Hey all,
This week I am bouncing between edits for “Lander”, from my Oberon Cycle trilogy, and beta reads for “The Rising Tide”, in my Liminal Sky series. Both involve interesting worlds that are almost characters in and of themselves. 🙂
Forever, in Liminal Sky, is an O’Neill Cylinder. From Wikipedia:
“…a space settlement design proposed by American physicist Gerard K. O’Neill in his 1976 book The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space.[1] O’Neill proposed the colonization of space for the 21st century, using materials extracted from the Moon and later from asteroids.”
But I’ve had a hard time finding art that really * feels * right for my particular world. Half the work of writing a story like this is being able to visualize the world you are writing in, as if you were there, so this is of particular importance for me.
Then I found this image:
It’s so close, and captures the wrap-around nature of Forever. But the world is not open to space, and so the ends and the astronaut are all wrong. So… I tweaked it. I LOVE photoshop. I cropped it, replaced the astronaut’s arm, and added an “end cap”:
Click on it for the glorious larger version.
Again, it’s still not perfect. I mean, Highways. But it does really give you a sense of what it would be like to be there. And for me as a writer, it puts me in the right headspace.
So for my sci fi writer friends how do you imagine your fantastical worlds?