Terran Trade Authority
I recently rekindled my interest in the late 1970's pencil-and-paper role playing game Traveller. It was the SF answer to Dungeons and Dragons. I dug out my box of old role-playing materials, and started surfing the web for "what's happened since the early 1980's?"
Among the various things to happen to Traveller in the 1990's was a fourth edition ("Marc Miller's Traveller") published by the now-defunct Imperium Games. Notable about this version were very stylish covers featuring art by Chris Foss. This style seemed very familiar; I assumed I'd seen these illustrations before. Eventually, I remembered getting large picture books of SF spacecraft out from the local library when I was growing up. But I couldn't find the right search engine queries to figure out what the books were.
During a trip to Half Price Books I found a promising clue - Aliens in Space. Popping this into a search engine turned up the Terran Trade Authority [Wikipedia], and I had my prize! Perhaps the best overview of the books is provided at Digital Waterfalls, an homage site to the key book in the series, Spacecraft 2000-2100 AD.
A few more links:
Simply put, the books take a lot of "spare" paperback cover art from the 1970s and 1980s by a handful of artists and string them together with a story. Each book has a theme - spacecraft, space wrecks, battles, and so on.
A visit to AbeBooks and I'm reliving my childhood - and making sure that Caspian's is well stocked!
Fellow fan-since-childhood Philip Banks has an interview with the author, Stewart Cowley.
Among the various things to happen to Traveller in the 1990's was a fourth edition ("Marc Miller's Traveller") published by the now-defunct Imperium Games. Notable about this version were very stylish covers featuring art by Chris Foss. This style seemed very familiar; I assumed I'd seen these illustrations before. Eventually, I remembered getting large picture books of SF spacecraft out from the local library when I was growing up. But I couldn't find the right search engine queries to figure out what the books were.
During a trip to Half Price Books I found a promising clue - Aliens in Space. Popping this into a search engine turned up the Terran Trade Authority [Wikipedia], and I had my prize! Perhaps the best overview of the books is provided at Digital Waterfalls, an homage site to the key book in the series, Spacecraft 2000-2100 AD.
A few more links:
- http://www.khantazi.org/Rec/TTABooks/TTABooks.html
- http://www.aemann.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/tta/index.html
- http://www.bisbos.com/rocketscience/tta/index.html
Simply put, the books take a lot of "spare" paperback cover art from the 1970s and 1980s by a handful of artists and string them together with a story. Each book has a theme - spacecraft, space wrecks, battles, and so on.
A visit to AbeBooks and I'm reliving my childhood - and making sure that Caspian's is well stocked!
Fellow fan-since-childhood Philip Banks has an interview with the author, Stewart Cowley.
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