IAN MCQUE MILESHIPS

The time of the Mileships is coming to an end. Their glorious history trails behind them, an archipelago of weightless debris in a storm-whorled sky. Those skyborn magnates who still control the fleets believe they can plot a course for the future, but it is the people who live and die each day in the sky — the sailors, merchants, cartographers, salters, and limitmen — who will truly decide what happens at the end of their journey.

Co-written with game designer and author Jim Rossignol, MILESHIPS is a product of many years of work and insight, through which Ian McQue has explored his science fiction concept with meticulous intensity and real-world inspiration. Sketches from docklands and fishing towns, highlands and marshlands, paintings and studies of people, ships, and places, have all found recombination in McQue's complex and contemplative work.

This is not just an art book. It is true worldbuilding. The book takes you on a tour of the MILESHIPS world, an imaginary but realistic place that the artist has created. It is not one story, but something like a narrative scrapbook of fragments and moments, all gathered from Ian McQue's own prolific imaginings. It is a worldbook for another place: a glimpse of an archipelago in the sky which echoes our own lost histories and our most urgent human enterprises. It is where the MILESHIPS take on a life of their own, and allow us, through McQue's endless painterly endeavours, to explore their world.

About artist Ian McQue

Originally from Sunderland in the North East of England, Ian McQue has been sketching and scribbling his entire life. His work is bound into the fabric of modern culture, having spent more than twenty years as a concept artist and art director producing the iconic imagery for the world-bestriding Grand Theft Auto games at Edinburgh's Rockstar North.

More recently, McQue has consulted for major video game and movie studios, loaning his visual design talents to Solo: A Star Wars Story, the Mortal Engines movie, as well as the hugely successful Spiderverse movies. Ian McQue has produced covers for twenty published novels, including those for the highly regarded Mortal Engines series by Philip Reeve.