#dyson tree

COVER REVEAL - An Amphoran warrior and his extraterrestrial counterpart, jubilant after a successful raid on a rival clan!

Daybreak at the Ancestor Bough

I can't believe Dan Simmon's Hyperion was the first time I heard of this concept.

It's a tree that's a space ship. A space ship that is a tree. It's the most delicious idea! Where is it?

It's called Dyson after Freeman J. Dyson, a mathematician and physicist, who also thought up the Dyson Sphere. A concept I'm sure many are familiar with. (There's also the O'Neill Cylinder, that colony thing at the end of Interstellar)

A Dyson Tree is a construct where a plant grows inside a comet or asteroid or something and produces it's own atmosphere. With a human crew it could easily be envisioned as a system where humans produce CO2 and the plant produces oxygen. Slap on some thrusters and you have a space ship. Some artificial gravity and you have a tree instead of a bush.

Tree houses! In space!

Here, in its entirety - "HALE-BOPP", a comic drawn back in 2017 for my patreon. Set in the far future, it tells of the Hale-Bopp Dyson tree, the hive men who reside within it, and some extraterrestrial vacuumorphs who attempt to take up residence alongside them.

The hive-men of HALE-BOPP first showed up in print form back in 2016, for the cover of @imagecomics 's Island Magazine. I'm still keen on this piece - a dyson tree's crew receiving trade goods from a Euhumanist vessel, with the euhumanist security trooper eyeing his hive-equivalent suspiciously.

But the look and feel of the hive-men and their living space-suits were codified in sketches the preceding year, while i was still dreaming of an epic tale of hive-men colonizing mars (to be drawn by Matt Sheean).

This drawing in particular, from 2015, ended up getting snuck into last year's book, REFUGIUM, along with the Hale-Bopp Dyson Tree - EASTER EGGS FOR EVERYONE