**3. The fashion event**

As indicated earlier, we conceived of an event that would both showcase the fashion designs and also the science fiction books which inspired the creation of these garments. As a fashion designer with several collections, Edwards had experience mounting fashion shows. We therefore conceived of an event built around the idea of a fashion show, that is, with a runway, models, and successive reveals of different garments, combined with music, an audience, and lighting ambiance. The event, however, also sought to integrate elements usually associated with a book launch, that is, excerpts to be read, copies of the book available for purchase and a book signing activity. Finally, we also undertook to develop additional representations of the event via video, and an app that could showcase some of the designs developed. These could serve both to document the work achieved and also act as marketing tools for the event and for the books that inspired the event.

Edwards selected several excerpts from Plenum that both acted as examples of the writing but also highlighted settings which could be visualized. We therefore conceived of four scenes (initially three - one was added later in the development) that would be presented. For each scene, we designed a different belt using colors and textures that matched those of the scene. Some of these original design choices were modified however, over the course of the work, as a result of changing conditions external to the work itself (and in particular, constraints imposed by the Covid19 pandemic, which struck about six months into the work).

The three initial scenes selected were (a) the approach by the main character to an artificial habitat build around a small moon or moonlet, (b) the climactic final scene which takes place in the vicinity of a sun, and (c) the large spaceborne platform called the Annex within which the main character spends most of the time. The scenes also include two kinds of ship, artificial ships and organic ships called jonahs, which are descendants of Earth-bound sperm whales. The fourth scene eventually added was to showcase the kind of dynamically shifting skin textures described in the books. For this we selected a fractal pattern.

Here are examples of the first two excerpts [1]:

*Excerpt #1*: "The Rock, as its residents named it, was some fifty kilometers in diameter … Naively, one would have expected vertical structures pinned onto the Rock, but the Yard was structured horizontally rather than vertically. Instead of spires, it consisted of folded sheets through which poked a large, rounded section of the Rock. It had slightly more gravity than a true microgravity environment, but at humorn tempo, objects still settled quickly enough to notice. If you left things floating, they drifted downwards at a stately pace, but the oblique angle of the sheets often made the downwards direction something other than the apparent vertical!"

*Excerpt #2*: "Vanu boarded the flyer, and piloted it across the short distance to the access port for the Wellhead. This was an egg-like structure which looked to be tethered to the star by a gossamer thread that dropped away beneath it. The construction looked ungainly, a beached whale thrown up by the seas it served, although Vanu had to dampen the brightness of hir visual field to even perceive it properly. Vanu also had a momentary thought about what the Wellhead represented. It was like a guardian, or a gatekeeper, a Saint Peter at the pearly gates, not just to support those who went down into the Core, but also to screen out the unworthy."
