h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Or will the claw get that errant bit of asparagus out of it's teeth?

Actually it's a somewhat stringy remnant of the traffic cop that wanted to see her license ...

Of course he did - she's not wearing a seatbelt!

What was the officer riding?

And did he have a red flashing light?

This is some serious art. You have a definite science-fiction touch.

She's picked the right place to go, anyway. That looks like a nasty plume rising behind him - I'd hate to walk in his wake.

Great work yet again - it's always a pleasure to run it in !

A victim of poor communication and administration. They asked for Iguanodons, but got Iguanas. Bureaucracy still very primitive, not unlike ... never mind.

Well anyways thanks for your comments! I'm still a total novice when it comes to stuff like this ... I hope to soon be working on the next one.

Novice? It sure doesn't look like it!

Well this is the *second ever* Science-fiction/fantasy style painting I've done in my life. It's a very different thing from painting real creatures or scenes using photographs as reference. You have to imagine the scene in your head and then it doesn't come out like that!

If that didn't come out like you imagined it, I want your imagination!

Indeed. I am amazed at the organic quality of your imagined worlds. They look real, not pasted together.

Hi again! Malabarista, the thing is, my 'imagination' is not completely visual ... I blend together visual elements with conceptual and symbolic ones in my mind ... I wish actually I had a *better* ability to visualise!

Dmitri, I think it's because I'm a rather holistic person. My art teacher also comments that I am a wildlife artist that actually goes to as much (actually more) difficulty painting the *backgrounds* of my subjects, as the subjects themselves. Thing is, everything belongs in its rightful home ... animals and plants adapt together with landscape elements to become an 'environment'. When to comes to science fiction/fantasy painting (or writing!), the thing to try is to imagine a kind of world where everything fits together and makes sense in its context.

That is beautifully put. I agree wholeheartedly. (And that's just as much true for writing as it is for painting.)

Reminds me of the HG Wells vs. Jules Verne thing: http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=231

Heh heh! I think with science fiction, you must not try to explain too much. Like 'positronic brains' or 'photon drives' ... by the time we have actual intelligent machines or star-visiting spaceships, the technology will be something totally unknown and quite incomprehensible to us as we are *now*, and the idea of using positrons or photons or whatever would be as silly as the idea of a huge gun shooting people to the moon! I think a good idea would be just to *hint* how something *might* work ... leave much of the details up to the imagination of the reader. But anyways ... my own goal with science fiction is not to predict new or strange technologies, but rather, to get people to think of different modes of living, of thinking, of being ... not necessarily *practical* ones, but just, people should start imagining different ways and considering that the way our society is set up right now, might not be the only possible or good or right way. Nothing wrong with stimulating people's imaginations!

No, you don't have to explain it all, just realise which effects it'll have - because these things can't just have the purpose of being futuristic so you can tell it's the future

As Alexander Pope said:

'True wit is nature to advantage dressed,
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.'

Which is is how I feel about what you just said, Willem.

The art of science fiction - which is why so few do it well - is in suggesting something productive without using that productivity to beat the reader over the head with a fully-imagined personal world.

Or, why I do not read Ursula K LeGuin et al.

If it takes half the novel to understand how the imaginary world works, or if the writer keeps trying to interest us in their peachy-keen inventions, just...

...close the book and move on.

Stop and think about 'Frankenstein'. None of the 'science' in that novel works. But they didn't know that. The novel is still insightful, as is the (only good) film, even though you can't paste Robert de Niro together using a tank full of eels and a few galllons of K-Y Jelly.

Pierre Boulle wrote two great scinece fiction novels - 'Planet of the Apes' and 'Garden of the Moon'. I even once accomplished the (to me) Herculean task of reading 'Planet des Singes' *in French*.

Neither novel would really hold up scientifically. 'Garden on the Moon' was proven inaccurate by the time I read it - it concerned the first moon landing, written in the mid-sixties. Both had elegant insights into human nature by the author of 'Bridge Over the River Kwai'.

>>Nothing wrong with stimulating people's imaginations<<

Rock on, buddy. Nothing wrong with that at all.

And sometimes, a dancing platypus has a belly-button. Which leads us to the many-worlds theory....