We’re very excited to announce that to coincide with the opening of Visions of the Universe – the upcoming exhibition at the National Maritime Museum – Pandemonium Press are publishing The Lowest Heaven, a new anthology of contemporary science fiction.

Each story in The Lowest Heaven is themed around a body in the Solar System, from the Sun to Halley’s Comet. Contributors include Alastair Reynolds, Kaaron Warren, S.L. Grey, Lavie Tidhar, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Sophia McDougall, Maria Dahvana Headley, Adam Roberts, E.J. Swift, Kameron Hurley and Doctor Who’s Matt Jones.

The stories are illustrated with photographs and artwork selected from our world-class collection, while the book’s cover and overall design are the work of award-winning South African illustrator Joey Hi-Fi. Joey has provided us with an exclusive Q&A about how he created the design for the cover artwork.

A limited edition hardcover is available for purchase exclusively through the Royal Museums Greenwich shop at http://bit.ly/17LpKDe.

Find out more about Visions of the Universe and book tickets online at rmg.co.uk/visions

The design you created for The Lowest Heaven centres around a map – where does this idea come from?

With The Lowest Heaven being an anthology, the brief was to create a piece of artwork that would tie all the stories together. Since the book features stories based on various celestial bodies in our Solar System – creating a bespoke solar system map seemed like an interesting way to do that.
Plus, having a fascination with all things cosmic (bordering on Kosmikophilia), I couldn’t resist. I used to draw maps of alien solar systems as a kid – peppered with space battles of course. So this is a childhood dream come true.
I was inspired by the wall hangings in the National Maritime Museum collection. These were produced by the Working Men’s Educational Union in the 1850s and based on astronomical themes. The hangings were printed lithographically on cotton, which gives them an interesting appearance. I liked their simple, yet striking design. One in particular (see jpeg) formed the basis of my design.
I just took a more modern approach – if you can call it that. My map has more of a 1950s aesthetic as opposed to one reminiscent of the 1850s.

The map also has hints or elements from the stories themselves. Can you talk us through these, and how you settled on which ones to include?
I wanted the solar system map to be unique to The Lowest Heaven. So I thought it should not only include the celestial bodies – but elements from the stories themselves.
What would make a map of the solar system even more awesome? Why, Spaceships of course! I decided to include some simple illustrations of the space-faring vessels (as well as an asteroid and a comet) that were mentioned in the various stories.
I had read the entire book already, so I went back through my notes and picked the objects I wanted to include – in the end, I settled on four. I’ll leave the reader to discover which stories they fit. To match the retro feel of the map, all the spaceships (bar Voyager) have a 1950s retro feel to them.

There are two editions of The Lowest Heaven, but this map is the central design for both of them.

For this project I decided to illustrate and design the fold-out solar system map (to be included in the hardcover) first. I felt it would be simpler to work from a full solar system map and then decide how to adapt that artwork to work on the two book covers.
What would work on the fold-out map wouldn’t necessarily work on the book covers, given the change of size and so on.
I wanted the covers to have the same character as the map – but I didn’t want the cover artwork to be exactly the same as the full fold-out. For both creative and practical reasons.
Since a simple crop of a section of the full solar system map wouldn’t work as a cover, it required reworking the typography, changing the design & removing small details while adding others.

Is designing for an anthology different from illustrating a novel or a single story?

It is. This is my first cover for an anthology featuring different authors. I had to approach it in a different way conceptually. Whereas a novel may have one central protagonist, voice, style or tone – an anthology obviously has many. Finding that common thread can be a challenge.
Many of the anthology covers I see tend to be quite generic in terms of concept. Science fiction will have a space ship on the cover, horror a ghoul of some kind, etc. For The Lowest Heaven, having each story based on a celestial body made for a strong central concept, one that was unique enough to steer clear of cover clichés.
I also felt that I didn’t want to focus on one story over another. I wanted to have the various writers all equally represented on the cover.

For more artistically readers: how did you go about making this? There’s so much detail!

I do the basic layout. Then, at night, extra-dimensional space elves materialize and complete it.
Jokes aside – having never designed a solar system map before – It started with much research.
I had to brush up on the orbit of the planets, their approximate sizes in relation to each other and so on. I wanted the map to have some semblance of scientific accuracy. The gaps in my knowledge of our solar system made me realize I should have payed more attention in science class at school – instead of filling my textbooks with super-hero themed doodles.
I then moved onto some rough sketches of the solar system map design (incorporating typography and other additional elements). Once I’d decided on a rough layout/design that I thought would work – I then started on the finished illustration.
Parts of the illustration were done in Illustrator or Photoshop, others by hand (ink on paper). I also scanned in various old paper textures to help give the solar system map that slightly aged / retro feel. I enjoy using a combination of various techniques in the illustration process. It allows me to experiment a bit.

Which was your favourite story?

By Grabthar’s hammer! My illustrator sense foresaw that question coming. Do you want all of the contributors to The Lowest Heaven to hate me – bar one?
Tough question. It’s so hard to choose. All the stories we amazing in some way. But if you insist on putting a phaser to my temple – I particularly enjoyed the tale for Jupiter by Jon Courtenay Grimwood.

Did you want to be an astronaut when you grew up?

Oddly no. I wanted to be a ‘Diver Uncle’. Which was my four year old self’s term for a deep sea explorer. At a young age I was watching Star Trek (plus other 80s Sci-Fi classics) and dreaming of space exploration – but I was equally fascinated by deep sea exploration. And I still am – who doesn’t find giant squid fascinating?

Find out more about The Lowest Heaven and Pandemonium Fiction at http://www.pandemonium-fiction.com/lowest-heaven.html

If you have passed the Museum lately you may have noticed the arrival of a giant ship in a bottle which was formerly located in Trafalgar Square.

A campaign was launched by the Art Fund and the National Maritime Museum at the end of 2011 and successfully raised £362,500 enabling the National Maritime Museum to acquire and permanently display Yinka Shonibare, MBE’s much-loved sculpture.

In order to help explain the meaning behind the sculpture and its new home at the National Maritime Museum we met up with Yinka Shonibare and our very own Simon Stephens.

Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle from National Maritime Museum on Vimeo.

The National Maritime Museum has recently published on Collections Online a selection of ship plans from The Admiralty collection of sailing warships, commonly known as the Sailing Navy Collection.
The plans range in date from 1700 to 1850 allowing visitors to visualise the leaps that were made in ship design during this period and show how as political situations changed (such as the War of American Independence and the Napoleonic War) so did the Navy’s needs.
The collection also holds plans for ships that were never built as well as experimental vessel that varied in their success.
I hope that you enjoy viewing the plans.

A pair of painted pearl oyster shells (ZBA4546 and ZBA4547)
Many craftwork items involve an appropriate combination of sailors with seashells. The nautilus shells engraved by C.H. Wood turn up quite frequently in the salerooms. Boxed shell valentines made in Jamaica are also well known to collectors. However, when the family of Able Seamen Wright offered us a pair of painted pearl oyster shells, we realised that they were something new to our collections. The shells are quite big and are likely to belong to the largest type of pearl oyster (Pinctada Maxima). These are found in the Eastern Indian Ocean and Western Pacific and historically were harvested not only as a source of pearls but as the basis of a shell button industry.
The shells commemorate a cruise by HMS Juno in the Indian Ocean during World War I and fit in with the NMM’s current research interests in this part of the world. Although his family believe that Henry Wright painted the shells himself, it is possible that he may have bought them in Sri Lanka as a souvenir of his visit. Displays of national flags featured on many items of popular decorative art at this time, notably on the silk embroideries produced in the Far East for sale to western seamen.
A bonus of these attractive items is that we know a good deal about their owner. Able Seaman Henry Wright was born in Plymouth in 1876 and joined the Navy as a boy 2nd class at the age of twelve. He served on the China Station in HMS Victorious during 1897-1900 and in Amphitrite 1902-1905. His service record describes him as a short, dark man with ‘HW’ within a heart transfixed by an arrow, tattooed on his right forearm and an anchor tattooed on his left forearm. He was serving on armoured cruiser HMS Aboukir when she was sunk by U-9 in the North Sea on 22 September 1914. During 1917, he joined Juno and remained in her until the end of the war in 1919. He married Mabel Ada Toms and they had 10 children.

One of the newest additions to the Museum‘s fine collection of navigational instruments is this sextant from the turn of the twentieth century. For those who don’t know, a sextant is an instrument used to measure angles at sea (or on land) for the purposes of finding one’s position. In many ways this example is unexceptional for the period – a standard design with all the normal fittings in its wooden box.

But the reason we acquired it is because we know who owned it – a young man named John Duncan Campbell, who won it as an astronomy prize while on HMS Conway, a training ship for the merchant navy.

Campbell seems to have been a good student and won several other prizes, including the special summer prize (a pair of binoculars), a telescope for proficiency in seamanship and a bible as a King’s Gold Medal candidate. After qualifying as a midshipman in July 1904, just a few weeks before his eighteenth birthday, Campbell joined the sailing vessel Invernneil, owned by G. Milne & Co.