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Terran Trade Authority #3
Spacewreck: Ghostships and Derelicts of Space
A collection of many unrelated very short stories about dangerous planets and space disasters, illustrated.
98 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1979
4 people are currently reading
217 people want to read
About the author
Stewart Cowley
166 books25 followersStewart Cowley (also Steven Caldwell, Hubert Venables) is a British writer and artist, best known for his works in the "Terran Trade Authority" universe.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
July 5, 2016
Okay now if there is EVER a book that screams nostalgia this is it. I cannot begin (well I guess I sort of am already) to say what this book means to me.
Okay the book is old, 1979 to be precise, the art is varied to say the least and the content well a little shaky but I DO NOT CARE.
I first saw this in a 1980s department store, one that we would go to every christmas to spend our christmas gift vouchers and yes it was all very stereotypical. However because it was the 80s and pretty much a closed environment my brother and I were let loose to explore - and yes they had a book department.
They had a copy of this book which I instantly galvanised to, imploring my parents to let me buy it. Sadly to no avail they said it was too old for me (and too expensive) so sadly I had to walk away form it (although I did do my best to try and read most of it) seemingly to never see it again.
Now years later I have a copy of the same book - okay its not as in such good a condition and I guess some of the "wow" factor has worn off and like I say shows it's age but still the memories still come flooding back and the sheer fun of it (even if it is a collection of crashed and wrecked space ships). The text is really just a series of contrived pieces to justify the choice of artwork but who cares. I guess we all have our white whales and over the years, in book format at least I have collected my fair share of them, but in this case, for once I finally found it. I am suddenly a very smug 10 year old all over again.
Okay the book is old, 1979 to be precise, the art is varied to say the least and the content well a little shaky but I DO NOT CARE.
I first saw this in a 1980s department store, one that we would go to every christmas to spend our christmas gift vouchers and yes it was all very stereotypical. However because it was the 80s and pretty much a closed environment my brother and I were let loose to explore - and yes they had a book department.
They had a copy of this book which I instantly galvanised to, imploring my parents to let me buy it. Sadly to no avail they said it was too old for me (and too expensive) so sadly I had to walk away form it (although I did do my best to try and read most of it) seemingly to never see it again.
Now years later I have a copy of the same book - okay its not as in such good a condition and I guess some of the "wow" factor has worn off and like I say shows it's age but still the memories still come flooding back and the sheer fun of it (even if it is a collection of crashed and wrecked space ships). The text is really just a series of contrived pieces to justify the choice of artwork but who cares. I guess we all have our white whales and over the years, in book format at least I have collected my fair share of them, but in this case, for once I finally found it. I am suddenly a very smug 10 year old all over again.
July 31, 2011
One of those books you pick up on a whim as a pre-teen and which haunts you until mid-adulthood. I recently *had* to buy another copy of this. Some sense-of-wonder-provoking images in here, tied together with some poignant storylines.
February 11, 2012
Spacewreck: Ghostships and Derelicts Of Space By Stewart Cowley is the excellent follow up book to Spacecraft: 2000-2099, and while the first book is full of great spaceship descriptions and accompanying illustrations, Spacewreck offers more gripping tales revolving around spaceship derelicts found drifting through space,resting on some unexplored planet or being of completely unknown origin.The text and illustrations are lavish and haunting, and this is an engaging read as a standalone book, although the first book makes a good reference background for some of the featured spacecraft, and also for giving historical information on the Terran Trade Authority universe,especially the Proximan War. Enjoy!
September 6, 2025
This is a very calm and peaceful book, who's only purpose is contemplation, a bit like a scholars stone, merely a fragment of pseudohistory; a history which does not exist, places that cannot be 'used' for anything and which signify nothing other than themselves.
This is from the 'golden period' in genre art, from around the mid 1970s to the 1990s. It was an age of ink, digital did not exist. For whatever reason, this age birthed titans in fantasy art, of which Stewart Cowley isn't necessarily one; these images are good, but if ranked up with the contents-irrelevant paperback covers of the 70s, you wouldn't pull them out. Here though, they are arranged amongst themselves, given large and luxurious room to breathe. They even have fold-out pages for a glorious widescreen feel!
That these wrecks are given _as_ history seems significant. This is a post-war book
in our world and the imagined one, (an memory strikes of Chris Foss, growing up on Jersey, inspired by the rotting ruins of WWII fortifications and reproducing them in space), and nearly a post-exploration tome, for, while wars and explorations are going on, there is little time to scratch lines.
Book such as these belong to the periods of peace, and periods of contemplation and reconstruction between ages of crisis. Fere are doomed explorations ruined by the hallucinations of poison planets, quarantined bio-plague investigation ships, the tombs of wild military adventures, returning on unexpected parabola to the scenes of their deaths, strange alien craft, empty, or filled with corpses, sargasso seas of wrecked ships. Here also are the memories of stories, for each of these wrecks is the end point and memory of a science fiction story; the story of the pirate who crashes on an island/planet, encounters aliens/primitives, and becomes a god, the story of a rag-tag fleets last-ditch attempt to stop a planet-death, the story of a resource-poor world consumed by war, leaving only ruins.
We contemplate these stories specifically after their end. In many cases the end is the only thing we are certain of and, like in many cases where the arc of time is subverted or reversed, this makes things a little existential - by removing and possible tension from events we are left with everything else.
These are specifically things to dream about, as one might dream about a 'real' mystery,
they invite the reader to build ecologies of wonder, combining the restless outgoing considerations of the explorer or invader, with the calm, centred and somewhat sorrowful perspective of the historian or philosopher. Probably Ursula LeGuin would like this book - all the tumults ended and what remains is the slow reclamations of entropy.
The pseudohistory may be the strangest kind of play, for it is very much a product _of play_, yet has no play in it, at least, certainly this sort, which has no grand explicit theme, no dark warning, no massively interlinked _lore_, and nothing clever and subtle going on with its construction of imagined events, (we are not going to find out that this or that is behind-it-all, or discover the book itself is a cognithazard, there is no monster in the background and no epistolary game between imagined interlocutors), it is, entirely and only, the sensation of one child in a garden finding something 'weird', and calling others round to look, a direct sharing of strangeness.
A wreck is a ruin, a graveyard, a memory of disaster - an image of human hope which overreached, or otherwise failed, and in some cases, a pure mystery, its origin unknown, unknowable, a tenious fragment of an inferred larger world. One things for certain - there is nothing left to do but remember, and witness what remains.
Here, like a ruin, is a symbol left by God, a little watermark in reality, or a fragment of html left in the main text of a web-page, making it very explicit that what we see and live within, the tumult of our sensory world, is like a little sheen of breath on metal, evaporating round the edges, part of something strange and large. Ruins are the keys of time in this way, and wrecks also, are doorways, symbols of a time-sense larger than we can currently perceive, the mind leaps here intuitively, into scales and measures which formerly hit, or resisted contemplation.
It is hard to be hysterical around a wreck.
This is from the 'golden period' in genre art, from around the mid 1970s to the 1990s. It was an age of ink, digital did not exist. For whatever reason, this age birthed titans in fantasy art, of which Stewart Cowley isn't necessarily one; these images are good, but if ranked up with the contents-irrelevant paperback covers of the 70s, you wouldn't pull them out. Here though, they are arranged amongst themselves, given large and luxurious room to breathe. They even have fold-out pages for a glorious widescreen feel!
That these wrecks are given _as_ history seems significant. This is a post-war book
in our world and the imagined one, (an memory strikes of Chris Foss, growing up on Jersey, inspired by the rotting ruins of WWII fortifications and reproducing them in space), and nearly a post-exploration tome, for, while wars and explorations are going on, there is little time to scratch lines.
Book such as these belong to the periods of peace, and periods of contemplation and reconstruction between ages of crisis. Fere are doomed explorations ruined by the hallucinations of poison planets, quarantined bio-plague investigation ships, the tombs of wild military adventures, returning on unexpected parabola to the scenes of their deaths, strange alien craft, empty, or filled with corpses, sargasso seas of wrecked ships. Here also are the memories of stories, for each of these wrecks is the end point and memory of a science fiction story; the story of the pirate who crashes on an island/planet, encounters aliens/primitives, and becomes a god, the story of a rag-tag fleets last-ditch attempt to stop a planet-death, the story of a resource-poor world consumed by war, leaving only ruins.
We contemplate these stories specifically after their end. In many cases the end is the only thing we are certain of and, like in many cases where the arc of time is subverted or reversed, this makes things a little existential - by removing and possible tension from events we are left with everything else.
These are specifically things to dream about, as one might dream about a 'real' mystery,
they invite the reader to build ecologies of wonder, combining the restless outgoing considerations of the explorer or invader, with the calm, centred and somewhat sorrowful perspective of the historian or philosopher. Probably Ursula LeGuin would like this book - all the tumults ended and what remains is the slow reclamations of entropy.
The pseudohistory may be the strangest kind of play, for it is very much a product _of play_, yet has no play in it, at least, certainly this sort, which has no grand explicit theme, no dark warning, no massively interlinked _lore_, and nothing clever and subtle going on with its construction of imagined events, (we are not going to find out that this or that is behind-it-all, or discover the book itself is a cognithazard, there is no monster in the background and no epistolary game between imagined interlocutors), it is, entirely and only, the sensation of one child in a garden finding something 'weird', and calling others round to look, a direct sharing of strangeness.
A wreck is a ruin, a graveyard, a memory of disaster - an image of human hope which overreached, or otherwise failed, and in some cases, a pure mystery, its origin unknown, unknowable, a tenious fragment of an inferred larger world. One things for certain - there is nothing left to do but remember, and witness what remains.
Here, like a ruin, is a symbol left by God, a little watermark in reality, or a fragment of html left in the main text of a web-page, making it very explicit that what we see and live within, the tumult of our sensory world, is like a little sheen of breath on metal, evaporating round the edges, part of something strange and large. Ruins are the keys of time in this way, and wrecks also, are doorways, symbols of a time-sense larger than we can currently perceive, the mind leaps here intuitively, into scales and measures which formerly hit, or resisted contemplation.
It is hard to be hysterical around a wreck.
May 9, 2008
Very entertaining read. Mostly geared towards younger readers, but it would be a fertile source of ideas for a futuristic space role-playing game.
February 27, 2014
The artwork is amazing.
January 13, 2019
Like the other books in the Cowley/TTA series I've had my copy of 'Spacewrecks...' for decades, first getting hooked on them in the late 70s. This entry and others from the author are hardly deep and meaningful sci-fi with detailed characterisations and complex plots. They are a series of very short stories framed around science fiction art of the period, contextualised within a 'Star Trek' like universe with a human-led organisation expanding throughout the galaxy. Therein lies the real value of this book and otehrs by Cowley; the artwork of the illustrations is always enjoyable, and the 'Terran Trade Authority' construct is well put together with some degree of complexity and potential for further work.
As for the individual stories, when Cowley produces longer narratives he does reasonably well. 'The Warworld of Alshain' and 'Children of the Gods' are quite acceptable short stories, whilst 'A Deadly Eden' has definite echoes of 'Star Trek'. There are plenty of occasions where the reader can observe that Cowley has shoe-horned his writing around the image he has adopted for his story, and one glaring example where he or his editors missed the mark.
It must also be said that Cowley does not populate his short stories with memorable characters. In fact there are only really two figures named in the book, and of these only one has any back story, any semblance of development. I don't think it's fair to be too censorial of the author for this; it may be argued that space and the fictional ships he writes about are the real characters, plus he has written a collection of short stories focused on sci-fi art. You can only really talk about how well he uses his palate, and Cowley does a very handy job. However if you want more detailed character exposition go somewhere else.
In summary, I enjoyed this book because of its illustrations, because of the manner in which Cowley has used these to create an interesting science fiction universe, and because it forms one long-held part of my personal library.
As for the individual stories, when Cowley produces longer narratives he does reasonably well. 'The Warworld of Alshain' and 'Children of the Gods' are quite acceptable short stories, whilst 'A Deadly Eden' has definite echoes of 'Star Trek'. There are plenty of occasions where the reader can observe that Cowley has shoe-horned his writing around the image he has adopted for his story, and one glaring example where he or his editors missed the mark.
It must also be said that Cowley does not populate his short stories with memorable characters. In fact there are only really two figures named in the book, and of these only one has any back story, any semblance of development. I don't think it's fair to be too censorial of the author for this; it may be argued that space and the fictional ships he writes about are the real characters, plus he has written a collection of short stories focused on sci-fi art. You can only really talk about how well he uses his palate, and Cowley does a very handy job. However if you want more detailed character exposition go somewhere else.
In summary, I enjoyed this book because of its illustrations, because of the manner in which Cowley has used these to create an interesting science fiction universe, and because it forms one long-held part of my personal library.
April 29, 2022
When Man challenged the elements in his attempts to conquer the oceans of Earth his successes were qualified by tragedies. Similarly throughout space are scattered grim reminders of his failures.
A collection of short sci-fi stories about space wrecks, both human and alien, and the exploration of deep space.
What I liked:
- some very engaging stories, ranging from tragic to creepy.
- the dispassionate narrative truly fits the book.
- amazing artworks all over.
What I didn't like:
- a few stories fall flat or feel too long compared to others.
- a couple stories break the narrative style going through their characters' minds and wishes, and it feels out of place.
Final thoughts:
A lovely way to spend a few days , reading through the (usually very) short stories while glancing at the pretty art felt great. I wasn't expecting much from the stories themselves but I must say they were quite engaging overall, the variety in what's on offer was an expecially welcome surprise.
Please note all my reviews follow Goodreads' descriptions of their star ratings, so 1=did not like 2=was ok 3=liked it 4=really liked it and 5=it was great! Story collections are rated by rating each story individually and taking an average of all results.
A collection of short sci-fi stories about space wrecks, both human and alien, and the exploration of deep space.
What I liked:
- some very engaging stories, ranging from tragic to creepy.
- the dispassionate narrative truly fits the book.
- amazing artworks all over.
What I didn't like:
- a few stories fall flat or feel too long compared to others.
- a couple stories break the narrative style going through their characters' minds and wishes, and it feels out of place.
Final thoughts:
A lovely way to spend a few days , reading through the (usually very) short stories while glancing at the pretty art felt great. I wasn't expecting much from the stories themselves but I must say they were quite engaging overall, the variety in what's on offer was an expecially welcome surprise.
Please note all my reviews follow Goodreads' descriptions of their star ratings, so 1=did not like 2=was ok 3=liked it 4=really liked it and 5=it was great! Story collections are rated by rating each story individually and taking an average of all results.
June 8, 2019
I read the first two books many, many years ago, and finally obtained a copy of this one, long out of print. Unfortunately, I can't say it maintains the high level of quality that my memory holds of those others, and so is rather disappointing. The stories are at times interesting, but the voice in consistent. Sometimes they are, as I expected, told with the dispassionate voice that a Terran Trade Authority handbook should have, but others are far too intimate, providing details and points of view that no bureaucrat would ever give. That spoils the mood and destroys the overlying story/history that the other books provided.
Most of the artwork is still quite good, by the same artists as before.
I'm glad I was able to add this to, and complete my collection, but equally glad I didn't spend a fortune to get it.
Most of the artwork is still quite good, by the same artists as before.
I'm glad I was able to add this to, and complete my collection, but equally glad I didn't spend a fortune to get it.
July 2, 2024
This book came out when I was nine years old, and it has had a tremendous impact on my life. For one thing, it might be a link to James Cameron's "Avatar" movies. And a screen play idea of mine entitled "Colony." The book is part of a series and features the best SF illustration available in 1979, the whole set of stories set in the TTA, the Terran Trade Authority, a fictional sequel to the USA that sprawls around the local galactic sector. This book turned me on when I was young, and I still have my copy today. Finally, I want the other books in the series, but they are expensive. Cheers.
April 26, 2021
I would honestly try to find this book for the pictures alone! Each picture or pictures of a crashed or abandoned derelict ship is accompanied with a short story (ranging from super short to a bit longer) that details how it ended up where it was. It’s written almost in a handbook or encyclopedia type of fashion and has a really interesting feel to it!
August 20, 2017
I didn't really read it, mostly skimmed the text and bugged out on the art. Awesome concept. I might take another crack at the goofball prose in it in the future.
November 15, 2020
I think the Love Death & Robots “Beyond the Aquila Rift” episode may have been directly inspired by this fantastic lil picture book. At any rate, I could not have enjoyed it more.
February 6, 2023
Absolutely lovely book with some enjoyable, if sketchy, stories to accompany the artwork.
June 12, 2023
So many nights as a kid I read this book under the covers with a flashlight imagining all the alien worlds and incredible spacecraft. Beautiful artwork and fun stories, what else could a kid want?!
December 8, 2025
I love this kind of sci fi artwork
July 23, 2016
My favorite maternal aunt gave me this book for Christmas when I was 10. The book was brand new, and I poured over the glorious pictures. My aunt knew that I liked SciFi very much having been encouraged by my favorite paternal uncle (see a pattern?) to read authors such as (listed in no particular order): ERB, Heinlein, Herbert, Norton, and Asimov. This book has survived in my collection despite numerous military moves across the nation, and the Great Apartment Flood of 1995. I have always wished to collect the rest of the series, without spending a small fortune - perhaps with internet shopping that might be possible.
January 24, 2008
An interseting book written like some sort of historical document or archaeological notes. It reads like a who's who of space derelicts, like a modern day book on sunken sailing ships. Its not really a story in the classical sense, but its an interesting glimpse of how authors of the 70's viewed our future voyages into space and the sort of things we might encounter. It could also be helpful for those looking for inspiration for sci-fi role playing material.
April 16, 2018
This was the one Terran Trade Authority book that I had never read. It seems to be fairly rare these days, but I was able to find a copy via interlibrary loan. Like the rest of the series, it's great fun. Lots of strange encounters on the edge of known space, crews disappearing from vessels with no explanation, all that stuff. Illustrated with classic science fiction art from the 1970's and 80's.
August 27, 2016
I loved these books as a youngster, I remember checking these out from the library over and over again.
August 13, 2009
Another of Cowley's clever incorporations of various science fiction artwork into a storyline.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews