Alien Waterfalls
When crafting an atmospheric landscape on an alien planet, it's always best to borrow the coolest, most interesting elements found here in the beautiful natural world.
When crafting an atmospheric landscape on an alien planet, it's always best to borrow the coolest, most interesting elements found here in the beautiful natural world. As a result, waterfalls tend to pop up fairly frequently.
One of my favorite examples is actually very recent: Michael Böhme's 2019 artwork, "At the Waterfall."
Böhme also has this undated waterfall, too.
David A Hardy has the most waterfalls, with this very cool piece, "Mistworld V."
Here's another one from David A Hardy.
Tim White's 1976 cover to Not Before Time by John Brunner is worth mentioning (again) for that lush jungle.
One of Rodney Matthews' most famous posters, “In Search of Forever,” centers on a waterfall bridge.
A waterfall provides a little visual interest in a Richard Courtney’s 1982 cover art for the Flying Saucers anthology, edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin Harry Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh.
Fred Gambino has some examples, alongside a beautiful cantilevered futuristic city, on his 1999 cover for Acorna's Quest by Margaret Ball and Anne McCaffrey.
David B Mattingly and Danny Flynn also have some nice waterfalls.
I love the sparkles on Rob Burt's 1982 cover art for The Crystal Singer, by Anne McCaffrey.
Of course, waterfalls don't have to make complete logical sense, if they're appearing in a fantastic setting. I'm not sure where all the water is coming from in this mountaintop fortress by Wojtek Siudmak.
Maybe it's coming from something like the rock in Bill Martin's 1971 work "Rock," as it appears in the 1977 art book Visions.
Logic isn't the point in this late-1970s surrealist work from Akira Shishido, either.
Here's a particularly weird one: The astronauts are floating, but the waterfalls confirm the rest of the planet has gravity. It's Johnny Bruck's August 1995 cover for Perry Rhodan #1775: Kommando Gonozal.
However, Bruck seems to have pulled that particular cave system directly from another painting – one by Angerer the Elder, according to this German webpage.
I'm not sure how familar Perry Rhodan readers in Germany would have been with Angerer the Elder. Perhaps this was intended to be seen as a riff on the painting.
When it comes to surreal, impossible waterfalls, there's no beating Roger Dean's famous 1972 album art for Close To The Edge, by Yes.
Dean also has a couple sequel versions, "Close To The Edge II"...
...and "Close To The Edge III."
The seemingly endless waterfall at the edge of the world isn't unique to Dean, of course. Here's Peter Lloyd's 1977 album art for Point Of Know Return, by Kansas.
And here's another variation on the theme – A 2002 personal work by Michael Whelan, "The Fourth Crusade."
Finally, I love this one by Marco Patrito. Not only is the waterfall endless, but so is the sea in all directions. Now that's alien.
Cool links
I link to John Coulthart's blog pretty often. Here's an interview where you can hear about his whole deal, which includes a lot of interesting projects done with Alan Moore.
"Imagined as fiction, presented as fiction, and accepted as fiction" - Metafilter
This blog post lists a ton of fantasy and fairy tale fiction from pre-1800s history, with dozens of links for futher reading.
The most interesting one to me was Mital; ou, Avantures incroyables, a 1708 satire "in which Laurent Bordelon constructs a story out of nonsense details taken from natural histories and at the end provides 70 pages of citations to his sources." I'd love to read a history of satire, if there's a comprehensive one out there.
Music Rec: Cowboy Bebop (Original Soundtrack) by Seatbelts - 1998
Next Time: Paying users get my notes on Franz Rottensteiner's The Science Fiction Book: An Illustrated History, from 1975.