Art of Russell Kightley ABSTRACT (free)
An art picture book of my abstract and semi-abstract works. There are paintings in dripping, digital watercolour, hard-edged, machine-generated abstracts, looping, curving forms, fractals, and painted trees. You might see figures, and faces, and monsters, and cities. And oceans, and gardens. Some are really there. Others come from you, maybe from deep inside…
Graphical OPTICS
AN ANIMATED PICTURE BOOK OF LIGHT, LENSES & MIRRORS
A sumptuous collection of my still and animated graphics of optics and waves with simple captions, including the unique simulations of light rays passing through lenses and bouncing off mirrors.
TOPICS: reflection, mirrors, refraction, lenses, refractive errors of the human eye, total internal reflection, simple optical instruments, colour mixing (RGB and CMYK), sine waves, wave superposition, wave interference, Doppler effect, polarization, the photoelectric effect, and lasers.
An easy read with very little maths, suitable for all audiences. And a perfect gift for anyone interested in science.
BRICKS OF PERCEPTION (free)
SCIENTIFIC ILLUSTRATION & THE ART OF RUSSELL KIGHTLEY
A picture book of my scientific illustrations and other artworks with some background, explanation, and biography. You can license the images or buy them as prints using the links and unique discount codes at the back of the book.
I have been involved in scientific illustration and electronic art since the early 80s, so it’s a wide-ranging perspective. The book was conceived after my animal cell illustration from 2001 went viral in the plague year of 2021, and people wanted more information on my work.
76 pages, ISBN: 978-0-6451595-3-0
RETRO VIRION: A Tale of Lunacy & Loss
NEW NOVELLETE ABOUT PANDEMIC GUILT
A man spirals into madness, believing he's in touch with prehistoric animals, the unborn, and the dead. The world around him teeters on a knife-edge, threatened by a nightmare virus that destroys everything in its path. The unreliable narrator, who's immune to the plague, takes you on a journey into the broken heart of existence, to a fractured consciousness as big as the universe itself, and as small as one man's mind. But is he really mad or is he right? Or is he the hallucinating survivor of a devastating pandemic?
NEW SHORT STORIES INSPIRED BY 2020
A busy street becomes an eerie café. An unimportant man chats to his television. The best-laid plans for a green and vegan world go wrong. A man wakes up as a woman, or so he thinks. A plague party with neighbours. A bad-news addict, a doomscroller, gets his comeuppance. And a grandfather writes a book in code. Sit in Café Street and sip the heady brew. But hurry. You don't have long.
SHORT STORIES WITH LONG TAILS
Two wives share a house divided. A writer writes himself a sexy new partner. A backseat driver's trapped. An elevator runs out of floors. And clothes control the man. Short, sharp jabs into your mind. Philosophical sci-fi quick reads. 17 pages.
Qualia, Pierce, & the Time Ship: A Marriage in Four Parts
COUPLE'S THERAPY HAS NEVER BEEN SO WEIRD
Qualia is young again and seeing a psychiatrist. Her husband, who's paying for the doctor, ignores her. There's something wrong with Qualia's world. Then she gets a book of clues... Metafiction meets philosophical sci-fi and time travel. Go down the rabbit hole.
Yesterday Makers: A Story from a Time Machine
BUBBLE UNIVERSES & ENLIGHTENMENT
Paxton's world is smaller than he thinks. Pierce is debonair and dashing, but he's just as trapped. Qualia reads about them both and achieves enlightenment. Philosophical science fiction and time travel to undermine your reality...
DEATH & DOGS & REINCARNATION
Words shift. That's the only sign we're in a different life. Lethe is the forgetting river in Hades, but some memories survive death... Metaphysical science fiction about a family moving between parallel worlds. Unsettle yourself.
Time Aerials
A TIME TRAVEL DIVERSION
A dying man's life flashes past as science fiction stories created by his panicked brain. Trying to make sense of its imminent demise, the brain spins tales of monster flies, and time machines, and weird factories, and a library of unreachable books. As it fights to stay in the past, forever circling its final moments, the dementing organ casts itself as The Great Mind, a god-like entity at the end of time. This Sum of the Dead resets a repeatedly breaking universe, trying to put things right. The Time Aerials are its own tree-like brain cells whose fractal branches leak into time and create consciousness itself. But the brain, like all artists, leaves clues and conceits and signatures hidden in plain sight...
This is metafiction and the brain’s an unreliable narrator. Perhaps the book’s an instruction manual, maybe one of many…