Great SCI-FI Concepts - VISUAL TRANSLATION // Part 1
Featuring:
A FIRE UPON THE DEEP (Vernor Vinge) & THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN (Gene Wolfe)
Most people know this about me, but if you don’t, here it is: I’m a sci-fi nerd. Hi! Since some of the most respected sci-fi books were recently adapted for the screen (hello there Dune and Foundation), I channelled some of my carefully nurtured geekness, to share with you some other cool & interesting concepts from science fiction novels, that have sparked my imagination as a space-insipired digital artist. Also, if you like sci-fi, they’re all great reads and I highly recommend them. In any case - journey ahead, ahoy!
P.S.: since there’s so many great works out there, I’ll touch on just two of the most fascinating ones for now. We can continue exploring other works next time.
A FIRE UPON THE DEEP
(Vernor Vinge, Zones of Thought)
Not to go too deep into the story, but the gist is, that in the book, our galaxy consists of three »Zones of Thought«: the »Unthinking Depths«, close to the galactic core, where only minimal forms of intelligence are possible, the »Slow Zone«, where Earth is located, and travel is restricted to sub-light speeds, and the »Beyond«, where artificial intelligence plus faster-than-light-travel and communication are possible. There’s also »the Transcend«, located in the galactic halo, where superintelligent beings dwell, having relocated there after achieving technological singularity. There, they become a »Power«, and do mysterious and incomprehensible stuff. The main story jumps from planet to planet, where we meet a myriad of different species, and come across super imaginative technologies, but there’s three ideas in this book, that seem extra special and would be a blast to try and create creative visual interpretations for.
Tines
A race, where each »person« consists of 4-8 members, to form a group-mind / individual. To be honest, it took me awhile to get it. When I finally understood that a hero we’ve been following in the book, actually consists of separate members, I was blown away. It’d be amazing to conceptualize a way to share that surprise with viewers. But could that even work as a revelation, transferred to a screen?
Blight
The story starts with a group of humans from the high Beyond investigating a five-billion-year-old data archive in the low Transcend, which could make them unimaginable rich. An ancient dormant superintelligence starts awakening from slumber in the archive. I’ve encountered a lot of A.I. characters in sci-fi books, but to me, imagining an ancient, incomprehensibly all-powerful entity, waking up in an archive after billions of years, takes the cherry. How would the interfaces look, the screens? I’m not a UX designer, but I’d love to tackle this – definitely not by making them holograms, hahaha.
»the Net«
A communications network that links a large number of civilizations, that populate the Beyond. Nothing special per se, as we’ve seen those type of networks on screen countless of times, but in this context, by being in a part of the galaxy, where technology transcends anything we can imagine, it seemed interesting, as I was reading, to try and understand what would that look like – if the type of computer graphics we normally see, would be represented by a 3-D cube, »the Net« would be like a hyper-cube, a shadow of of a 4-D cube. How would a UX interface like that be?
“How long must a fish study to understand human motivation?”
― Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep
THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN
(Gene Wolfe, 4-Book Series)
The story revolves around Severian, a former apprentice in the torturer’s guild, and is set in a distant future, when the Sun has dimmed, the Earth has cooled and is dying, and the moon is green and irregated. Since this 4-part novel series is set millions of years from now, it somewhat feels disjoined to »regular« sc-fi. A lot of the science knowledge in this world has already been forgotten, and is yet again considered as magic and part of fable. There’s mercury filled executioner’s swords, duels, »magic mirrors« that allow interstellar travel, phosynthetic green men, and that’s just scratching the surface. »The Book Of The New Sun« manages to build a complex world, built on top of ruins, on top of ruins of previous human civilizations, that have risen and fallen in the millenia passed. It’d be great to design visuals or direct an incarnation of »The Book Of The New Sun«, but here we are. However, three special ideas from the series haunt me to this day, asking me to find a creative visual translation at least for them. Here’s to them!
General Setting
As I was reading the books, I saw the entire setting as a mix of a medieval, ruined world, filled with high-brow technology, mixed with biopunk and steampunk. The setting borders on fantasy, since the technology is so far advanced. A green moon, red sky. So much tasty goodies, just waiting to be translated to the screen.
Urth
World-building and seemingly natural evolutions of names always get to me. As we’re so far into the future, naturally, languages have evolved and changed, and so names have, too. In the time of »The Book of the New Sun«, the planet on which humans live, is called Urth. It’s nothing drastic, which is exactly why it feels more believable. »Earth« changing to »Urth« feels like a natural evolution. Frank Herbert also used this approach with Arrakis in »Heretics of Dune«, which takes place around 5,000 years later than the original »Dune«, where it’s renamed to Rakis. Caladan becomes Dan. And so on. Although the simplicity of the idea isn’t really connected to visual design and communication, it does parallel it, though.
Father Inire’s Magic Mirrors
I saved my favorite for last. It’s one of the best and most imaginative faster-than-light-travel concepts that I’ve come across. Although a lot has been written on the magic mirrors and how they work, my understanding of them is purely visual. I love physics, but at the end of the day, I’m fueled by imagination :) With that out of the way, the backbone for how I visualized this concept, is similar to what happens when there’s two mirrors facing one another and we’re standing in between – our reflection goes into infinity. Who hasn’t been intrigued by that at one point or another? Now, consider that if somewhere else in the universe, our reflection was somehow made to appear between another set of mirrors, that’d mean there must be a source to them. So, the universe, »forces« that source into existence there. We effectively get teleported via our reflection. How do the reflections appear somewhere else? I usually care, and thankfully, people way smarter than me have already written loads on this subject. So to be honest, the visual idea here seems so brilliant, that for me, the physics bit was overshadowed by it’s fantastic visual potential. I’ve read the series ten years ago, and I’m still fascinated by the magic mirrors to such a degree, that I’m actively thinking of using it for a short animation someday (inspired by the »Book Of The New Sun«).
