SF / Fantasy Ruins

The world is finite. We know the bounds of our reality, and they are fixed. The past is the past, and after a point there is no more of it to explore. No more pyramids, no more Pompeiis. We’ll have unraveled the mystery of them all.

Then do we give up? I doubt it. We’ll mine the history and ruins we’re building around us every day, our behemothic culture machine that spews out stuff on a gloriously endless basis. The ruins of a virtual reality world are every bit as exciting to explore as the fake ruins Indiana Jones explored for us on a sound stage.
Ruins of a Nuclear Winter
Ruins of The Secret World
Gerry Judah sculpts a nuclear winter. He builds out minutely detailed architectural models of buildings, then destructs them with a flood of white paint- leaving the canvas pitted, scored, and crusted with ruins.There is a city on the moon. 11 days are missing. The Earth is hollow. The tower of Babel never fell. These are just a few of the many premises of The Secret World, a stunning new MMORPG game.
The Ruins of LOST
Ruins of the Statue of Liberty
The TV show LOST is all about ruins. The island itself is a living museum, a place where the relics of millennia-old statues rest side by side with downed aircraft and underground research stationsThe Statue of Liberty is an icon, a beacon-fire at America`s shore calling out to all and sundry- ‘come on in, there`s plenty of room!’ To destroy her is to denounce the very idea of America, to throw that generosity of spirit back in her face and cry out ‘who needs you?’
The Ruins of Warcraft
The Ruins of Ender’s Game
The online fantasy game World of Warcraft is awash with ruins. Half of the in-game quests involve pilfering buried treasure from cities razed by the Scourge, temples leveled by the Lich King, and craters where force field-encapsulated cities once lay.Orson Scott Card’s brilliant novel Ender’s Game is not widely known for its ruins. You’re rather more likely to read it and be blown away by the sheer force of Ender’s personality, or by the genius with which Card orchestrates his entire Battle School world.But ruins there are.
Ruins of a Tokyo Apocalypse
Painting the Ruins of NYC
Tokyo has been ravaged. It was meteors or earthquakes, tsunami or nuclear holocaust, though the cause hardly matters- no one’s left alive to remember it anyway. The apocalypse came and killed everyone, leaving only ragged bits of Tokyo behind.New York can be destroyed at the click of a mouse button.
The ruins of cities are nothing new, we’ve seen them in countless movies as the stunning backdrop to end of the world tales. Here I take a lesson in ruins-painting.

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