Book Series
Our unmanned efforts in space deserve great credit, but they aren’t enough.
background: NASA Juno Mission Collection 2 excerpt (https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/juno/multimedia/junoanimations.html), NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center MAVEN animation (https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11024)
Next up: a hazy memory of the Apollo era.
Background video footage: Apollo 11 montage from NASA
I got together with a friend and a green screen recently to shoot for a promo video. I can be chatty, so we ended up with more footage than I need, much of it quite good. I’ll throw some clips against the wall here over the next couple weeks and see what sticks.
background: Illustration for Scratching the Surface by Luis Peres.
One day, in the near future, children will be born on Mars. The environment they grow up in will be very different from yours. And yet, they will still be human children, just like you. They will have dreams and worries, just like you. They will go to school; they will play; they will cry; they will laugh: in so many ways just like you.
But their sky won’t be blue. They will never see an ocean. They will never go to an amusement park or go camping in a forest. They will never hear the sound of rain.
Instead, their sunsets will be blue. They will see the tallest volcano and the deepest canyon in the solar system. They will ride in rovers and rockets, and this will be normal for them. They will walk through rocky red landscapes that haven’t changed for billions of years. They will see, and be part of, the development of an entirely new branch of human existence.
And, once in a while, they will look up at a particularly blue evening star in the sky and know that on that planet so far away, there are billions of children, just like themselves, some of whom might, at that same instant, be looking up at a particularly red star in the sky.
Which will they call home?
illustration by Luis Peres (work in progress)
Illustration for Book One, Scratching the Surface, is well under way. Here is an in-progress sequence of the work on Chapter 4. Continue reading “Illustration progress, Chapter 4”
I’m thrilled to announce that Generation Mars has an illustrator! Luis Peres, master illustrator of science fiction and fantasy, will bring his vivid style to Book One: Scratching the Surface. The image above is from his existing portfolio and serves as an example of his work. The actual illustrations are currently under development. You can see more of his work by clicking the link below, and I encourage you to take a look. It’s wonderful stuff!
We have logos!
The first is the mission badge for the colony in which the kids live. The colony calls itself Dawn, signifying the beginning of a new era in human development. The motto, “Ut melius faciat”, translates as “To do better”, a noble and ambitious sentiment for these first humans on Mars as they go about developing an entirely new culture.
The second is the official series logo. It too is a mission badge. Initially created by the younger sister as a gift to her older sibling, the parents liked the idea so much that they formalized it to be the official badge for kids born on Mars. The arms open to the sun, reflected in the helmet visor, signify this generation’s embracing of their future in this new era.
Both badges were developed by Graham Blake, illustrator extraordinaire.
Scratching the Surface, Generation Mars: Book One, is an illustrated chapter book. Told through the eyes of two sisters, it describes the emergence, literally and figuratively, of this first generation of kids born on Mars. The colonists live underground as protection against the solar and cosmic radiation that reaches the surface of Mars. The kids have never been to the surface. The inside of the colony is all they know. And then they get their chance to step outside.
Coming soon…
My youngest daughter overheard us discussing ideas for the series logo, so she got out her pencils and went to work.
What do you think?
Well, the recent rain has delayed work on the promo video. We had planned to shoot at Lordsburg Playa, New Mexico, in order to get the look of a Martian landscape. An inch of rain this week has left standing water, ’cause that’s what desert playas do.
On Mars, the atmospheric pressure at the surface is so low that liquid water would boil away immediately. Here on Earth, we’ll have to wait for the slower process of evaporation.
