Downtime Uncommon Alien Worlds

This is not the kind of alien book that explains itself. Fifty planets go about their business without translation: rivers that bend the wrong way, islands that decline to touch ground, ruins built by whoever was here before the caption started. The line work stays clean and the shapes stay readable, so the strangeness never tips into clutter; a crystal garden reads as a crystal garden even while insisting it belongs to no known geology. It suits colorists who have grown tired of coloring the familiar and would rather guess at the atmosphere of somewhere with two moons and a sky the wrong color entirely. Nothing here needs correcting to make sense, which frees you to just pick a palette and decide, for instance, what a floating island's underside should look like. A color test area and single-sided pages take care of the practical questions, leaving the rest of the universe open for interpretation.