The Monk

Copyright © Peter MacDougall, all rights reserved

The Monk is an intriguing story by Phillip A. Hawke published in On Spec, the Canadian magazine of Speculative Fiction.The story is about a dystopia where highly sophisticated computers are created from humans as part of a intricatly created background of politics, revolution, and existentialism. In the story the revolution has found a "monk", one of the human computers, and hopes to communicate with her if only they could get her password into her world. I could not resist the opportunity to sneak her password into the illustration. It is her halo, a old-fashioned "daisywheel".

The illustration is a composite of a scanned painting of the monk's head, a Corel Draw daisywheel in perspective and a "plasma" fractal bitmap created with PM-Fract for OS/2. All of this was put togther, grafitti included, using Corel Photopaint running on OS/2. Unfortunately the only printer I had available was a 24-pin dot-matrix and so the final illustration produced in the magazine does not have quite the fine resolution this image does.

I landed this assignment because of the demonstration computer illustration I had sent them earlier, a picture called Masks.