MILESHIPS - A Narrative Art Book by Ian McQue.

The World Of MILESHIPS: Vessels
5 months ago – Tue, Apr 30, 2024 at 03:53:12 AM

This is the third and final part of our look at what to expect from the narrative of fiction of the MILESHIPS book.

We come, finally, to the central subject of McQue’s paintings: the vessels around which this world turns, the Mileships themselves. 

Years ago, back in the ancient times of 2017, when the two of us first sat in a pub in Edinburgh to really get into the work, it became clear that while Ian’s many subjects all overlap, there was a vital thread running through his paintings: a depiction of flying boats and ships. This, I said at the time, was clearly one of three main McQue-vian areas of interest. One, broadly mechs and sci-fi stuff, we already got into in a video game, and another, rather more inspired by Edinburgh itself, that we will likely turn to in the future. But the thread which had the most power, the one that demanded a book be written about it were these dynamic and provocative flying vessels which Ian called the MIleships. I remember noting down at the time how they were too grounded to really be whimsical, and too subtly believable to be fantastical, despite capturing elements of all these concepts. It was almost as if they demanded new terms to describe them.

I sat and took notes as Ian talked about a smaller vessel, The Remora, with a crew. He had names sketched out. And not just for the crew, but for the places they might visit, and the other vessels they might pass on their journeys. The Remora-type vessels, which appear again and again, were a light skiff or barge — one of the small workhorses of the archipelago. And this image was a clear expression of the work Ian had been doing to create imaginary versions of the fishing boats and other light industrial vessels he saw as he sketched around docks and bays along the northern coasts of Britain. I place it at the heart of MILESHIPS, for while this vessel isn’t a hero or a protagonist, it is almost via its context, its point of reference, that we end up seeing Ian’s invented world.

And the canvas for this is as vast as our own world: there are depictions of far more fantastic vessels, and it was with these that we began to conjure broader visions of immense skyliners and rock-devouring mining vessels, not unlike the rigs and cargo ships that sat in the distance beyond the tugs and barges Ian had been painting in the docklands of Scotland. We created a sourcebook of ideas that was filled with the names and descriptions of these mighty beasts, which ranged from heavy commercial ships, right through to immense pleasure-palaces owned by the elite of this world, the self-titled Highborn. Ian painted fleets, docks, and mining operations. He painted wrecks and the homes of the privileged and the poor.

It has been a joy to name, describe and invent histories for these machines. In the book we will see the setting sail of the Penton Moss Flotilla, the passage of the mileship, The Collapsing Meredith, and the mooring-for-business of the pleasure barge, The Palgrave Crooner. We shall see arrivals and departures.

We shall also see how Mileships meet their end. That the Mileships can run out of weightlessness salts and find themselves crashing to the surface is one thing, of course, but Ian also had the concept of the “buoyancy cascade” in which the ships’ weightlessness goes into meltdown and they crash upwards. This catastrophic event demands that the “Limit-Men” don their diving suits and ascend into the sky to salvage the wrecks from the icy furthest reaches of the atmosphere…
 

--

Anyway, I know that many of you fell in love with these vessels, as I did, from the moment McQue started painting them. It’s incredible to have reached the point where I can spend my days writing about them, and I hope you can tell how excited we are for this book.

Thank you, all, for making it a reality. And when it arrives, along with all these ships and their crews, we know you’ll be pleased with the result.

Gratefully,

-jim

Final Signature Drawing Edition Release
5 months ago – Sun, Apr 28, 2024 at 01:59:44 PM

Hello! I will add the final twenty Signature Drawing Edition copies to the tier limit shortly after posting this update. Thank you to everyone who backed these or any other level, please know that we appreciate everyone's support immensely.

We've been overwhelmed by the generous response MILESHIPS has received. We're already hugely excited about the reality of getting the book finished and into your hands! We're now looking forward to a busy few days capping off what has already been a hugely successful campaign.

Thanks again,

-jim

The World Of MILESHIPS: Places
5 months ago – Sun, Apr 28, 2024 at 07:24:25 AM

This is the second of our updates about the world of MILESHIPS. We wanted to let you know a little more about what to expect from the narrative fiction of the book; its people, places, and vessels.

In an archipelago of shifting stones there are locations the pilots of vessels of all sizes can rely on. While some stones move (the “Erratics”), others are anchored in roughly the same place by their vast anti-gravitational resistance. It is in these places that the cloudyards -- vast floating cities and air-docks  -- have been constructed. They are important waystations on any skylane chart.

When working through Ian’s drawings, it was almost impossible not to start noticing a sense of history and growth in these ideas. We imagined an early time in the archipelago, before industrialisation, where people explored and colonised the rocks with gliders and ropes: an initial phase of settlement in which people spread out through the floating stones, perhaps escaping conditions on the surface, while bringing with them animals which might help them live in these challenging conditions: mountain goats and birds.

As the conditions of modernity grew in the archipelago, so the settlements took on other requirements: those of large-scale interactions of people, such as entertainment, food, and even political organising. All these elements were immediately obvious in Ian’s paintings, inspired as they were by the materials of the real world. And so we began to formalise this fiction across a range of cities and constructed locations, with names such as Flagstone, Thunderhead, and Kemplen Cloudyards. These locations were complex and crowded, reflecting the pressurised nature of an industrial and commerce-driven society perilously perched upon a few rocks in the sky. It was only natural, in these circumstances, that tensions would come to light.

And where people live upon the stones like this the weightless salts which empower lighter-than-air flight cannot be extracted. Some stones must therefore be sacrificed to mining, and as the veins of these substances are mined out, the stones begin to drift downwards. Now and then they lose buoyancy suddenly and so crash into The Down Below, without terrible consequences. These places, too, were depicted in Ian’s paintings.

It was the paintings that Ian painted of more rural scenes, however, that completed the world for me. Where there were cities in the world of MILESHIPS, there were also rural uplands, wastelands, and hinterlands. There were farms and villages. Shepherds and hermits. This world is vast and many people choose not to live where things are busiest or most profitable. Constructing fictions for these places — more pastoral, more spiritual — gave us a full-sense circle of what Ian’s work was about. He was painting a place that had a sense of richness, a reflection of a real and imaginable world, struck by some nameless catastrophe so that it became a sea of floating stones. A place that mankind would, inevitably, find a way to call home.

Fireside Chat Part 2 + More Signature Drawing Edition Copies
5 months ago – Wed, Apr 24, 2024 at 08:03:16 AM

Hello there,

We'll put twenty more Signature Drawing Edition copies live a few moments after this update goes live, so good luck to all those hoping to get one! This brings to the total to 160, and yes we know the counter previously got stuck at 139, we don't know why. Sorry! Hopefully it will track correctly this time.

In other news, over on McQue's Patreon we have part two of our fireside chat about his work and influences.

JR: So what do you think is the aspiration for the book? I love working on this material and can’t wait to hand someone a copy of what we’ve done, but what’s your feeling about it? What’s the hope and the dream for MILESHIPS, Ian?

IM: You know, I’d like to find myself in a position where if I was to give it to a twelve year old kid who’s into this stuff and know it made a difference. I’d like it to be a book that they’d want to go back to all the time. I think about all those old Roger Dean paintings, the old TTA books, things like that, and how much they influenced me, how much they influenced both of us and a generation of artists. We all went back to them over and over. That’s where I’d like to be with this book. That’s where I’d like this to have gone in the end. I mean, beyond it just being a really lovely chunky art book, I’d like it to serve that kind of individual need. Perhaps that’s a generational thing, because growing up in the 1970s this stuff was thin on the ground and now that the nerds and geeks have taken over the world it’s everywhere. But I think it’s still true that as a kid you find some things — movies, games or books — and they become your big reference, your bible, and I hope this can be that for someone.

Head over to the Patreon for the full thing. It's free to read, so you don't have to sign up, but if you do that will, of course, be enormously appreciated. (And there is a free tier!)

Notes On The World of MILESHIPS: People
6 months ago – Mon, Apr 22, 2024 at 05:17:29 AM

We thought we’d take a moment to tell you all a little more about what to expect from the full book. There will be three of these informative updates!

It’s been a huge privilege for me (Jim Rossignol) to work on the written fiction side of MILESHIPS. The results of my work with Ian over the past few years mean that the final book will contain a multifarious slice of life from our archipelago of floating stones: people, places, and the vessels themselves. 

Our intention for the written materials is that everything you read will be an artefact from that world. Each written word will be from the point of view of the people who pilot and inhabit the Mileships, from diaries and journals, via history books, police reports, ship’s logbooks and notes in the margins of a cartographer’s sketchbook. There are even a few love letters.

This means, of course, that the book contains the many characters who produce these written materials in the course of their daily lives. Like our own world, the world of Mileships is a product of many different people, their goals, and their experiences.

Ian’s vision for the archipelago was one that immediately had social complexity built into it: the people who live beneath, on the muddy, storm-wracked surface, are often downtrodden and aspire to live alongside those who travel the skies and inhabit the floating stones of the archipelago above. But that does not mean they have no society of their own. Those people who farm eels or pick over the wrecks of fallen ships — or even scavenge remnants of weightless salts from the rocks which have been mined out and lost their buoyancy — all have their own lives and culture too.

Much of what we concentrate on, though, is up in the clouds. Here the tensions are between the Highborn magnates, who see themselves as the natural lords of the archipelago, and those who actually work the vessels which ply the tradelines and skyways. Nor are the Highborn able to control everything in the clouds: the far flung limits of the archipelago are home to pastoralist cults who have a spiritual order outside the recognisably industrialist core of the MILESHIPS world. It's easy to see Ian's Scottish influences in the environments he created for these people, and we'll come to that in the next update.

Identifying distinct characters and vocations within all this has been a delight for Ian and myself. That has been a three-step process. First there were notes and images. Then we crafted an initial world bible from Ian's notes and now we are turning that into the materials of the full book. Identifying the personality of Edwin Mearst, the shipping magnate, or his rival Aldous Kemplen, and defining the fierce independence of Huna Lintaig, the skipper of a vessel called the Remora (which features repeatedly in Ian’s paintings), has given us a fantastic cast with which to populate our fictions.

Woven into all this are the words of freelancers, independent merchants, company men, hired thugs, career pilots, bird-catchers, beloved hermits, miners, sketchy salt-traders, ice-frosted limit-men, entertainers and musicians, as well artists and cartographers who chart and map the drifting belts of stone and the people who live within them. You will hear about their working lives, their beliefs, their tribulations, the costs of their vittles, and, occasionally, their grim or dramatic fates. 

Whether they can avoid a fall, or stay afloat, they all have something to say about the perils which await in the stone-filled sky.