Category: art

History of Science Fiction

I’m on my way to PAX East! I hope to see you there, but if not, at least you can entertain yourself by maximizing your window size, then clicking on the mass of organs above that represent the history of fantastic fiction, starting with mythology and ending up in the realm of Kim Stanley Robinson, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Wall-E.

The image is really big. You’ll seriously want to make your window full screen to see it or download it.

Why We Explore

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY59wZdCDo0&feature=player_embedded

In an early Human Contact game, a player asked me why Academics go to the stars. The answer is this video.

Another Sagan quote, this one from a rejected layout that we might yet see in a future edition of the game:

As the ancient myth makers knew, we are children equally of the earth and the sky. In our tenure on this planet we’ve accumulated dangerous evolutionary baggage — propensities for aggression and ritual, submission to leaders, hostility to outsiders — all of which puts our survival in some doubt.

But we’ve also acquired compassion for others, love for our children and desire to learn from history and experience, and a great soaring passionate intelligence — the clear tools for our continued survival and prosperity. Which aspects of our nature will prevail is uncertain, particularly when our visions and prospects are bound to one small part of the small planet Earth.

But up there in the immensity of the Cosmos, an inescapable perspective awaits us.

First Human Contacts Roll In!

Good news! After two weeks of technical issues, the first copies of Human Contact are in! The technical issues persist, unfortunately, so there’s not quite closure, but I have 60 copies now, should have another 200 or so next week, and another 50ish the week after that.

The nature of the technical issue isn’t clear; it’s just one of those thing that happens when printing. But I can say that my printer, 360 Digital, has done a fantastic job of both printing them and keeping me abreast of things that have gone wrong. The measure of a printer, after all, is not that nothing ever goes wrong. Things go wrong. The measure of a printer is in how they communicate and make good when that happens.

I won’t be shipping any books until more are in, but I will have copies at Dreamation, so if you’re one of my backers, please let whoever’s at the Indie Bazaar and I’ll sign and hand you your copy right there.

Isisaurus Colberti on my Workbench

I’ve wanted to do more sculpture for a while now. In celebration of giving the thumbs up to the press, I started work on an isisaurus colberti. It’s a “small” sauropod (like the apatosaurs, brachiosaurs, and ultrasaurs of our childhoods) of a mere 18m in length. But what gets me is its weird, hyaena-like posture. It’s quite speculative — there aren’t really enough bones to confirm the body shape — but there’s some reason to believe it’s something like this.

Since I’m liable to put a howdah on top anyway, I’m not going to be overly concerned with the actual accuracy. Reproducing the weird structure here will be enough.

So I started building the armature tonight!