5 books for people who love science fiction (reading it, writing it, drawing it)

by Prentis Rollins

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5 books

Science fiction has been a passion of mine since my mother took me to see West World in 1973 (I was 7 at the time). I grew up preoccupied with the strange visions I was seeing on the screen and printed page—visions in which some factor of the actual world is changed or extrapolated into a future where things are very different from what we want or expect. As an adult, I’ve sought to express my love for sci-fi through my work as an artist/writer in comics and graphic novels, and to pass on what I’ve learned in art instruction books. The 5 books listed here are varied indeed—graphic novels, graphic short stories, art instruction manuals—but they all convey my love of different worlds, different futures, different possibilities.

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The Furnace

A Graphic Novel

Prentis Rollins, 2018

AD 2052: Walton Honderich is an aging physics professor with a secret that’s destroying him. In a New York hotel room, he finally unburdens himself—to his 6 year-old daughter. He recounts to her his youthful involvement with what he now knows to have been a crime against humanity: a plan for humanely releasing supermax prisoners into society. The plan, which involves drones that render the released inmates invisible and untouchable, results in a disastrous human death toll. The Furnace is a timely meditation on the oft-ignored perils of solitary confinement, the terrifying scope of the surveillance state, and the dangerous allure of youthful ambition and legacy.

How to Draw Sci-Fi Utopias and Dystopias

Create the Futuristic Humans, Aliens, Robots, Vehicles, and Cities of Your Dreams and Nightmares

Prentis Rollins, 2016

I’ve always been struck by the ways in which future visions are often either utopian or dystopian (compare Star Trek with Mad Max). In this lavishly-illustrated book I explore the many ways in which one can realize utopian and dystopian dreams on paper. There are chapters devoted to citiscapes, land vehicles, space vehicles, aliens, and humans. Special emphasis is placed on the centrality of influences in an artist’s life; no one creates in a vacuum, and the more influences you expose yourself to (films, comicbooks, novels, fine art), the more and better tools you’ll have to build with.

How to Draw Sci-Fi Heroes and Villains

Brainstorm, Design, and Bring to Life Teams of Cosmic Characters, Atrocious Androids, Celestial Creatures - and Much, Much More!

Prentis Rollins, 2023

I wanted in this book to convey my approach to brainstorming and designing sci-fi characters—good and evil alike. My approach was to invent two teams of characters, each with 9 members, each a parallel universe moral isomorph of the other. Thus were born the Alpha Union (heroes), and the Omega Legion (villains). Each team is comprised of humans, aliens, robots, young and old. I lead the reader through the process of trying out different looks for characters, settling on one favored look, and developing it from sketch to final lineart and color. Special emphasis is placed on the oft-overlooked role of narrative in creating art; a character’s backstory influences it’s look as much as the converse.

The Making of a Graphic Novel

Prentis Rollins, 1978

This is a ‘flip book’; oriented one way it is a 100 page sci-fi graphic novel called ‘The Resonator’, oriented the other it’s a 100 page art instruction book called The Making of a Graphic Novel. The Resonator depicts a dystopian future in which humans no longer sleep, and a space-going miner’s desperate ploy to save the world’s last existing resonator (a device with the ability to induce sleep). The Making of a Graphic Novel leads the reader through the very involved process of creating a graphic novel single-handedly (with chapters on writing, pre-production, pencilling, inking, and lettering).

Survival Machine

Prentis Rollins, 2003

This graphic novel is actually a collection of four short stories, about four survivors. Dying Inside tells the story of a tycoon and the world-threatening lengths he will go to in order to save himself from a recent cancer diagnosis. What Woulds’t Thou Do, Old Man? depicts an aged Holocaust survivor in New York City, and his random encounter with white supremecists in Cental Park. In The Whirligig, we meet a physicist slowly going insane as he obsesses over what happens to socks that go into tumble dryers but don’t come out. And in I, God we meet the lone survivor of an apocalyptic plague, rendered a biological immortal by the same disease that killed the rest of humanity.