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Is the future of housing round? The Elkinoid Project envisions a future where housing shortages are solved with sustainable, off-the-grid towns made up of thousands of orb-shaped houses. And each structure would take less than a week to build. More »
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Syd Mead didn't just work on Blade Runner's dirty-neon future L.A., he also designed Tron's original lightcycles — check out this original concept art. So a new Mead book, full of concept art, is a cause for major celebration. More »
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The gestural interface that looked so shiny in Minority Report has turned up everywhere since then, and now it's cheap enough that it's in the FBI's war room, on Castle. Allowing Nathan Fillion to have too much fun bursting windows. More »
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A passenger vessel the size of a whale and packed with gardens, the concept ship Physalia is also designed to purify every river it floats in. Keep the Physalia in your river for long enough, and it will create drinkable water. More »
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John Berkey is famous for doing concept design for the original Star Wars movie, including a breathtaking poster of the Death Star. When he wasn't imagining space battles, he designed cities of the future - on Earth and in space. More »
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Library music is something you hear all the time in science fiction movies and TV without realizing it. These weird, ambient tunes are created cheaply by talented session musicians, often working anonymously, and many of them are beautifully futuristic. More »
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Here are 26 images that will take you deep into the gorgeous afterworld of Peter Jackson's Lovely Bones. The main character, a murdered young woman, lives in a Purgatory that blends New Zealand and American Suburbia, flavored with 1970s kitsch. More »
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Ubernerd Martin Anderson argues in a surprisingly persuasive essay that corridors - from trippy to utilitarian - are crucial to great scifi concept design. Check out these famous scifi corridors and tell us which corridor rules them all. More »
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This space-saving concept chills your food, makes your coffee, and checks your email all from a single piece of furniture, ensuring that you are never more than a few feet away from your snacks or your screen. More »
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Environmentalists worry about piles of non-recyclable e-waste, or discarded high-tech equipment. And somehow that's led to an explosion of ethernet cable fashion, as you can see in this recent fashion show in Medellin, Colombia. More »
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Though the upstanding citizens of Orange County, CA, tried to defend themselves against this crystalline molecule entity, their weapons were no use. Its translucent hulk dominated the skyline for years. More »
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These flowers dangle delicately, but you cannot pluck them. They're made of precision-etched metal, and contain an electrified light source. More »
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A surreal tidal wave as high as a skyscraper is about to bear down on this city and destroy it forever. No it's not ripped from the pages of a climate change report - it's one of the many worlds designed by British design student Jon McCoy, who revels in the apocalyptic. More »
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Man, I just love a good monster-on-monster wrestling match. Thinking about Hellboy 2 coming out next week is getting me all excited about cool monster fights, and that's why this crazy-ass painting by William B. Hand is just the ticket. Hand does concept design work in New York, and his strange blend of monsters and robots (which you can see below) make his imaginary worlds feel sort of medieval high tech. More »
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This device looks like a mechanical war chariot crossed with some kind of backflipped sexbot. Dubbed "Triceratops" by designer Kazuhiko Nakamura, this steampunk kaiju is just one of the artist's many fantastical creations. Check out his haunting citiscape, below, which he calls "Requiem for Industry." More »
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One of the most widely-read science fiction novels across the globe, H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds has been in print continuously since the late nineteenth century. And it's had a lot of book covers: artistic, fancy, pulpy, and just plain strange. Now, over at Chez Zeus, there's a collection of over 100 (and growing) covers from the book that readers have sent in. You can browse them by date, artist, language, and image on the cover. By far my favorite collection of of the covers is grouped under the header "Huh?" See a few below. More »
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Welcome to The Jewels of Aptor, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's biweekly column on art and the fantastic. Ian Miller would've been cool even if he hadn't worked on Ralph Bakshi's underrated movie Cool World. The UK native has produced a distinctive body of SF artwork over the last thirty years, sometimes pulling collage and photography into his more traditional drawings. Not only did he create an amazing and iconic graphic novel of the brilliant New Wave writer M. John Harrison's The Luck of the Head, he also did covers for such classic magazines as New Worlds and Interzone. Edgy and surreal, Miller combines intelligent geometric exactness with a messy, fluid sense of what it means to be human. More »
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Here's an amazing image from the pre-history of 1990s political space opera Babylon 5, when the set for the space station's main corridor had first been built and the techs were testing out stage lighting in it. This just got posted by Mojo, a visual effects artist who works on Battlestar Galactica and used to work on B5. He says he has a lot more where these came from and will be posting them on his new blog. More »
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1993 movie Coneheads was many things: unfortunate Dan Ackroyd vehicle, decade-too-late spin-off from Saturday Night Live, critically-derided box office failure. But now you can add "missed opportunity" to the list. For those who thought that there was never that much potential in the movie in the first place, all you have to do is look at Brendan McCarthy's designs for the movie to learn the error of your ways. See what you missed at the multiplex after the jump. More »
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Antigrav will give us flying cars, but more importantly it'll reinvent jetski technology. These seacraft hoverpods look sexier than those pod racers in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Plus you could zip up onto the beach and spray sand in the face of the jock who bullied you during high school. More »
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When a conceptual artist imagines a futuristic sewer system, you'd expect something that would give Dr. Seuss nightmares. Not so in this glance down a sewer corridor from artist Ben Procter. It looks spartan, utilitarian, orderly, and just plain gorgeous. It's enough to make you want to dive underground and look for crawly aliens in toilet water. More »
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The brainfarm over at Sentient Developments calls our attention to the concept designs of Adam Benton, who has worked on Stargate among other things. Here you see a sumptuous illustration of a forested world dotted with space ports. When I imagine a Utopian future for New Orleans, this is what I see: a beautiful, clean Mississippi River edged with graceful, high-density housing and thick wetlands. If you want to see more of Benton's curvacious, festively-colored space ships, click on. More »
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