#a wizard of mars

[dduane]

Hey DD! My friend and I were looking at the graphic you have for the All the Wizardry bundle. We're both on the Curiosity science team, and we're curious (pun intended) where the model came from. Every time I see it it makes me smile :)

(chortle) I was impressed with it too when I first saw it, though the maker doesn't explicitly come out and say that's what they're modeling.

It turns up over here at Daz3D: "Mars Rover." And the maker seems to have done a pretty good job. It's fully rigged, and everything that ought to be able to move, does.

...When I was working on A Wizard of Mars it occurred to me that wizards with an interest in the Red Planet would be up there covertly interacting with the machinery on a regular basis—usually with puffer brushes and/or carefully-shielded cans of compressed air to help keep solar panels clean (or cleaner...) when observed weather conditions on Mars offered them sufficient cover to let them exploit the "plausible deniability" factor. (Because the last thing they'd want to do would be to mess up the science.)

So when it came time to do the cover for the New Millennium edition of AWoM, it seemed to me that the best thing to emphasize would be the concrete reality of what we'd put up there. Therefore a wheel of that Rover model appears on that cover.

The Rover also turns up occasionally, as you've seen above, in promotional stuff for the Ebooks Direct store; such as this 2017 ad for a summer reading sale.

(And yeah, if the orange-redness of everything is emphasized... oh well, it's a trope, and sometimes you just surrender gracefully and lean into those.) :)

BTW, the rather blown-out image of Mars displaying on the right side of the Wizard's manual in the AWoM cover above is a relic from older editions of the book: a render I did using laser altimetry and radar terrain data from the Mars Global Surveyor probe. There's a scene in the book where one character gets really annoyed at another and uses wizardry to drop a small ocean's worth of (ancient) water on the Oceanidum Mons region in an attempt to get rid of her. This attempts to show how the region looked in the immediate aftermath.

...I really need to re-render this now that Terragen has upgraded its planetary-level cloud management. :)

Anyway, I'm delighted you liked the Rover! Thanks for letting me know.

[haveyoureadthisfantasybook]

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[haveyoureadthisscifibook]

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[fiction-quotes]

The irony wasn't lost on Nita that wizard could so easily change concrete physical matter, but practically had to sweat blood to change something as immaterial as someone else's thought.

  —  A Wizard of Mars (Diane Duane)

[moonlight-and-memory]

“Nita glanced down. Bright in the light of the Sun behind her, like a falling star, a tiny figure was accelerating toward the planet’s surface. For just a moment, thinking of what Aurilelde had intended for Kit and for the Earth, a nasty satisfied anger flared up in Nita. If she does land a little too hard to survive, well, maybe she had it coming. The Rede did say, yet to wreak aright, she must slay her rival-

And if she didn’t pull that off, then maybe I’m the one who has to…

Nita hung there, silent. No, she thought. Prophecy is fine, but it doesn’t have to happen. “Sorry,” she said to someone she was sure was watching. “Not today.” And she dived after Aurilelde.”- A Wizard of Mars

[solarspringg]

Lily “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess” Evans and Remus “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars” Lupin

[lowpolyanimals]

Rats from King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard: Mars For The Rich (Rat Game)

[saganssorcery]

🔥💥♂️💥🔥

Artist in the watermark 🔥🖌️

[canigohomenoow]

“Lady Stardust sang his songs Of darkness and disgrace,”

Lady Stardust- David Bowie

Tonya - The Cadence of Part time Poets by motswolo

[haaaaaaaaaaaave-you-met-ted]

Three Tree City (Borderless Seasons Ver) by Andrew Mar

[dduane]

Having recently moved i was organizing my books and had to look up the order of your wizards series and found out the book after i stopped reading was Wizard of Mars. Which saddened me a bit because i love space stuff and had missed that and now around 2 decades I'm wondering how hard it would be to get into it. Still, I'm gonna hold on to these books and give them to my niece in a few years when she's around the right age, I'm sure she'll like them

I think I can safely say that no matter how much older you've gotten after finishing Wizards at War, you shouldn't have too much trouble getting into A Wizard of Mars. (Not least because I went to a lot of trouble to make sure the science was current, while also knowing more and better data would be coming along fairly soon, and not wanting what was going on in the book to get dated.)

The YW books are broadly classified by their publisher as "middle-grade", sure... as the lower recommended age to come at them. But I don't think there's an upper one. Don't forget that the writer's an adult in her late middle age, and while (naturally) working to keep the work accessible for younger readers, she writes first and foremost to amuse and engage herself. This position sometimes shocks people when they hear it. But a book that won't keep me interested isn't one I'd inflict on anyone else, no matter how old or young they are.

Whatever age you start reading these books, after (more or less) your young teens, is the "right age." I do hope your niece will enjoy them. But I'm pretty sure the newer ones will have something for you too.

[mxro-x]

Remus is

Sirius is

James is

Pete is

[resident-gay-bitch]

you wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me

[mariska]

HIII i finally have cool dyed hair again after 4+ yrs of not being able to get anything done with it and i am so in love + obsessed with how it turned out 🖤❤️🖤❤️🖤❤️

[mtg-cards-hourly]

Adrix and Nev, Twincasters

Artist: Andrew Mar TCG Player Link Scryfall Link EDHREC Link

[moononlyricochetslightfromzstars]

Me and who???

(found on Pinterest)