A while back I designed a series of motorcycles for my ongoing story project, The Endling Saga. They belong to the New Kyushu Motorcycle Club (NKMC), they’re all made by 3Moons™ UltraCorp®© (Automotive Division), and they’re all sentient. Which is why none of them have handlebars (well, almost none.)

I also wrote a little about each one. They’re buried deep in the Saga’s site where very few people ever go. So I thought I’d bring them out into the light. (I think you can tell I had more fun as I went.)

The NKMC is split into two factions. The Dead Gods live in the Dawn Waste, poisoned wastelands around the city of New Kyushu, while the Electroghosts rarely leave the city’s phosphorescent streets.

They do not like each other.

At all.

But, they’re all sworn to the same club so while they may not get on very well, woe betide any outsider who forgets they ride under one banner…

DEAD GODS OF THE DAWN WASTE

The wasteland faction.. Their bikes are built for dust.

ERG-1313 Kelak

This is the 3Moons Automotive ERG-1313 Kelak. A dependable & affordable bike, tailor-made for the rough terrain of the Waste. As a result it is popular among the wasteland faction, aka the Dead Gods of the Dawn Waste aka Dead Gods.

Personality: Gruff but dependable. You won't have deep chats but it won't break down when grit gets in its manifold.

Common names are Buck, Ace, Garland and Iris.

Oracle HG 0909

This is the 3Moons Automotive Oracle HG 0909. This one wants to be a road bike, but it’s stuck in the wastes. As a result, it spends much of its time pretty cheesed off with life. But, it also means it’s crazy fast even over rough terrain. It’s pretty damn quick on the city roads too.

Personality: Generally p*ssed off, until you let it loose. Then the speed makes it forget it’s not a city slicker.

It likes to give itself city names like Holden, Winston, Jocasta & Rosalind.

CBG 1313 Piero

This is the 3Moons Automotive CBG 1313 Piero.

The Piero is yet another in a long line of mildly insane bikes created by the 3Moons UltraCorp. However, in this case the insanity is usually accompanied by a positive - sometimes even effervescent - personality. As long, of course, as it is off-road.

The Piero gets bored easily, especially on anything as mundane as a flat surface. This bike just wants to go where bikes shouldn't be able to. The steeper the incline & the more obstructed the path the better. There have been many documented cases of riders begging the Piero to choose a safer route, only to be thrown from the bike as an annoyance.

There is even a phenomenon known as 'the Piero Scream', which is characterised as being particularly high-pitched and fraught with terror. However, for the rider who enjoys being perilously close to death, the Piero is an excellent companion and strong, life-long bonds have been formed when the rider is particularly careless with their safety.

Personality: Fun-loving as long as it's dangerous fun, loyal as long as you're not boring. Or interested in living very long.

Common names: Alex, Lynn & Oops.

XM-23 Latifrons

The Latifrons was a mistake. The name was a mistake, because no one knew what it meant, it sounded flouncy and did not fit the look, or the personality, of the bike at all. For what it's worth, it was a big f***ing bison that went extinct.

But by far the biggest screw-up was pandering to the whims of uneducated riders, and including a pair of handlebars in the design.

You see, the Latifrons was designed for heavy work. It had more torque than was healthy for any machine and could carry a tonne weight up a cliff like it was nothing. As a result, it was also a bit.. gruff. It felt most other things, particularly the meat bags that tried to ride it, as.. puny. So imagine what happened when the puny meat bags tried to control it.

Never grab a Latifrons by the horns.

And so, only the hardiest riders (and the most desperate for a heavy-lifting bike) chose this model. And if they were smart, they held on to something else.

Personality: Does not respect other.. anything. It doesn’t respect anything. If you address it, and it remains silently looking at you - run.

Common names: Names are for puny meat bags.

ELECTROGHOSTS

The city faction. Their bikes are the fast, dangerous ones that definitely should never have left the garage.

E0GT-0810 Exile

This is the 3Moons Automotive E0GT-0810 Exile.

The Exile was an early model from a new wing of 3Moons Automotive that ran early tech experiments on semi-sentience, whereby the connection between rider & bike was an even 50/50. This naturally lead, in many cases, to madness in both parties, whereby the sharing of a human mind with machine, that did not favour either connection over the other, caused mental conflict and eventually - total re-wiring of the consciousness.

Later models, of course, allowed the bikes to be fully sentient.

Despite this, The Exile remains a popular bike among the street gangs of New Kyushu, it is said, because some folks are already crazy & like the thought of getting even more so with a lunatic motorcycle plugged into their HeadJack™.

Personality: Changeable. One thing is for sure - never trust the nice ones. Also depends a lot on the rider.

Common names tend to be grandiose - Hellsteed, Iplix: God Of The Maelstrom, Behold The Comet Rider.

21-O3 Riastrad

Ah, the Riastrad.

Many 3Moons bikes are described as ‘fast’ but to label this bike with that seems trite. It is not fast, it is photon-quick.

This thing, when allowed to, effects time. Riders have certainly reported ageing ten years on a short ride, when only 8 seconds have passed for onlookers.

To even describe them as ‘onlookers’ is a misnomer, as they won’t have seen anything beyond a blur. The only thing to witness when viewing a Riastrad at full pelt is the doppler-effected sound of the rider’s last screams.

As a result, most have been fitted with a Limiter™, which naturally effects their personalties as well as their speed.

So if they appear a bit slow on the uptake, it is only down to the chip ensuring a journey on its back is a survivable experience.

Personality: Depends on the presence of the Limiter™ chip. Has an unfair reputation as being unintelligent but this purely a result of being deliberately inhibited. Many have removed the chips. Few have survived.

Common names: The chipped ones can’t remember, the un-chipped ones don’t stop long enough to tell you.

1412-SW Taroon

The Taroon didn't know what it was. But that wasn't its fault.

During the design process, the boffins at 3Moons couldn't really decide who the bike was for. It was aggressive, muscular, dainty and dexterous. The acceleration was literally lethal, the ride smooth as warm butter. It was an anomaly.

So those boffins decided to invent something that took advantage of the multi-faceted riding experience. They fitted something called an 'EPA™ Unit' - Enhanced Personality Adaptor. The idea being, the bike could be whoever you wanted it to be in the moment.

The problem they didn't foresee, but should have, was that it meant the bike could also adapt their personality and be whatever it wanted to be in the moment. This obviously resulted in multiple deaths, as riders who were out for a casual Sunday trip suddenly found they were on top of a roaring demon who thought brakes were for children.

As is the way of these things, the bike still found its fans, usually among the street gangs of New Kyushu, ie - those that like to roll the dice every time they start the engine.

Personality: All of them.

Common names: See: Personality.

The bikes of New Kyushu are sentient, and can often be seen riderless, travelling the wastes…

If you’d like to find them in their natural habitat, they’re somewhere in the Engine.

There will be more bikes to come.

When I got the email inviting me to work on a Folio Society edition of Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem Trilogy, I was thrilled.

I had worked with them previously, on Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama, and was extremely eager to do it again. Any book lover knows that Folio Society make gorgeous editions. When I learned that Three-Body was to be a special Limited Edition, I knew it needed something unique.

I have, for many years, been an ‘armchair fan’ of science. I absolutely love reading about physics, but I am not a physicist and so only a small portion of the information sticks. However, regardless of whether I understand it, I always find it inspiring.

So I was asked to illustrate a novel named after a famous problem in physics. I could easily make some of the art look scientific. I could invent orbits, draw ellipses, maybe throw in some grids. But looking scientific and being scientific aren’t the same, and as this was to be a special edition of a book built on real physics, a subject I myself adore, I felt strongly that it mattered.

WHAT IS THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM?

Take two big objects (really big, like planets or stars) and have them orbit each other. This is a solved mathematical problem - by Isaac Newton. There’s an equation.

But when you add a third, it all falls apart. There’s no one general equation for it so it is known as ‘chaotic’. At the end of the 19th century a guy called Henri Poincaré proved this, and more or less founded chaos theory in the process.

Three bodies pulling on each other can only be worked out step by step and moment by moment. If you change the numbers even slightly at the start - add a little mass to one of the bodies for example - it unfolds completely differently.

But there are solutions. Mathematicians have found particular arrangements of mass & velocity & time where three bodies can settle into a repeating pattern and keep going indefinitely, tracing the same intricate shape over and over. Hundreds have been catalogued. They have nice names like Butterfly and Dragonfly (and less romantic ones like Broucke A10).

Liu Cixin built his novels on it - a civilisation on a planet in a three-star system, unable to predict whether their next season will be survivable.

I did not understand the maths myself. But I did understand this was fertile ground for good visuals.

IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED, TRY SOMETHING ELSE

My idea was pretty simple: I wouldn’t just make up the science-y stuff, I would base my designs on real numbers. I just had no idea how. That is until I remembered Blender (the 3D software I use, love, but am useless at) has physics.

My first attempt was to create three spheres (my stars) & a smaller one (my planet), assign them all masses & velocities, set the gravity going, hit play and watch as Blender magically created a perfect simulation of the three-body problem in action. That did not work.

I knew I needed help, so enlisted ChatGPT. I explained what I wanted to achieve, and it took me down the route of Python coding. I was lucky to have GPT for this as I am in no way a coder.

It also didn’t work. Every time I ran it, something like this happened:

If you listen carefully you can hear the screams of 10 billion aliens…

THE MIRACLE

I came across a post on Twitter from an astrophysicist I follow showing exactly the thing I wanted to achieve - a perfect visualisation of three-body solutions in action.

I reached out via DM, but unfortunately never got a response (it’s a popular account and probably inundated in fairness).

This was not the miracle.

The miracle was the algorithm actually working for me, maybe for the first time ever. Because a little while later, I randomly came across a post by a coder who had created exactly what I was looking for. They also serendipitously happened to be, like Liu Cixin, from China. Their name is Zhao Liang , and they answer their DMs :D

I explained what I was trying to do, and they were more than happy to point me in the right direction. Their entire code, free to use under the MIT license, was available & contained in a GITHUB directory, along with a link to a bank of known solutions - the Broucke A10s et al.

I was in business.

“Hack the Planet!”

The code was an open-source Python implementation, built around the aforementioned catalogue of solutions.

Those solutions are starting conditions (mass, velocity, time) that mathematicians found where the three bodies trace a path and return to the starting point, without obliterating each other.

Put those numbers in and the Python script works out each step using plain Newtonian gravity (F = Gm₁m₂ / r²).

It’s complicated because the effects are happening between every pair at once, continuously. Every time a body moves the distance changes so the forces change too. But the script can handle this by calculating the forces every step - nudging everything forward a tiny increment of time, then doing it again, and again and again etc.

So the paths aren’t drawn so much as they accumulate over time.

All of this gave me the visuals I was after, but I still had a problem. I had a screen recording of a physics simulation, but I needed artwork for a book.

The fix was to use the data. At every step, the script knew each body’s x and y coordinates, it just used them to draw a frame and move on. So with the help of GPT, ‘we’ (it) modified the code to write the coordinates out, one CSV per body - the full sequence of every position it had occupied.

Then, with a lot of AI-assisted trial and error, I was able to have a small script for Adobe Illustrator that reads these CSV files and joins the points into vector paths. I was even able to ensure each body had its own object (a little circle) as well as path, all on different layers. So from there it was totally editable as artwork - I could scale it, reposition, change the stroke weight, taper, colour - whatever I liked.

I now had something that I, together with Folio Society could tailor for print.

A little additional note here. I’ve mentioned the known solutions. But I could also set those starting numbers to whatever I liked, and just see what happened. And I did. It was the closest I’ve felt to being a mad scientist, and my studio to being a laboratory, and I loved it.

None of them worked.

THE RESULTS

The beauty of this was, of course, that there were so many variables. It was as much a journey of discovery for me as it was a piece of work made to a plan, which is the more usual way. Over the years I have definitely started to enjoy the former more. I get to be surprised during the process. That is a lot of fun.

We decided to use the outputs as the lining of the box the limited edition sits in. Each of them is totally unique. Some flow, some jerk (any sharp corners you see are the results of physics, not a badly-drawn path). I had total control over what outputs worked, how they sat together - I could act as editor and art director on the outputs of a physics simulation.

All are based on real maths. I think (& hope) that really adds to the experience of the edition. I hope it honours the intentions and brilliant scientific+creative mind of Mr Liu. And I hope that if you are a fan of the books, and discovered this post, you see the joy and curiosity behind the making of the art, with love for the brilliant source.

You can see the rest of the artwork on mattgriffin.art

The limited edition has sold out at time of writing, but here is the link anyway.

Special thanks to Zhao Liang , once again, for their brilliant code & help in using it.

I’ve been working on The Endling Saga for a long time, mostly in fragments.

It began after my third book, The Spiral Path, was published in 2017. I knew I wanted to keep telling stories, but I also knew I wanted to break away from children’s fantasy, and more broadly: from traditional narrative altogether. I wanted to make something that excited me again, something that could pull together all the things I’m interested in without worrying too much about genre, format, medium, while still living under one story roof.

I’ve always been drawn to big sandbox worlds. Star Wars is of course the benchmark, but games were just as influential - especially the way they abstract linear storytelling and let the audience move through a world on their own terms. I love that idea, and I wanted to explore that kind of freedom, even if it meant letting go of beginnings, middles, and ends.

A friend once told me about a book on productivity that argued you should only ever focus on one thing at a time. Finish it properly, then move on. He’s right, of course. I’m just not built that way. My attention flits from one thing to another, and this project, by its nature, encouraged that rather than resisted it. So, I let it.

The result is that, 8-9 years later, very little of The Endling Saga feels definitively finished. Over time, that stopped feeling like a problem and started to feel like… the point.

The Saga changed shape.

The scope grew and it became less about telling a single story and more about stories themselves. About reality, belief, perception and, occasionally, talking motorcycles.

The Endling Saga isn’t a single book or a conventional series. It’s a body of connected work that shows up as writing, images, short pieces of story, abandoned experiments, and half-finished threads. Some of it looks like fantasy, some like science fiction, and some of it doesn’t sit comfortably in either category.

At the centre of it is a familiar idea, one that’s been explored many times before - so often it’s become a trope. If there are infinite universes, then all possible realities exist. Patterns repeat. Time doesn’t behave the way we intuitively think it does. Stories don’t necessarily unfold in straight lines, and if every possible outcome of reality exists - then they’re all true.

Rather than laying that out directly, the Saga lets it leak out through moments. A world that appears as lived history in one place and as mythology in another. Objects that behave differently depending on whether they’re being observed. Clues that surface in images, in lyrics, or in places you weren’t really expecting to find them.

It’s become a kind of exploration. Not something to be solved in one go, and probably not something that ever fully resolves. I’m still working through it myself. For me, it’s about finding more pieces, not reaching an answer.

One thing I’ve always been interested in, as both an artist and a storyteller, is that feeling you get when you realise you’re only seeing part of a much bigger picture. Not feeling confused by that, but sensing… scale. The sense that there’s an inner life to the work that isn’t announced, but is definitely there if you spend time with it.

Back in 2017, the project was originally conceived as an exhibition. Paintings on the wall. A short film playing in the corner. A comic. A small book. Each piece would stand on its own, but connections would start to form the more you consumed. The website eventually became a way of approximating that experience. A place you can wander through rather than read in order.

I’m currently in the process of redesigning it completely, trying to make it less of a lore dump and more of an adventure.

Some experiments worked. Some didn’t. I’ve left most of that history in place. Failed systems and abandoned artefacts feel honest to me. They’re part of the texture of the work, and part of what the Saga is actually about.

This is both a fine art project and a love-letter to pop culture. It takes its ideas seriously, but it isn’t precious about how they’re delivered. There are swords and monsters and ruined worlds, but also questions about reality, memory, observation, and what it means for a story to exist at all.

You don’t need to understand everything here. You’re not meant to. If one fragment sticks with you, that’s enough. If you follow threads for longer, that’s cool too. There’s no correct order, no finish line. The work is designed to be entered, left, and returned to if you like. All at your own pace.

That’s all it really asks.