Sime-Gen Street Violence

During my association with Sime-Gen fandom I did a number of illustrations for fan-written stories. This is one of them and is also one of my rare attempts at an action scene. In the story the hero, who is homeless and hungry, is caught stealing an apple from one of the vendors at a marketplace. As he is alone and unprotected, a mob of children and teenagers attack him. Their only weapons are pieces of wood or rocks that they pick up. The leader of the children's' gang is a large red-headed girl, who you see in the center. In the Sime-Gen storyline, children are neither Sime nor Gen until they hit puberty and then they either sprout tentacles as a Sime, or become generators of the bioenergy that Simes live on. The young hero, who becomes a Gen, manages to escape.

The Sime-Gen chronology is elaborate, though one group of fans has published a fairly detailed chart of it along with references to works by originator Jacqueline Lichtenberg and her collaborators and fans. As I am very fond of world-building I naturally want to know what happened in the first place to turn humanity into Simes and Gens. According to Lichtenberg, she will not provide an account of the originating events and no one else should, either. No matter what happened, it had to be an enormous catastrophe resulting in the deaths of billions. The world of the earlier chronology is a post-apocalyptic Earth population attempting to adapt into the new human forms, and using what they can salvage from a destroyed past. Interestingly, the later chronology becomes more science-fictional as well as introducing elements of psychic powers, which is one of my favorite fantasy/s.f. themes.

This illustration as well as two others for a short story, were published in a Sime-Gen fan magazine. I still have it somewhere. But Lo! the text is available online if you wish to read it. The author (not Lichtenberg, but a fan writer) bought the whole set for her collection.

Black ink drawing, colored with watercolor on illustration board,  8 1/2" x 6 1/2", December 2000.