So having recently sent Guy Haley's Champion of Mars to press, I've naturally had the Red Planet on my mind (fun fact: the majority of the names for mars around the world either mean "fire star" or refer to war; cool, huh?).
Mars is an old fascination of mine; of everyone's, really. I tore through Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy as a youth; I wrote my own SF stories set on Mars; I played roleplaying games in which I peopled it with future colonies and strange cultures. It's always been a massive part of my imaginative life.
So anyway, today I stumbled on these pictures of Martian sunrises, on the very curious geek-culture blog Hyperlexia. Which was timely. They're artist's renditions (this is a correction; I was given to understand that they're real photos, but it turns out they're not, which is a slight shame) based on data taken from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter. Leaving aside for a moment the mind-blowing idea of how these pictures are created, aren't they amazing?
Just thought I'd share them with you.
-o0o-
An extraordinary blend of cutting-edge, hard-SF transhumanism and glorious, classic science-romance, this is a treatment of Mars in which both Kim Stanley Robinson and Edgar Rice Burroughs (what is it with Mars and writers with three names, huh?) would find something to love.
It's also a work of breath-taking scope and ambition, spanning over seven hundred centuries and a war between different planes of existence. Massively recommended.
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