A couple more snapshots from the "A Wizard of Mars" book trailer

[dianeduane]

Here are two more wallpapers for those who might be interested in DL'ing them. Once again, these were produced in the wonderful Terragen 2.2. The location is in Syrtis Major, and that shiny object is the "superegg" that the wizards find buried in a dune by an outcropping  there. (I have removed the sand in these shots because I like seeing the whole superegg shape: I find it very cool.)

This first one is a late afternoon shot --



The second is a reverse angle on the same position, and you can see a proper Martian "blue sunset" in the b.g. The superegg is plainly about to start misbehaving in this one.




Both of these are 1920x1200 pixels. The images are hosted at Box.net, so that's where clicking on the images will take you for your download.

Enjoy!

Comments

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

these are very neat. I especially like the blue sunset

[keristor.livejournal.com]

I'm impressed! I don't know what I'm going to do with it, but I'm downloading the 'free' version to have a play...

[particle-person.livejournal.com]

Nice!

One of the nicest things about reading your (and other people's) books on the iPad (in Kindle app) is that you can go in two taps from a word to Wikipedia. When the superegg part came up, I could wiki the term right away without losing track of where I was in the book.

I wonder if the extended ebooks will be able to pop up windows with explanations of such terms. It could lead to changes in the way people write because less exposition will be necessary in the main text.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I think it would be distracting. When I go away from a page (and this is on an ordinary browser, not an e-reader) to look something up it's frequently an hour or more before I get back to the original. Not lookup time, it's because I then end up following links all over the place and forget what it was I was originally looking for.

Not unique to the web, either, I used to have the same problem with print dictionaries and thesauri and other reference books.

I expect an author to explain -- no, to show -- what they mean. I didn't look up superegg, I expected the description to show it (and it did, close enough: I didn't need to know the precise formula, nor who invented the term and when). The same as I don't need to know details of Mars' orbit, if it is relevant then a good author will find a way to present the information without a page of infodump.

What I would like is a way to bookmark terms for later research. I don't want to break in the middle of a story, but there are often things which I want to look at in more depth later, and then find them in the book to correlate.