This 3D Fractal Sci-Fi Image was created using Mandelbulb3D fractal software.

This is an imagining of the vast habitat ‘Tier’ from the SF novel ‘Excession’ by Iain M. Banks. Below is an excerpt from the novel describing Tier.

Bear in mind that as this is a purely Fractal image, all the details described cannot be depicted, but I hope it gives some sense of the scale of Banks’s vision.

“Tier was a stepped habitat; it’s nine levels all revolved at the same speed, but that meant that the outer tiers possessed greater apparent gravity than those near the center.

The levels themselves were sectioned into compartments up to hundreds of kilometers long and filled with atmospheres of different types and held at different temperatures, while stunningly complicated and dazzlingly beautiful arrays of mirrors and mirrorfields situated within the staggered cone of the world’s axis provided amounts of sunlight precisely timed, attenuated and where necessary altered in wavelength to mimic the conditions on a hundred different worlds for a hundred different species.

The environmental diversity and civilizational co-dependence it implied, and intermingling it encouraged had been Tier’s raisond’etre, the very foundation of it’s purpose and fame for the seven thousand years it had existed. Its original builders were, perhaps, unknown; they were believed to have Sublimed shortly after building it, leaving behind a species or model – depending on how you defined these things – of biomechanical sintricate which ran and maintained the place….”

MarkJayBee’s 3D Fractal artworks look amazing as large, high quality prints; please take a look at the options below:

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