop? Do we eventually end up with just two or three franchises, with names like "Space Gloop" or "Time-Travel With Robots"? And heroes with names like "Captain Cocky Z. Valiant"? Does it eventually go full circle? Meaning, after franchises swallow up whole genres, do the franchises eventually melt down and become genres again? (I feel like this nearly happened to Star Trek already - Voyager and Enterprise managed to be utterly generic, even as they felt less and less connected to whatever Trek was originally about.) Or maybe the process will just continue, as franchises eat each other and we eventually end up with just one mega-franchise, called "Blam" or "Spow".

Anyway, consider this a plea: Continue Star Trek for another 50 years, spawn another dozen Battlestar incarnations, I don't mind at all. But please, please give us some original space opera and self-aware robot stories on screen. We'll still like them even if they're not an existing brand. I promise!

Their ship rose into the morning light, their exhaust no filthier than the trashed urban landscape that this world had become.

And on another world, two systems away, another search party found themselves greeted by huge Tripod robots whose jobs were to keep the environment clean at any cost. These images are the creation of UK artist Andree Wallin, who manages to capture the decadent beauty of future citiscapes - as well as future countryside, entirely tended by robots.

At last both groups of searchers converged on this hideaway. They didn't bargain on it being a sentient AI who could fold itself up into a ship and shoot offworld at any time.

See more of Andree Wallin's work via Concept Ships

I love all of these bizarre remodelings of the Enterprise, posted at the movie's official web site. (There are more images there.) It reminds me of the weird Darth Vader mask customizations that artists did for a Star Wars event a couple of years ago. There's something awesome about taking such an iconic shape and making it your own, with weird add-ons. The smiley-faced Enterprise, with the Betty Page Vulcan babe, was created by Gizmodo's own Jesus Diaz. (And we featured a nice huge desktop pattern of that Betty Page Vulcan a while back.) [Enterprise Project, thanks to Kerim!]

Put together by Rick Murphy and inspired by BSG's ships, The Trylon Viper car was sold as a kit in the 1990s, and what an amazing package that would have been to get in the mail.

The Trylon is outfitted with a snazzy blinking cockpit that measures 15' 4" long, 43" high and 76" wide at the Stern with an RX-7 engine. Which, according to car lord Ray Wert, is "insane" and "would probably leaves an oil slick in its wake...it's also wholly unreliable." But spaceships are fickle beasts, and I can only imagine assembling a Battlestar Galactica Viper is even harder because there was a war on people, a war with Cylons — so you have to take what you get, scrap metal and crappy engines be damned.

But before you jump into your Trylon Viper you might want to make sure it can turn.

[Three Wheelers] (Thanks Corey!)

I feel like this is one of those videos that's perfect for the late afternoon, say around 4:20, but I'm posting it now so you can get a head start on your afternoon during the next 8 UFO-packed minutes.

[via Real UFOs]

According to a report on Real UFOs:

Ufologists have discovered a trend whereby Ufos are seen in the northern hemisphere usually from spring to summer, May - start of september. I guess the obvious reason is that most people are out then on holidays to witness such sightings but there is also some connection with geological phenomena. This is seen with the 'crop circle seasons' of summer and is apparently attributed to a vortex created by changes in water channels under the ground.

Ohhh, right. Vortexes. There's even a video from the History Channel that explains it all to you.

Apparently stone structures and monoliths in England are somehow connected to these vortexes and that explains everything about why when you're not on holiday, you don't see UFOs. I also think it's nice that UFOs tend to show up in pretty places, like Hudson Valley, New York, so you can come for a vacation and check out the alien visitors. Tourism conspiracy, anyone?

UFOs Come in Seasons [Real UFOs]

OK, this might be a cyborg monster, or just a person in mecha armor. I think the giant creature might be working with the human, since they don't appear to be fighting. I love the way this image almost looks as if it's underwater. You can see more of Jangariyawong's work in his portfolio.

Concept Space Scene [via Concept Ships]

Here's a side-by-side comparison between the source material and the Demetrius, the industrial garbage ship that Starbuck and her away team used to try to find Earth earlier this season. Mojo writes:

Landing lights are generally blue, so I used that scheme to surround the Viper platform. See the small ladder leading up to the platform on the bottom right? People need to see where they’re going, so it was a natural area to illuminate.

You can see that he's borrowed the shape of the sea-going ship, as well as the way its lights are positioned. It's always cool to see how much real-world objects inspire fantastical images.

Check out a whole bunch of concept art for spaceships and the images that inspired them in Mojo's blog.

BSG VFX: A Thousand Points Of Light [Darth Mojo]

Allen added that the pieces are supposed to look like they might have lightning powering them, and that the yellow globes inside the rocket on the right are seeds that the ship is taking to spread life among the stars.

Rik Allen [Traver Gallery] (Thanks, Nick C!)

The principle behind antimatter is simple. It releases a ton of energy when it's destroyed, so you'd harness that in the same way you'd harness energy from nuclear fusion or any other "atoms smashing it up" style energy. It sounds like science fiction, but in fact most of the gorgeous renderings of antimatter spaceships you'll find out in the world are actually done by NASA artists or people in labs.

Here's a cool diagram of the ICAN, also dreamt up by the Penn State antimatter propulsion lab:

A strangely thrusty antimatter ship from NASA:

And an antimatter ship designed by NASA to go to Mars: Hey ho, let's go!

Here is the oxygen room from above.
And here's the oxygen room once Icarus starts getting super-heated from the sun.

There's also a clip of Michelle Yeoh looking lovely and washing carrots in the oxygen room here.

Famous names: Produced and co-created by Rick Berman, who rescued Star Trek: The Next Generation from painful, Roddenberry mediocrity; while Voyager was mediocre more often than not, even its worst episode was better than most of the clunkers fromThe Next Generation's first season.

Crunchy goodness: 3

Spinoffs/Sequels/Copycats: The next series, Star Trek: Enterprise, took the basic premise of a ship on its own and added more potty jokes and a male captain who manages to say "ass" in almost every episode.

Stunt casting: After Cronenberg vet Genevive Bujold didn't work as the captain (see the extras disc on the Season One Voyager DVD set for fascinating outtakes), the producers cast ex-Mrs. Columbo and Remo Williams girlfriend Kate Mulgrew.

Design breakthrough: The intentional use of Art Deco motifs on the bridge and other sets meant that even if the episode sucked, there was still eye candy, 'cuz Art Deco rules.

Star Trek Voyager Encyclopedia