Mark J. Brady created this image using the 3D Fractal program ‘Mandelbulb 3D’, which is available for free download from FractalForums.com

‘Quanadium steel’ diffuse map image courtesy of James ‘Grunge Tv’ Knowles.

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 Mark hopes 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….”

Prints of this image are available to purchase from Mark’s fractal art site: MarkJayBeeFractal.com

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