#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.

#Mars #A Wizard of Mars #Curiosity #Young Wizards meta

[haveyoureadthisscifibook]

vote yes if you have finished the entire book.

vote no if you have not finished the entire book.

(faq · submit a book)

#scifi #books #A Wizard of Mars #Diane Duane #Young Wizards #poll #l: English #result: no

[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)

#book quotes #science fiction #fantasy fiction #ya fiction #diane duane #young wizards #a wizard of mars #nita callahan #magic #wizardry #thoughts #telepathy

[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

#A Wizard of Mars #Young Wizards

[lowpolyanimals]

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

#rat #king gizzard and the lizard wizard #mars for the rich rat game #thank you for your submission!

[first--lines]

The problem, Kit thought, scowling at the paper, isn't the basic shape, so much. It's what to do with the legs...

  —  A Wizard of Mars (Diane Duane)

#book quotes #science fiction #fantasy fiction #ya fiction #diane duane #young wizards #a wizard of mars

[mxskellington]

Remus is

Sirius is

James is

Pete is

#marauders #dead gay wizards #remus lupin #sirius black #james potter #peter pettigrew #david bowie #the rise and fall of ziggy stardust and the spiders from mars #Spotify

[resident-gay-bitch]

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

#has this been done? idk I’m doing it anyway #ziggy stardust #dead gay wizards #David Bowie #marauders era #the rise and fall of Ziggy stardust and the spiders from mars #taylor swift #meme

[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 🖤❤️🖤❤️🖤❤️

#my hair stylist is a literal wizard like i cannot get over how cool this looks #and i finally finally finally feel like Myself again. so relieved to not have my plain natural color i simply meant to have dyed hair #cant wait until i get some extra energy to shave my eyebrows off again and draw cooler ones on to match lol....Soon #mar face

[mtg-cards-hourly]

Adrix and Nev, Twincasters

Artist: Andrew Mar TCG Player Link Scryfall Link EDHREC Link

#mtg #magic the gathering #tcg #andrew mar #adrix and nev twincasters #commander 2021 #legendary #creature #merfolk #wizard

[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.

#Young Wizards #Young Wizards series #Wizards at War #A Wizard of Mars

[moononlyricochetslightfromzstars]

Me and who???

(found on Pinterest)

#david bowie #bowie #bowieforever #fuck jkr #dead gay wizards from the 70s #lgbtqia #ziggy stardust #the rise and fall of ziggy stardust and the spiders from mars #mauraders

[fiction-quotes]

It had surprised Nita to learn that the manual didn't have all the answers. But then, she thought, it never claimed to. I just assumed...It turned out, however, that a surprising amount of the information in it came from wizards themselves – as Nita had started discovering during some of her more recent studies, especially just before her mother died, when she had been seeking desperately for ways to save her mom's life. There were many strange sources of power out there, not least among them the manual itself, which kept the secrets of the universe, old and new, structured and updated so that wizards could find them. But the strangest and most unpredictable power might very well be wizards themselves – bending the universe to their will, finding solutions where no one had found them before, driven by their own needs. Wizards were making it up as they went along – just as, in Their own time, the Powers That Be had done. And they're looking to us for the answers as much as we are to them, Nita thought. We're all helping each other out here, trying to make sense of the universe, trying to make things work. The thought left her feeling both very intimidated and, strangely, much less powerless. What we write in the manual is as important as what we find there already...

  —  A Wizard of Mars (Diane Duane)

#book quotes #science fiction #fantasy fiction #ya fiction #diane duane #young wizards #a wizard of mars #nita callahan #the powers that be #learning #education #knowledge #discovery #questions #answers #magic #wizardry #power

[fhtagn-and-tentacles]

THE FALL OF LORD KONDA

by Andrew Mar

#fhtagn #tentacles #andrew mar #magic the gathering #tcg #wizards of the coast #creature #monster #bas relief #kamigawa #dragon #mythology #fhtagnnn

[vinniedirkota]

i have INTERNET

i can POST HIM

creature man

#was watching temple of mars and hwaaaaitwaitwait. back up. CREATURE #he looks like wizard the animal #adventure time #he just. does that. #magic man #aw hell. do i have to tag all his names so i dont misgender him? #king man #normal man

[mxskellington]

Who wants to be the

to my

?

#dead gay wizards #wolfstar #remus lupin #sirius black #rem and pads #the rise and fall of ziggy stardust and the spiders from mars