Today, my picture book Hello Space: Is Anybody Out There? is published.
The book is published to coincide with the opening of the Natural History Museum’s exhibition SPACE.
But this time, the subject isn’t something big, prehistoric and lumbering that once lived here on earth and then died from an asteroid to its cranium. It deals with the idea of how life exists beyond our planet Earth and how we know about it.
The book features Waterhouse, the mouse that lives in the Museum and has investigated the sauropods Diplodocus and Titanosaur in my previous books. Asteroids play a big part in what we know about life beyond our planet, and this time the mouse ventures beyond the Museum to see for itself. The Natural History Museum has examples of meteorites, which are an asteroid’s way of getting closer to us.
This book is a little presentational (there’s a lot of big ideas that need to be explained on a grain of rice), and a little philosophical, too. I don’t think the Museum experts – who have to authorise the text – will ever be completely satisfied with my glossing over subjects that they’ve spent a career investigating in-depth. But then… they probably can’t even draw. That’s what I reckon.
The pictures in my book are made with ink, oil pencil, kraft paper and watercolour. There’s a lot of drawing going on, and this book is printed in two colours: black and a nice Mars red.
These books don’t just appear out of the sky in a streak of bright light. You can get one at the exhibition, or through the NHM online shop.
Hello Space is out now.
Hello Space: picture book promo trailer © David Mackintosh, 2025
Early stages. Some ideas made it into the book.
Hello Space Re-entry book trailer © david mackintosh. 2025.
