Anxiety Update
Sep. 16th, 2003 03:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
herewiss13E and I are back in touch! After the Weekend of Silence I sent a short "What's up and should I be sorry?" email yesterday. Turns out she accidentally deleted my last missive on Thursday in a general junkmail sweep and then wondered why I hadn't emailed her back! She hoped she hadn't sounded too crazy. I had to re-construct what I'd sent, which wasn't too hard, and hopefully we're back on the correspondence track.
Read "The Return of Santiago" by Resnick last night. He does lovely character work, all the legends of the inner frontier are truly larger than life and a joy to behold. But aside from the color, the plot was really predictable, I'm afraid. Basic idea: Guy on a search. End result: I knew where he'd end up by about 1/4 of the way through the book...and I had my suspicions even earlier. Subtle it was not, despite the characters varied cluelessnesses (let's see the spellchecker choke on that!).
Recently my thoughts have trended towards a ballet of continental drift. One of my long-term world-building projects is your basic Hyper-Venusian Jungle Planet. Here Be Monsters, etc. etc. The trick is actually making it believable.
Obviously the entire planet can't be one globe-spanning jungle. Even with minimal axial tilt and a hotter sun (or closer orbit), climatically speaking, you'd have dry spots...not to mention mountains and rain shadows, etc. Best I can think of is to have a lot of small, Mediterrean type seas for the needed moisture/rain and make any needed deserts _really_ desert-like. This is going to be a planet where men are Men, deserts are Deserts and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri are Small Furry Creatures from Alpha Centauri (to coin a phrase).
Geology and Geography aside for a moment, I also want a incredibly diverse and active ecology. To get this, I plan on going all the way back to the origins of life on the planet;-) First I have to separate the seas (which never AFAIK, happened on Earth), so you get true evolutionary divergence. Two truly divergent groups of body-plans (maybe more).
Then the supercontinent/barrier splits apart and you get a bunch of Australias. This way the varied forms from the ocean each get their own "petri dish" for coming onto land. Using authorial fiat, this means I can get tripod, tetrapod and hexapod creatures rather than the one measely four-footed design we had here on earth. That got established before anything set foot on land. Remember, massive variety is what I'm looking for here and that's what I'm going to get.
Having many seperate continents also allows for seperate "mini" extinctions. One continent can be (mostly) covered with lava without destroying the rest. Re-seting the clock=fewer monopolies and more diversity.
After these varied biota get established, filling all the various ecological niches, we start playing mix-and-match continental collision and let natural selection run red with tooth and claw. With luck (and luck is on my side, remember?) one body plan will not prove superior in all instances. So creatures with very different histories will come to live side by side. A tetrapod herbivore, a hexapod predator, a tripod scavenger, etc.
While this is all going on above water, the two (or three) radically divergent marine biota have been meshing as well. Think about the fiercest creatures ever to roam the sea. Most of them came from the land. So you get a third (or fourth) wave of oceanic competitors coming back from on shore. Whaloids and sea lizards, etc.
I'll leave the aerial environment as an exercise to the student.
The tropics are a rich and stable environment, hence that's where most of our Earth's diversity lies. A species has time to specialize into a micro-niche and doesn't have to worry about being wiped-out by natural fluctuations.
With most of an entire planet in the tropical climatic zone, I expect (and demand!) massive diversification and specialization above and beyond the many different body-plans I introduced at the very beginning. When we finally start the plot (which I'm still working on) the continents will have merged into a Pangea maybe a million years before. So you're done with the first wave of ecological upheavals, but not everything is settled down yet, and you still have regional differences despite a uniform climate.
So the end result (the image I actually started withm give or take a little ret-conning) is a wide band of land totally ringing the equator, with high mountains and parched deserts directly in the middle (from the collisions and the equator and the distance from the coastlines). The jungles are pock-marked with small seas, each a bubbling caudron of diversity, no two alike. At the edge of the jungle is lush savanah/prarie that stretchs to the two "polar" oceans, which are both chocked to the brim with sea monsters. Not a place for the timid sailor. One pole is probably sea, the other is land (like ours), but Antarctica will be more like Southern Canada, and probably very "tame" ecologically speaking compared to the mainland. This is where I plan to plant my human colonists (several hundred generations before plot) to allow them to get a foothold before something (massive vulcanism or an "ice age" (which would probably mean drought) forces them to exodus to the mainland.
Dragons and Dinosaurs and R.O.U.S.s! Giant insects and honest-to-God Leviathans. This is going to be so much fun!
And to all my readers on the East Coast (all...four of you?), I've got my fingers crossed for you. Hope Isabel turns mild.
Read "The Return of Santiago" by Resnick last night. He does lovely character work, all the legends of the inner frontier are truly larger than life and a joy to behold. But aside from the color, the plot was really predictable, I'm afraid. Basic idea: Guy on a search. End result: I knew where he'd end up by about 1/4 of the way through the book...and I had my suspicions even earlier. Subtle it was not, despite the characters varied cluelessnesses (let's see the spellchecker choke on that!).
Recently my thoughts have trended towards a ballet of continental drift. One of my long-term world-building projects is your basic Hyper-Venusian Jungle Planet. Here Be Monsters, etc. etc. The trick is actually making it believable.
Obviously the entire planet can't be one globe-spanning jungle. Even with minimal axial tilt and a hotter sun (or closer orbit), climatically speaking, you'd have dry spots...not to mention mountains and rain shadows, etc. Best I can think of is to have a lot of small, Mediterrean type seas for the needed moisture/rain and make any needed deserts _really_ desert-like. This is going to be a planet where men are Men, deserts are Deserts and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri are Small Furry Creatures from Alpha Centauri (to coin a phrase).
Geology and Geography aside for a moment, I also want a incredibly diverse and active ecology. To get this, I plan on going all the way back to the origins of life on the planet;-) First I have to separate the seas (which never AFAIK, happened on Earth), so you get true evolutionary divergence. Two truly divergent groups of body-plans (maybe more).
Then the supercontinent/barrier splits apart and you get a bunch of Australias. This way the varied forms from the ocean each get their own "petri dish" for coming onto land. Using authorial fiat, this means I can get tripod, tetrapod and hexapod creatures rather than the one measely four-footed design we had here on earth. That got established before anything set foot on land. Remember, massive variety is what I'm looking for here and that's what I'm going to get.
Having many seperate continents also allows for seperate "mini" extinctions. One continent can be (mostly) covered with lava without destroying the rest. Re-seting the clock=fewer monopolies and more diversity.
After these varied biota get established, filling all the various ecological niches, we start playing mix-and-match continental collision and let natural selection run red with tooth and claw. With luck (and luck is on my side, remember?) one body plan will not prove superior in all instances. So creatures with very different histories will come to live side by side. A tetrapod herbivore, a hexapod predator, a tripod scavenger, etc.
While this is all going on above water, the two (or three) radically divergent marine biota have been meshing as well. Think about the fiercest creatures ever to roam the sea. Most of them came from the land. So you get a third (or fourth) wave of oceanic competitors coming back from on shore. Whaloids and sea lizards, etc.
I'll leave the aerial environment as an exercise to the student.
The tropics are a rich and stable environment, hence that's where most of our Earth's diversity lies. A species has time to specialize into a micro-niche and doesn't have to worry about being wiped-out by natural fluctuations.
With most of an entire planet in the tropical climatic zone, I expect (and demand!) massive diversification and specialization above and beyond the many different body-plans I introduced at the very beginning. When we finally start the plot (which I'm still working on) the continents will have merged into a Pangea maybe a million years before. So you're done with the first wave of ecological upheavals, but not everything is settled down yet, and you still have regional differences despite a uniform climate.
So the end result (the image I actually started withm give or take a little ret-conning) is a wide band of land totally ringing the equator, with high mountains and parched deserts directly in the middle (from the collisions and the equator and the distance from the coastlines). The jungles are pock-marked with small seas, each a bubbling caudron of diversity, no two alike. At the edge of the jungle is lush savanah/prarie that stretchs to the two "polar" oceans, which are both chocked to the brim with sea monsters. Not a place for the timid sailor. One pole is probably sea, the other is land (like ours), but Antarctica will be more like Southern Canada, and probably very "tame" ecologically speaking compared to the mainland. This is where I plan to plant my human colonists (several hundred generations before plot) to allow them to get a foothold before something (massive vulcanism or an "ice age" (which would probably mean drought) forces them to exodus to the mainland.
Dragons and Dinosaurs and R.O.U.S.s! Giant insects and honest-to-God Leviathans. This is going to be so much fun!
And to all my readers on the East Coast (all...four of you?), I've got my fingers crossed for you. Hope Isabel turns mild.
no way
Date: 2003-12-18 08:46 pm (UTC)