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An artist in residence in humanity’s first major colony on Mars, has less that six months to save her reputation or return to Earth as a complete failure.
Her every attempt to create something of deep artistic merit is being torpedoed by some ridiculous health and safety issue conjured up by the administrator responsible for the colonists who inhabit the outpost.
Worse, the four other artists on the UN sponsored program have all become household names, achieving almost universal praise and admiration, and putting her failures in to stark relief.
What can she do? Is there anyway she can save her reputation?
But more importantly, why is there thick black smoke seeping into her accommodation module?
About the story:
This story came to me after reading an article on some recently discovered cave art - believed to be drawn 45,500 years ago. This got me thinking about the people who created these paintings and what motivated them to scratch such lines on the walls of their dwellings?
Around the same time, the ‘dearMoon’ project was announced by SpaceX, a lunar tourism mission and art project conceived and financed by Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa.
It struck me, that this need to create art is almost as ancient as we are as a species — it’s part of what makes us human, it’s written into our DNA, so to speak.
So, as we venture out into the solar system, this artistic desire will surely follow, and thus the germ of a story began to form in my mind of a visual artist working in a Martian colony. With that came the questions; what would they create, how would they be regarded, and does art have any relevance in a technologically advanced future society?
Genre: Science Fiction
Her every attempt to create something of deep artistic merit is being torpedoed by some ridiculous health and safety issue conjured up by the administrator responsible for the colonists who inhabit the outpost.
Worse, the four other artists on the UN sponsored program have all become household names, achieving almost universal praise and admiration, and putting her failures in to stark relief.
What can she do? Is there anyway she can save her reputation?
But more importantly, why is there thick black smoke seeping into her accommodation module?
About the story:
This story came to me after reading an article on some recently discovered cave art - believed to be drawn 45,500 years ago. This got me thinking about the people who created these paintings and what motivated them to scratch such lines on the walls of their dwellings?
Around the same time, the ‘dearMoon’ project was announced by SpaceX, a lunar tourism mission and art project conceived and financed by Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa.
It struck me, that this need to create art is almost as ancient as we are as a species — it’s part of what makes us human, it’s written into our DNA, so to speak.
So, as we venture out into the solar system, this artistic desire will surely follow, and thus the germ of a story began to form in my mind of a visual artist working in a Martian colony. With that came the questions; what would they create, how would they be regarded, and does art have any relevance in a technologically advanced future society?
Genre: Science Fiction
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