Comments about technological history, system fractures, and human resilience from James R. Chiles, the author of Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology (HarperBusiness 2001; paperback 2002) and The God Machine: From Boomerangs to Black Hawks, the Story of the Helicopter (Random House, 2007, paperback 2008)

Friday, October 3, 2014

Interstellar Ice: The Fan-Poster

SF fans counting the days to the premiere of Interstellar are pretty eager to see what Christopher Nolan comes up with.

In my last post I pondered the problem of creating credible but uncanny images of alien neighborhoods, so I scanned my stock of ice photos for something along that line. Here's my shot at a fan-poster for Interstellar:



Except for the NASA image of the spacewalking astronaut on the upper right, all the imagery originates from my wintertime ice field, including the spray of stars. The bubble-headed force-field creature was less than an inch long.

For people who find it hard to believe that macro-photographs can be sufficiently rich in detail and depth of field to stand in for outer space, here's a quote from Douglas Trumbull about the "Stargate" effects near the end of Kubrick's classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey
"The images implied exploding stars, vast galaxies, and immense clouds of interstellar dust and gas. Without revealing too much detail, I'll merely say that these effects involved the interactions of certain chemicals within a camera field of a size no larger than a pack of cigarettes."
I'm working on a PowerPoint SF short story using more ice art, so will be back with a teaser about that.

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