The thing was, one of the major themes of the book was that this species (for now referred to as "tellurians." Concept art can be found on one of my other sites) had very little access to ferromagnetic materials; the vast bulk of their technology was biological in nature. Machines were actually genetically engineered creatures with little-to-no higher cognitive functions. Imagine a coffee table that moves on its own and is covered in human-like skin and you've got the basic idea. Biotech becomes so common that literally everything surrounding these creatures is alive, but it's absolutely normal to them and they take it for granted the same way we do our own technology. Their cities are massive fluid-filled sacs resembling organs, their homes giant cells that can be altered dynamically by tinkering with its nucleus, or reproduced through a sort of mitosis. To look at a tellurian city would be like looking inside an animal body with a powerful microscope.
This visual doesn't lend itself well to text alone.
I've kicked around the idea of doing the book as a comic instead... but I want to describe how everything works in exhaustive detail, as per your typical hard sci-fi book. Half the fun of science fiction for me was reading the authors description for how far-future tech would actually function. It's hard to put all that inforomation into a caption or speech bubble, though. Shirow Masamune sort of did it in his manga by putting annotation on every page, and an appendix in the back... but I'm not sure that would be very well received. So I'm leaning back toward the idea of a novel with accompanying illustrations.
Anyway, to the point, here's some early thumbs/roughs from when I was seriously considering the comic route. They're from two different stories. One would have detailed the early selective process in tellurian evolution (the creature responsible for which was shown in the previous blog post). The other story involved a young tellurian's first exposure to a stable reality construct, an entire solid-state universe contained within an almost infinitely dense sphere... a black hole, if that's how you want to think of it. Plug into it, and the user can share the experience of any pattern in that universe that results in a cognitive feedback loop (a la Douglas Hofstadter).
Blah! Too much talky. Pictures, now:
