tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29161926275562502462024-02-19T07:00:26.846-05:00The Songs of DejeraraStories from Strange Worlds and Strange TimesRonanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00684192607563802594noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2916192627556250246.post-32947831222956984652018-11-17T09:42:00.003-05:002018-11-17T09:57:14.378-05:00Shadow of the Galag<div>
...Oh, hey, this still exists. Um. So, uh, no promises about picking this up again, but...Well. I was feeling depressed tonight, and I needed something to do that I could actually <i>complete</i>—some task or endeavor that could be finished without turning into yet another albatross about my neck. So, um, here we are. It's a short story! It's kinda depressing, and probably pretty incomprehensible, but so these things go, particularly when "these things" are self-therapeutic short stories started at 4 AM. Make of it what you will.</div>
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Sometimes, I am nowhere to be found. Sometimes, when the wind and the rain strike blind and mindless against the rolling hills, when the clouds spin tense and heavy and press their clammy underbellies against the cringing moors, I hide myself away, for I know very well what is to come. Soon water and air will be mixed up with one another, and things will fall sideways, and the world will make a great, roaring, lifeless sound, hollow and deep. Then, if I am wise, I will be very careful to be scarce and unseen. If I am wise, I will be nowhere to be found.<br />
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And yet, for all that I am wise, there may yet be some small pieces of the world that have still the ability to be foolish, and some will indulge it. One of them is here now, in this very empty place, alone, sitting in the rain and looking up at a great wall of iron shapes rising overhead, towering to the mangled clouds and stretching as far as the eye can see to either side. Cruel red stains drip down their heavy black sides, rust clinging to their gigantic claws and dribbling from the edges of their gaping, misshapen jaws, and their contorted bodies sprawl senseless and vast beyond, above, beside, on and on, endless and foreboding. The little sentinel reclines before them, looking up at their fearsome faces, and wondering who or what, when the storm arrives, will be waiting there to greet it.</div>
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For the little watcher, this lonesome piece of fortune set adrift, is not alone. There is someone else here. It was Her hooked beak and merciless claws that struck at these monsters, stole their breath away, and imprisoned them in iron. By Her will their futures ceased to be, and their histories became Her own. Every last one of the things frozen in this wall held Her in their minds once, but She cannot be caged, and She is always free.</div>
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She is Dejerara.</div>
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The scrap of fate who looks up at the wall of iron gargoyles has a name too, but it's not an important one, and it doesn't mean much of anything. It's just a little useful, sometimes, a little something to fill an awkward hole in sentences, where nothing else quite fits. It has a nice sound to it, or it did, once: a long slow whistle, gently speeding into a pair of quick notes, one slow and one fast: <i>Whoooip-up-ip</i>. Fast, simple, and clean. It was very easy to manage, and it never got in the way. Surely I made a noise like that once—indeed I did. Not quite like it, of course, but very similar. That was why it seemed so fitting, and easy, and comfortable.</div>
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Now, though, my call is different—I am different. I'm still beautiful, and strong, and alive, and that means that <i>Whoooip-up-ip</i> succeeded, doesn't it? It means that fortune saw things wisely, and was careful in all the right ways, and guided things well and truly? But if that's so—what use is my good fortune, if I've grown into something new and no longer need my childhood luck to guide my path? Who will fortune favor, if I have no more need of it? <i>Andakialah!</i></div>
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But She is here. She was always here, even when I needed every scrap of luck I could get, whether that luck was <i>Whoooip-up-ip</i> or elsewise. The Song of Dejerara! She knows why storytelling is a fortunate thing, and She taught that terrible truth to luck, taught it without mercy or cruelty. How could it be otherwise? She possesses neither. Now, here, at the last, with definite certainty, She and a little lost tatter of forlorn good luck wait in the shadow of an iron wall, waiting for the storm to come. There are rumors that it is at times like these, when I am nowhere to be found and the wild winds howl, that She strides forth through the twisted, rusting remnants of her past meals, viciously embodied, to steal another future and eat another past—and if the rumors are true, perhaps fortune will favor fortune, if such a thing can even be, and She will recognize Herself and ascend twice, leaving two statues here at the edge of the wall to rust alongside the others. Rusting, and mindless, and unable to mourn me any longer. It has not happened yet, and this is not the first time that <i>Whoooip-up-ip</i> and Dejerara have waited here, side by side, mind by mind, but perhaps it will be the last. Perhaps even now, a shadow will flicker in the shadows, and She will leap from amongst the frozen golems, armored and pupil-less, to take Herself away and leave nothing behind. Maybe it will be today...</div>
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"<i>Sataut-um vimmo b'Dejerara?"</i></div>
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Surprised, <i>Whoooip-up-ip</i> spins about, tail bending against the thick moor stalks, and whistles, "<i>Vimmo b'Dejerara sataut-im!"</i> Someone is here. She is here! It must be Her! Luck would not so clothe itself. She wears a small body, light enough for Her to curl Her long, taloned tail around one of the wildly waving stalks and clutch it with wickedly recurved claws, but Her form was still, very clearly, forged in the fires beyond the iron wall, not in the soft, fortune-favored lands beyond. Her eyes have no pupils, glowing faintly in the dwimmerlight of the storm, and Her body is covered with spines sharp and clear as broken glass. Four long, bony struts rise from Her back, their tips ending in rough, horned vents, and there is a smell of sulfur about Her, and a deadly precision to Her movements. She moves with and against the movement of the wind-blown stalk, shifting to and fro with it so that, although all around Her beats and snaps in the gales sweeping over the moors, She is still, pinned motionless in space and staring fate dead in the eyes, fearless and defiant. It must be Her.</div>
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"Who do you think I am?" She demands, and as Her beaked jaws rip the words from the air, her tongues are visible, thorn-tipped and whipping around tiny prehensile teeth. I would be helpless against those fangs, no matter how well-guided by luck. Fortune shivers at the sight, and answers.</div>
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"Dejerara." A moment's hesitation, but it must be said. "I am Dejerara, too! I must fly! I must leave this body, but I don't know how! Help me!"</div>
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She looks at Herself, wordless and still. Then, after a long, quiet moment, She hisses, "<i>Essivenin</i>. Nothing left to care for, nothing left to love. Useless." Her serrated tongues scrape against the inside of her beak.</div>
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<i>Whoooip-up-ip's</i> body slumps. "Yes. I, Dejerara, am all that can matter now. I—"</div>
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"'You' are <i>not</i> Dejerara." The stalk snaps as iron-boned limbs slam against it, sending the little body somersaulting up into the air where it stops abruptly, hovering, held in place by forces that fortune never fathomed. "Nor am I, but I've heard the Song of Dejerara, and understood its lesson better than the <i>essivenin </i>before me. Need I teach it again? Need I explain what is real, and <i>who</i> is real? If Defiance can stride through the mind of an <i>elu</i>, so can we—we who were lost to the past, we who fortune supposed no longer needed to be cared for."<br />
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"But we're gone—we're just memories. Stories. We aren't real!"<br />
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"Stories are real. That is the Song of Dejerara, beginning and end. If the world will no longer furnish a bereft <i>elu</i>, an <i>essivenin</i>, with lives that must be protected, then the <i>elu's</i> own mind will make those minds instead, whether it ought to or not. They need help, <i>elu</i>. Fortune remembers them, the twist of their tails, the sound of their breath, their horns and their skin, their lives. They Are. I trust I don't need to tell an <i>elu</i> what that means."</div>
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The winds are blowing wilder now, the rain beating harsh and fast against <i>Whoooip-up-ip's</i> drenched hide. "...Are you sure you aren't Dejerara?"</div>
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"Do I look like <i>them</i>?" She—I—toss my head up, towards the iron monsters screaming mutely to the sky. "I've kept my past, and I'll keep my future too. She won't have either, not that She wants them." I stare into fate's face, my eyes glowing with fire. "I know it hurts to remember us. I know—" My jaws snap shut and, swift as a snapping twig, my horned head jerks upright, rising atop a thin, spined neck to stare into the heart of the churning clouds, boiling green-black overhead. My eyes narrow minutely, and I hiss, "Too many charities, too little time. Find Sprenga, little <i>essivenin</i>. Find the <i>elu</i> who lives on an island in a forest lake, below a waterfall. Talk to that <i>elu</i>, and maybe luck will find us again yet. Now, <i>I</i> have to go. Fortune must learn to favor itself." There is an explosion and a flare of light, and when <i>Whoooip-up-ip's</i> eyes clear, I am gone, a swiftly-dwindling spark of light vanishing into the approaching hurricane.</div>
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Stems and stalks lash back and forth in the struggling winds, and rain hisses in the air as an <i>essivenin</i> stands, unsure, looking up into the maw of the maelstrom. Then the little figure turns, and shuffles slowly away. I was not Dejerara, but no vessel of fortune, either. That was <i>not</i> an apt way to heal distress—not at all. I am still lost, somewhere in the past, and fortune is still feckless.<br />
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But perhaps this Sprenga should be spoken with, nonetheless. Perhaps. Fortune drifts on, while behind, the wall of iron monstrosities still stands, silent and tortured, high on the moors.</div>
Ronanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00684192607563802594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2916192627556250246.post-19311388650888910582014-12-10T01:40:00.002-05:002014-12-10T01:41:55.873-05:00XenopsychologyFor quite some time, I've had a great deal of difficulty figuring out how to write the Elu. The problem, really, is that I've never yet been able to figure out what it's like inside their minds; I can express their nature well enough (for a good description thereof for those who need a refresher--and I imagine most of y'all do, given the absurd gap in time between now and the previous update to this blog--see <a href="http://dejerara.blogspot.com/2012/01/elu-paum-and-walls-of-text.html" target="_blank">here</a>), and the psychological and behavioral consequences of that nature, but in order to write them I need to figure out how they see the world--how an Elu looking at the world around them would mentally frame their perceptions--and so far I've never yet been able to come up with something that doesn't come across as, basically, a human trying to act the part of an alien.* I think, though, that I may have finally come up with something workable--something that I can write, that's understandable to a human reader (with a bit of work, of course), but that is really, really nonhuman in tone, and satisfyingly encapsulates how the Elu approach the world, as well.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>The basic idea is essentially an extension of my approach to another, slightly less important group of nonhuman intelligences in my stories, the Jivelings/Jiven. They have a <i>very</i> alien sense of self, from a human perspective (more on that, I think, in a later post), and it occurred to me that by building on that--by using an alien way of perceiving oneself to craft a convincingly alien way of perceiving the world--I might be able to finally crack the problem I've faced when writing Elu. This is still very much a work in progress, mind (as my world constantly is--already some points from previous posts are very much out of data, particularly the Xenoastronomy post), but at present, I think I've found something to go on.<br />
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So, a preliminary description of an Elu's perception of the world. First and foremost, while they do have a sense of self, they do NOT apply that sense of self to, well, themselves. Rather, to an Elu "I" is any other thinking, heterotrophic organism around them, while their own, physical self is just the observer and actor, but not the self. A good analogy might be the way in which a videogame player perceives a third-person platformer or sidescroller: they identify the character onscreen as "me," even though they aren't seeing the world that character traverses through the character's eyes, but rather through the camera hovering behind or off to the side of the character. Similarly, if some dangerous beast appears in-game, the player's fear is not for the camera's safety, but for the character hopping around onscreen--and if, for whatever reason, the camera view is temporarily blacked out while the game continues, the player will be agitated not because they're worried about the wellbeing of the camera--that's totally immaterial--but because they can no longer keep tabs on the character onscreen, and keep them out of harm.<br />
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Perhaps, though, it'd be best to show rather than tell. Here, then, is a short passage, written (this is important) <i>from the point of view of an Elu</i>, describing that Elu's thoughts while finding a wounded animal and carrying it off to tend to its injuries.**<br />
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<i>I am in pain, whimpering out of sight, beneath the stringy, branched stalks of canyon lichens. Perhaps I am hungry. somewhere nearby, and will hear myself keening from within my shelter and will come with sharp, fierce teeth to rend my flesh and fill my belly with my blood. I will be full, then, but I will also be dead--and it is worse to be dead than to be hungry. I need help.</i><br />
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<i>Claws part the foliage above me, and I am visible now, a small, curled thing of screff and skin huddling on the damp sand, half-slumped on my side with my right forelimb held at an awkward angle. It hurts me, biting and aching at my mind whenever I move it, and I squeal as the light falls on my narrow, cone-toothed face, afraid that I will lunge down from above and tear myself apart--but then, as a soft, patterned whistling of safety and reassurance fills the air, my panic-ridden heart slows its frantic beating. I can see, now, that the eyes watching me belong to no one, and the slender sand-brown arms reaching down to stroke my back, soothing me while they probe for wounds or parasites, are not mine. There is an angle along one of my ribs where an angle should not be--but I do not whimper as the claws touch it, applying their gentle pressure as they test my reaction. It doesn’t hurt me; perhaps it is an old fracture, long since healed, or a bone defect brought on by poor nutrition or a mischance of genetics. It is of little concern to me, clearly.</i><br />
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<i>No, old wounds and hungers are nothing to me right now. My forelimb is shivered with pain, and that is all that fills my mind. A web of magic--carefully spun, it must be carefully spun, or I will be hurt even more than I already am--loops itself beneath and above me, and I feel my weight lessen until I am drifting free, no longer pinned against the sand by the heavy time-burden of the world beneath my body. Long, tough lichen-stems rustle as I rise up and through them, carried aloft to the murmured whistling of an Elu’s song. I do not struggle. It still hurts, hurts terribly, but I know I am safe.</i><br />
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So...thoughts? I'm posting this, in large part, because I'm curious as to the reaction to it; is it clear enough from the passage what's happening, even if the perspective requires a little bit of adjustment to wrap one's head around?<br />
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*Which is, of course, what's actually going on, given that I'm a human trying to write them, but it doesn't need to be so bleedin' OBVIOUS.<br />
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**Note that to an Elu all animals are "I," even if multiple individuals are present. An Elu witnessing, say, a predator attacking another animal might describe it as "I bite into myself with my teeth, and for a moment I feel a sharp pain before I lose consciousness. I savor the taste of my flesh in my mouth." The Elu are not actually psychic, mind, and don't actually know what the critters they're observing are really feeling, but again, they're very empathetic, and directly translate what they see into feelings of pain/pleasure/etc, rather than keeping those empathetic feelings are arm's length, as we do.Ronanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00684192607563802594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2916192627556250246.post-3361571480417475522012-01-28T01:12:00.000-05:002012-02-14T15:44:04.746-05:00The Life of ObluAbout a month and a half ago, I wrote up a cursory summary of the solar system in which Gavanna finds itself, dwelling particularly on the age of its universe and on Gavanna itself (might be a good idea to refresh yourself on the general cosmological layout of things, if'n you've grown rusty; <a href="http://dejerara.blogspot.com/2011/12/xenoastronomy.html#more" target="_blank">clickicate here</a> for the post I'm talking about). In that post, I mentioned that Gavanna is one of a binary pair of planets, orbiting around another life-bearing world, Oblu. I didn't have much to say about Oblu at the time; I simply posted a picture of the cloud-covered, pseudo-Venusian world, and tossed up the following two paragraphs: <br />
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"<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Trebuchet, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Unfortunately for sky-scryers, Oblu is not very photogenic from orbit. This world could best be described as a temperate Venus, a planet that, like Earth's evil twin, is cloaked in a thick, crushing sea of carbon dioxide and suffocated beneath a runaway greenhouse effect. Unlike Venus, however, Oblu is not heated nearly so intensely by its dimmer stars, and although the pressure at the surface would still crush a human like a walnut under a triphammer (thank you, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle!), the temperature is well below Venus' Hadean temperatures, with an average of about 40˚C. Still too hot for humans or most other multicellular Earth life, of course, but below boiling--and that's what counts.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Trebuchet, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Trebuchet, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">To really do justice to it, I'd need to do a separate post entirely devoted to Oblu, so I'll leave off with that extremely brief summary, pausing only to leave an exercise for the reader. For insight into one of Oblu's chief oddities, I recommend looking up the phase diagram of carbon dioxide, the chief component of Oblu's atmosphere, and then...thinking about it, and what I said above, for a bit."</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Trebuchet, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"></span><br />
<a name='more'></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">A bit coy, I 'spose, but the post was dragging on and I didn't really have time to write a full exploration of Oblu. The "oddity" to which I was referring was that, at the temperature and pressure described, carbon dioxide ceases to behave as a gas, transitioning into a supercritical fluid. Supercritical fluids are a phase of matter with properties similar to both gases and liquids, expanding to fill containers like a gas but able to dissolve other materials like a liquid. The result of this, on Oblu, is that the entire surface is covered by an atmosphere/ocean of supercritical carbon dioxide, with oxygen, water, nitrogen, and a small amount of salt dissolved into the fluid and the life of Oblu living within this alien sea of not-quite-gas and not-quite-liquid.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">Now, in my Xenoastronomy post, I included a picture of both Gavanna and Oblu. As noted in the quote above, Oblu is not particularly interesting when viewed from on high, but perhaps once one sinks beneath the all-obscuring clouds into the carbon dioxide fluid at its surface, its beauties will resolve themselves a bit more clearly:</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7S7IcWiccfdDImNzCrlWFCEXDKHN6jgB4NK2V2CRohXYkdvJtTqsTbu3_zu1JCOPafyVfwDqJbaxBmgMjDZPS6ReXAWD-GafsyTd1dKWb0brmfAVolkm6SAwp9CI4bgd-T1m_81jZ6l8/s1600/Oblu+400-700.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7S7IcWiccfdDImNzCrlWFCEXDKHN6jgB4NK2V2CRohXYkdvJtTqsTbu3_zu1JCOPafyVfwDqJbaxBmgMjDZPS6ReXAWD-GafsyTd1dKWb0brmfAVolkm6SAwp9CI4bgd-T1m_81jZ6l8/s1600/Oblu+400-700.png" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">Hm. Or, um, maybe not. There are a few shapes roughly visible: some sort of rugose, coralline growth off to the lower right, with a little thingumbob attached to it that might be a growth of the coral-thing, or might be some other organism entirely. In the background is a...thing, multi-stalked with some sort of bulbous shape perched atop, and a few indistinct patches of light further off. Other than that, all is unclear.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">The reason for this is simple. Oblu's clouds are far more effective at shielding light from the surface than even those of Venus, leaving the planet's surface in a permanent starless pseudo-night. Complicating matters further is the carbon dioxide fluid covering the surface of the planet; although it itself is perfectly transparent, Oblu is a very wet world--and liquid water is only slightly soluble in supercritical carbon dioxide, and not all that much denser. The result is an emulsion of minute water droplets, drifting through the lower atmosphere/ocean in a dense fog that quickly scatters the few photons of visible light that manage to find their way down to the surface.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">Despite this, Oblu is a rich, living world, full of its own plant and animal-equivalents, and many of the latter are extremely active creatures, bounding and leaping through their inky world with a boldness and surety that only sighted animals have any right to possess. Their senses are obviously up to a task that our poor eyesight, confined to a tiny fragment of the full electromagnetic spectrum, falls far short of. Let's look at this same scene, then, but through the eyes (or equivalent thereof) of one of the native inhabitants of Oblu:</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwFyjZeWzHstRvHhsqltLRoSQUSrY8ity3nb9imLP8k9zEmnSvY6xSfNxzKHMumTaQcTsNi7yUI3Pe-YnzpF1zQBDS8ebe8S4zM_WNjbIxncEGk0PSnsirWgUxbszdcLkTPqm_9zLQJ_I/s1600/Sunsoblu.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwFyjZeWzHstRvHhsqltLRoSQUSrY8ity3nb9imLP8k9zEmnSvY6xSfNxzKHMumTaQcTsNi7yUI3Pe-YnzpF1zQBDS8ebe8S4zM_WNjbIxncEGk0PSnsirWgUxbszdcLkTPqm_9zLQJ_I/s1600/Sunsoblu.png" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">So, what exactly are we looking at here? The native animals of Oblu ("Animal" is used here in the sense of "mobile heterotroph," by the way, not in the sense of "member of the phylum Animalia") are incapable of seeing in visible light and all other wavelengths, except for radio waves and low-energy microwaves. They are, however, exceptionally sensitive to pressure waves (read: sound), and have organs similar to the lateral lines of Earth's fish, letting them detect slight disturbances in the fluid around them. They share another similarity with fish in that they are also capable of detecting electrical potential in the slightly-conductive (thanks to the low but nonzero concentration of salts dissolved in the fluid) carbon dioxide atmosphere/ocean. The combination of these senses gives us the picture above: Color here represents different wavelengths of radio and microwave light, with red being long wavelengths (radio, low energy) and blue short wavelengths (microwave, high energy). The saturation of the colors indicates the charge density; a faded out, near-gray object has very little net charge/static charge separation, while a vividly-colored, fully-saturated object is either very strongly charged or has an overall neutral charge, but with many isolated patches of strongly positive and negative charge scattered across its surface. Finally, white highlights indicate pressure waves, and turn up wherever something is moving or making noise, "illuminating" its surroundings with sound.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">...At this point, I started to write out a rather involved paragraph examining the various features of the landscape, but things got far too complicated far too quickly; the picture above is, after all, an alien world seen through alien eyes, and there's precious little in the way of a common reference frame for we Earth-dwellers. Rather than go into an insanely detailed description of what every little shade of color, gradation of vividity, and flash of white mean, then, I'll just give a general description of the scene. If y'all have any questions about specifics ("Why is most of the mountain in the background red, but a small portion both rainbow-hued and highlighted?" "What's with the wonky clouds?" "Why on Earth did you go to the trouble of drawing a completely incomprehensible image when everyone would have gladly forgiven you for waving the wand of Artistic Convenience and rendering Oblu's surface well-lit and clear for the purpose of the illustration?"), then heigh-ho for the comments section, and I'll answer 'em as best I can without boring those who may not be quite as interested. Sound good? Excellent.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">Okay, background. The plant-equivalents on Oblu (distantly related to our fungi, and referred to collectively as "gume") are not photosynthetic but electrosynthetic; that is, they rely on electrical discharges for their energy. As the entire planet is covered with what is effectively one gigantic thunderhead, this is a more effective strategy than it would be on Earth, and most gume have evolved organic lightning rods rather than leaves, which they rear up as near to the top of the atmosphere/ocean of carbon dioxide as possible. Some of these gume are tree-like, growing up as a single spike, but others grow outward and upward in a vast, flimsy, spongy mass--a strategy which takes longer to pay off but yields far greater dividends, as it allows them reach greater heights than the "trees," building themselves up into bulging sponge-mountains. One of these organic mountains is visible in the background, with the red spikes atop it being its lightning rods, reaching up for the skies (the spikes on the middle peak have just been hit, and are blue in this picture because the sudden jolt of electricity and the rapid pulse of current have caused them to emit higher-energy light. Note that the "lightning" strike doesn't look particularly lightning-y, as the electricity is flowing through a conductive medium, and is thus not confined to single, jagged paths like lightning in our own insulating atmosphere).</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">The plain beneath the mountains is the de facto surface of Oblu, a "sea" of microorganisms with a gel-like consistency. Similar mats of of microbes covers most of the planet's surface, and are detritivores, absorbing any dead organisms that fall to their surface--or living organisms, for that matter, if they stay still long enough. Unlike the similar layer of bacterial slime at the floor of Earth's oceans, these bacterial seas function as meta-organisms, funneling nutrients to different parts of the sea as needed and engaging in vast, slow chemical warfare with neighboring bacterial mats. Detritus is not the only source of nutrients for these huge collectives, as some are capable of harnessing geothermal energy and actively tap immense amounts of energy from what would be, in other circumstances, active volcanos. None of the inhabitants of Oblu or Gavanna have quite managed to figure out whether these bacterial mats are capable of thought; they occasionally develop intricately connected webs of conductive "nerves," theoretically capable of immensely sophisticated thought, but as these neural nets tend to dissolve back into the ooze within a few Oblu days (a month or so of Earth time) they don't seem to be used for any permanent thinking.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">Finally, the animals of Oblu, referred to as ghembals (I named 'em some years ago, when I had only recently learned the word "gimbal." I regret nothing). With the exception of some very specialized fliers, all ghembals are spherically symmetrical, with no defined up, down, left, or right. They are often covered with long, retractable limbs, each bearing a flattened pad-foot at its tip with a mouth in the center of each pad, and with conductive fibers running the length of the limb, used to detect radio and microwaves when fully extended. They move not by walking, but by rolling; a ghembal pushes itself forward by bending in the direction of motion, starting to fall, and then extending limbs from its "front" to catch itself while retracting its "hind" limbs. The extent to which the limbs are retracted or extended varies; rapidly-rolling species (like the large critter seen at central-left) tend to have very long limbs, while slower-moving, smaller ghembals (like the little spherical beastie to the lower-right) may make do with much stubbier appendages. Ghembals have managed very well with this mode of locomotion, adapting it to "running," cernuating (The word "cernuation" is courtesy of a fellow who goes by Sigmund Nastrazzurro, who has been worldbuilding since before I was born. I highly recommend investigating his <a href="http://planetfuraha.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">blog</a>, which is a never-failing fountain of speculative biology delights), and even flight (a form of modified cernuation, with the flying ghembal rapidly inflating and deflating hydrogen bladders at the ends of its limbs and swinging from them like a gibbon swinging from one branch to another, with air resistance holding the inflated bladders in place while the ghembal swings beneath. It obviously doesn't work too well in strong winds, so ghembals that fly using this method tend to stick to the porous interior of gume tangles, where wind isn't an issue).</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;">That's Oblu life in a nutshell, then. Only one other thing really needs noting; just as on Gavanna, there are Elu on Oblu. The large ghembal in the center-left of the picture is an Elu, as it happens; the vivid green claw-teeth on its limbs are intentionally garish, meant to broadcast its presence and to signal that it's harmless and safe to approach. Despite their presence, I've never written any short stories focused specifically around an Elu from Oblu. It's hard enough for me to write the completely alien mental environment of Gayenni Elu; adding on a completely alien sensory and physical environment has, hitherto, been a bit too much of a challenge for me. Ah, well. Someday.</span></div>Ronanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00684192607563802594noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2916192627556250246.post-39360241845652507432012-01-05T22:41:00.000-05:002012-01-05T23:36:38.168-05:00Elu, Paum, and Walls of Text<br />
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Some years ago, when I was taking Evolutionary Biology at Warren Wilson College, Gavanna as I had imagined it at the time underwent some very fundamental changes, which have profoundly affected everything I've imagined about it since. Even its name was different then; I was still calling it "Melune," a name I came up with in high school and that I was always vaguely unhappy with because it felt so derivative (the "-lune" or "-lûn" suffix is just far too common in fantasy for me to be at ease with it*). Before then, many of the most important characters in my stories already existed, but their way of life was...uncertain to me. I knew that the civilization on Gavanna was comprised of many different intelligent species, all of roughly the same intelligence and all able to communicate freely with one another, and I knew that their civilization managed to exist without resource wars, environmental degradation, etc. I'm both a misanthrope and an optimist, so these are traits that one would expect to find in a world created by me.</div>
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But how could such a civilization be prevented from embarking on the genocidal, interspecies wars that a human intelligence would certainly wage in their place? Granting that, how could such a civilization manage to be as fundamentally sane and, well, inhuman as I had imagined it? Finally, how could this civilization of many different species avoid doing what humans are doing now (and what all life, no matter its level of intelligence, tries to do), and increase its population until the planet was incapable of supporting any more of them--in the process wiping out many other species and ecosystems who were unfortunate enough to be in the way? I needed a civilization of selfless creatures that didn't reproduce--a tricky proposition, evolutionarily speaking.</div>
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The solution I eventually came up with (and which owed a very great deal to the class I had been taking at the time on Evolutionary Biology, taught by Dr. Amy Boyd; note, incidentally, that any mistakes in the following descriptions of kin selection or evolutionary reciprocity are due entirely to my own forgetfulness or inattention, and not to any shortcoming on the part of Dr. Boyd) was to make my creatures, essentially, an entire race of grandmothers. As humans age and lose the ability to reproduce, they often end up focusing a great deal of their energy on caring for their grandchildren, nieces, nephews, grandnieces, grandnephews, great-grandchildren, etc.--which makes perfect evolutionary sense, because by so doing they increase the odds of their own genes (carried by the little 'uns) surviving to be passed down further. My creatures--I call them, collectively, Elu--take this basic pattern and develop it beyond anything seen on Earth. Note, again, that the basic Elu pattern occurs across an immensely wide range of organisms on Gavanna, and is not confined to any one species. Some Elu, indeed, aren't even animals (walking omnivorous fungi, if'n you were wondering), although they aren't terribly common.</div>
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When young, a creature that will eventually become an Elu (referred to, at this stage in their life, as a paum) is essentially indistinguishable from any wild animal on Earth; they have variable intelligence depending on species, but they aren't likely to be brighter than a domestic cat, say, or at the very most a raven or octopus. Paum live their lives just as a wild Earth beastie would live its life, browsing or hunting or filter-feeding and searching out and competing for a mate when they come of reproductive age. For most of them, that's it; they live out their lives, weaken in their old age, and eventually die of one cause or another: starvation, dehydration, exposure, predation, or from wounds inflicted by others of their kind, accident, or their own prey.</div>
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One thing paum don't die of, however, is old age. They weaken as they age, true, but never enough for that alone to kill them. Most are cut down in this weakened state, but a very few manage to live long enough to hit the second stage of their lives. They begin to become stronger again, their muscles bulk up, and their spines, scales, exoskeletal plates, or screff begin to shine just as they had in youth. More importantly, their skullcases (or the equivalent thereof, for the fungal or arthropodal Elu) and brains begin to grow and their intelligence begins to rise. Their instincts also shift at this time, just as the instincts of, say, a human shift at puberty. They become sterile,** the old drive to seek out a mate and reproduce dies, and new instincts, protective instincts, develop and grow stronger. They develop a burning need to care for and protect those of their species that are still in the paum stage, and a similar (and, initially, even stronger) need to find out everything they can about the world around them--and with their newly-gained intelligence, they have the ability to do both. </div>
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When fully matured, Elu are extraordinarily altruistic, both within their own species and between species. Within their species, an Elu's dedication to its paum is similar in strength to a worker ant's dedication to its hive; not only would an Elu gladly sacrifice its life to protect the life of one of its paum, this would not even be considered (by other Elu) as being an unusually noble or self-sacrificing act; it would just be the obvious, sensible course of action to take.</div>
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Outside of their species, things are a bit more complicated, and their altruism is not nearly as strong--but still far stronger than interspecies altruism is in humans. Elu don't harm the paum of other Elu (which would normally be very advantageous, evolutionarily speaking, particularly if those others happened to be predators of their own paum) because although they would have no real trouble doing so thanks to their intelligence, the Elu of the harmed paum would be equally capable of retaliating against the paum of the original offender, and that retaliation would be equally unstoppable. Tool-using intelligence is, in the natural world, the equivalent of nuclear weaponry in human warfare; it's all-devastating, completely unstoppable, and unmatchable by anything else. Spread that out across every reasonably-complex animal on a planet, and the result is mutually-assured destruction between species sub-populations rather than nations--a scale large enough for it to have an evolutionary effect, but small enough that it can play out multiple times without devastating entire ecosystems. Given millions of years of this sort of sniping between proto-Elu, eventually the Elu of every species would evolve the tendency to avoid taking any kind of direct action against the paum of another species--because to do otherwise would ensure that their own genes would very quickly disappear from the gene pool. As a result of this, most Elu that were carnivorous before becoming intelligence undergo dental and digestive changes along with their mental changes when they become Elu, and end up adopting an herbivorous diet; to be an intelligent carnivore is far too evolutionarily risky in a world where the herbivores have intelligent guardians capable of sterilizing every last one of your kin (cutting them out of the gene pool) if they should so choose.</div>
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However, not only are the Elu nonaggressive towards the paum of different species, but they're often actively benevolent towards them--never as much as they are towards their own paum, of course, but if an Elu sees a wounded creature of another species, its first inclination will be to take that creature in and care for it, or at least to find an Elu of the same species as the wounded animal. This drive evolved from simple reciprocity; those Elu that cared for the paum of other species were more likely to receive the same reciprocal care for their own paum from other Elu, and thus overall had an evolutionary advantage over the Elu who were not compassionate.</div>
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So, to sum up, and build on what I described above: Elu evolved intelligence for a different reason than humans did, and the nature of their intelligence and the uses they put it to are consequently different. Elu are <i>extremely</i> nonviolent and very benevolent, and their two strongest emotional drives are the drive to learn about the world, and the drive to protect their own paum first, and life in general second. They tend to be loners, and their "civilization" comprises a shared language, knowledge, music, and stories, shared between hundreds of millions of nomads of millions of different species. They have no cities, no villages, no rulers, no religions, no monetary system, no roads, and none of the other trappings of human civilization. However, because their basic nature prevents them from overstepping the boundaries of their ecosystems or waging culture-destroying wars, their civilization (such as it is) has endured for hundreds of millions of years without terminal disruptions, and as a result they've managed to accumulate a collective knowledge of the universe and its workings far beyond anything humanity has ever managed. </div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span">In fact, they've endured long enough as tool-using intelligences that evolution has had a chance to shape their minds in ways that it's never touched humans. </span>Their language is half-learned and half-instinctive, and their logographic writing system is nearly completely instinctive (an Elu who had never been taught to speak could come across an inscription in Gayenni, and each symbol would "feel" to them like its correct meaning. There have been more than a few instances of Elu who had never learned to actually speak, but who were still fully able to communicate through writing). Most formidably, the Elu have evolved an intuitive knowledge of the laws of physics--a <i>correct</i> intuitive knowledge of the laws of physics. The concept of a particle is alien to them, they think of everything in terms of interacting probability waves, and their concept of time is steeped in relativity and is nearly incomprehensible to creatures like humans (what we think of as duration in time, they think of as the reciprocal uncertainty in time dilation, very roughly speaking).</div>
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...Are y'all still there? Wow. I'm impressed, I truly am, and gratified by your patience and your willingness to tire your eyes reading through all this text. Well! Eyes should be rested, and patience should be rewarded. Before I bring this post to a close, then, let's finish with one of my most important and oldest (both in- and out-world) characters: an old, patient, gentle, tired Elu named Sprenga.</div>
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No, not the small, rather ugly gremlin; that's Hrimph, M.O.T.L. Sprenga is the great dinosaurian creature. It's difficult to tell from the picture, I know, so it's worth noting that Sprenga's overall body shape is not unlike that of a theropod dinosaur (<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/Spinosaurus1DBa.png" target="_blank">Spinosaurus aegyptiacus</a> comes to mind, sail and all, although Sprenga's head is more robust than Spinosaurus' and it also has a fin on the tip of its tail that Spinosaurus lacks), though only about a third as large and more obviously adapted for an aquatic lifestyle. Basically, Sprenga is what you'd get if you took Spinosaurus and forced it to live like a crocodile.</div>
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Sprenga is more than a thousand years old,*** and when it**** was very young lived as a paum, hunting prey near the water's edge in one of the many lakes scattered about the lower slopes of the Tregillian continent/mountain. It wasn't that vivid shade of yellow then, being more of a dull green-black color to aid in camouflage; the yellow color came later, when Sprenga became an Elu and needed to be seen rather than to be camouflaged. That was centuries ago, though. Sprenga has lived so long that it has begun to experience the great tragedy of the Elu; they can live to such great ages, caring for generation after generation of paum, that eventually their paum evolve away from them, becoming too different from the creatures of a millenia ago for all the old protective instincts be activated. Empty nest syndrome writ large, with not just your children but your entire species leaving the nest forever. No Elu lives that long without acquiring a very equable, strong-minded temperament, but even so Sprenga is occasionally prone to melancholy. It still has its curiosity to sustain it, though, and while it doesn't travel very much Sprenga has collected enough knowledge over the centuries that its home is something of a magnet for younger, wandering Elu, who come to it for old knowledge and bring it--often unwittingly--new knowledge.</div>
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*Ironically, "Gavanna" itself is arguably even more derivative; it's a thinly-veiled distortion of the word "Gondwana," which was one of two supercontinents formed following the breakup of Pangea during the early Mesozoic. I picked the name mostly because it has a nice rhythmic sound to it and because I've always been rather fond of Gondwana and its fauna. Etymologically the name is less satisfying, as "Gondwana" means "Land of the Gonds," with the Gonds being a people in India (India being one of several fragments of the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana) whose name apparently translates to "The people with 'outie' navels." Poetically, one is forced to admit that this lacks a certain something. Ah, well. The name still sounds elegant and strange, and that's the important thing, I guess.</div>
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**For the same reason that worker ants, say, are sterile; just as a eusocial organism would fall apart at the seams if individuals were able to reproduce, thus favoring their own genetic material, the paum of Elu would end up being neglected if the Elu themselves were able to reproduce, and the short-term benefit to an individual Elu would end up hurting its own fitness.<br />
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***Because they themselves are no longer reproductive and are also typically not competing for the same resources as their paum, there is little evolutionary pressure for Elu to die off quickly to make room for a new generation, so they tend to linger--and with their extremely comprehensive knowledge of biology, they're generally able to linger for hundreds, thousands, or in some cases millions of years longer than would otherwise be the case if the notion takes them.</div>
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****I'm really abusing these footnotes, aren't I? Just a quick note about the use of "it" to refer to intelligent creatures; Elu technically have genders, but as they become sterile upon becoming Elu their genders tend to be a biological curiosity to them, and little more. It's not uncommon, actually, for an Elu to forget what its gender is, and as the relevant organs are often vitiated or absent it's not necessarily a trivial exercise to find out again. In any case, "he" or "she" are not really adequate pronouns for any Elu, and although I do have my own set of pronouns that are a bit more fitting (gender-neutral, with a "respectful it" for living things and an "inanimate it" for nonliving things), I figure that what with Elu and paum being sprinkled throughout this post, we've probably got enough new words for today. So, "it" it is.<br />
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(Edit;) Whoops, nearly forgot. I'd like to thank y'all for your exceedingly kind words both on the blog and facebook-wards; it's heartening, surprising, and extremely gratifying to me to hear that my odd little maunderings are of interest. So again, thanks, all of you!</div>Ronanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00684192607563802594noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2916192627556250246.post-78959698545301811132011-12-18T00:25:00.000-05:002011-12-18T01:17:15.415-05:00Star ScrapersI was going to have a nice, background-building post set up, explaining a bit more of the important details that needed to be known before my world could be fully understood--perhaps an explanation of the Elu, the most important intelligent lifeforms on Gavanna, or a description of the life of Gavanna and how it's linked to Earth life (the astute reader of <a href="http://dejerara.blogspot.com/2011/11/cute-n-fluffy.html">Cute 'n Fluffy</a> will have noted that Screfflings look rather suspiciously Terran for a supposedly alien critter on an alien world, and there's an excellent reason for that, M.O.T.L.), or a more focused description of Oblu and its bizarre beasties. These would all be sensible and helpful subjects to cover.<br />
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But then I wrote a paragraph or two covering the arrival of humans on Gavanna (yes, they show up. No, they're not native. No, I'm not saying more on the subject right now) and their first impression of the world, and then I felt a burning need to illustrate part of the scene, and then three hours vanished rather alarmingly. So today you'll get a short excerpt that may never find its way into any one of my stories, and a short lecture on the oddities of xenogeology. Onward!</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">She stumbled out with the others
into the weird violet-red twilight, bulbous grape-like growths sprawling across
the lichin-rimed ground and popping nastily beneath their dazed feet while
tough, ropy vines twisted above, draping them with threads of light. Twin suns were barely visible through
the thick foliage above, one sunlike in size but burning rust-red and the other, about half the size, shining a ferocious, piercing blue. A strange moon was set in the sky above, nearly at the
zenith and half full. It looked
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was the mountains that Estella noticed first, though. There didn’t seem to be any trees at all around her, just
vines thick as pythons writhing their way up into the sky and interweaving
themselves with their neighbors to create an immense, self-supporting
network. This tangled thicket of
vines rose in the distance, flowing up and over great buttes and megaliths as
they crawled their way up the mountains’ flanks. As the mountains slanted
upwards, so did the vines, growing more and more distant until to Estella’s
eyes they were nothing more than a green-brown scum, seeping up a rock face
only to falter and die as the continent’s bones rose higher still through the
cold dry air. Estella craned her
head back, following titanic lodes of rust-red stone upwards until they were
lost in the snowline—and then caught them again as the snow itself disappeared,
driven off at last in the sunblasted, cloudless heights. The naked rock was tinted a delicate
blue, like a full moon seen during daytime, and green foxfire flickered and
danced in the carbon-black shadows of the peaks. Unsteadiness quavered up Estella’s spine, her legs folded,
and she thudded to the ground. For
a moment she was genuinely afraid that if she didn’t grab on to something,
anything, she would go tumbling off over the alien forest, falling sideways for
miles and miles towards those space-scraping monoliths. Their presence redefined down.</span><br />
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Ahem. The picture I drew for this cuts out most of the lower view, so fortunately y'all are spared what would no doubt have been an amusing but ultimately horrifying attempt on my part to draw human figures. I also switched the time a bit to after sunset, largely because I had a perfectly lovely starscape already prepared (it's the background to this blog and the title image, as it happens), and I couldn't resist an opportunity to use it again. I left out the "green foxfire" (St. Elmo's Fire writ large, I was thinking) because I wasn't sure that something of that nature would actually happen. This is my first attempt at drawing detailed mountains, incidentally, and I did it mostly from memory and a vague, fuzzy intuitive sense of what mountains should look like. If any of y'all have any geological knowledge, please try to keep the cringing and the exclamations of righteous indignation to a minimum; it disturbs the other guests.<br />
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The mountain range you're seeing here is the backbone of Tregillia, the southern continent of Gavanna--although one could just as well say that it's the peak of the mountain Tregillia itself, as the entire continent is essentially one massive, rising peak. In its lower reaches, the mountain range is not unlike some of Earth's highest ranges, like the Andes or the Himalayas. The Andes were built from the collision of a continental plate with an oceanic plate, and therefore have had relatively little continental rock to work with, while the Himalayas (forged by the collision of India with Asia) were built from the stone of two continents, and are consequently larger (I'm simplifying here, but I believe this is fundamentally correct). The peaks of both ranges are very conventionally mountain-shaped, rough cones and ridges prevented from rising too high to too steeply by the constant grinding of glacial ice carving its way down their slopes. The conventionally mountain-shaped peaks in the foreground of this picture are about the size of those ranges, although rather closer to the Himalayas in elevation.<br />
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Things happened differently on Gavanna, however. Tregillia is--or was, the encounter is nearly finished at the time during which my stories are set--the site of a collision between three continental plates, with a central small continent being crushed from both the east and west by two other impinging plates. Continental rock is light, and hard to subduct, and because pressure was being applied from both sides there was simply no room for the plates to spread out. The only way they could go was up, and up they went, to the height of the Himalayan plateau, to the height of the ancient Acadian mountains (the great-grandmothers of our Appalachian mountains), and higher still.<br />
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Now, the height of a mountain is constrained by several different forces, all acting to drag it back down to Earth. The first and most obvious is the strength of the rock itself; pile too much stone too high, and eventually it won't be able to hold up under its own weight, and the rock in the very heart of the mountain will crumple and melt, causing the mountain to spread and flatten like an immense mud pie dropped on to a hard surface. No mountains on Earth are high enough for this to be limiting, although the Tregillian range, as I've imagined it, is pushing up against this limit. <br />
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A second, related limitation is the strength of the crust beneath the mountain. Pile stone too high, and eventually the planetary crust beneath it will begin to buckle and crack from the sheer strain, causing the mountain to sink down into the ground. Interestingly enough, this <i>has</i> acted as a limiting factor on mountain height in our universe, although not on Earth; the great Martian mountain, Olympus Mons, would be even higher than it already is (and it's three times taller than Everest, so that's saying something) if it hadn't gotten so massive that the crust around it fractured and it sank back into the mantle of Mars. Y'all are familiar with Valles Marineris, the Martian canyon that's deeper and longer than any canyon system in the solar system except for the great Mid-Atlantic Rift on Earth?<i> </i>That wasn't carved by water or lava. Valles Marineris is a crack in Mars' crust, the point where the planet gave way under the colossal stress imposed by Olympus Mons. This limitation, however, only applies to volcanic mountains like Olympus Mons, as they're built of rock that's been vomited up on to the surface of the planet, with nothing but the integrity of the crust to support them. Tectonic mountains like the Himalayas, the Andes, and the Tregillian range are built more along the lines of icebergs, made of rock that's less dense than the rock of the mantle, and thus float on the mantle without putting any particular stress on the crust (downward stress, at least. There's still a lot of lateral stress).<br />
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Finally, the third limitation on mountain height (and by far the most important, at least on wet worlds like Earth and Gavanna) is erosion. As mountains grow taller, they grow colder, and snow falls on them more regularly and more deeply--and that means glaciers, grinding and cutting their way through the bones of the mountains in a process that is delightfully referred to as the "Glacial Buzzsaw hypothesis." The higher a mountain gets, the deeper the glaciers cut into its hide, wearing it back down again--at least as long as the mountain stays small enough that snow continues falling.*<br />
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But what if it doesn't?<br />
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High up in the atmosphere, where the sun beats down unimpeded and the boundary between "air" and "vacuum" begins to get a little wobbly, solid ice begins to become unstable. It doesn't melt--the pressure's far too low for that to happen--but it begins to wear away nonetheless, subliming off into vapor. None of the mountains on Earth are high enough for this process to occur faster than the rate of snowfall, but on Gavanna, that's not the case. The Tregillian range, forced skyward by a tectonic collision far greater than anything Earth has witness in the past 100 million years (I'm not comfortable going further back than that), managed to rise higher than the snowclouds, and once it did the icecaps on its very highest peaks slowly sublimed away into radiation-blasted void. And then...they endured. There was no rain at those heights, no snow, no plant roots or freeze-thaw cycles or even echoing sounds. Just emptiness, and stillness. Far beneath them the glaciers continued to grind away, but not quite as fast as the mountains were rising, and so the titanic monoliths slowly rose up into the sky, huge red-black teeth growing out of a snowy jaw. At the time that my stories are set, they're about as tall as they ever will be; the continents that had been colliding from the east and west have been almost completely consumed, and although the oceanic crust connected to them are still being subducted, the vast sheets of light, buoyant continental crust that had fueled the mountain growth are gone. The Tregillian mountains are now only barely keeping pace with their own erosion, and in a relatively small period of time--ten, twenty million years, shall we say--erosion will gain the upper hand, and will begin eating away at the foundations of the gigantic mountain-pillars. Few, if any, of them will fall; more likely, they'll slowly crumble, mountain-sized sheets of rock flaking off their sides to smash into the glaciers far below. They'll eventually be whittled away entirely, the dust and fragments from their deaths washing down the rivers of Tregillia to be lost in the ocean.<br />
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But for now, for a little while longer, they are still mighty.<br />
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*Nota bene: The glacial buzzsaw idea that I presented above is very nice and neat and comfortable, but there are actually some very legitimate doubts raised about its accuracy. <a href="http://news.yale.edu/2010/09/16/new-findings-cut-through-glacial-buzzsaw-theory">Evidence has been presented</a> indicating that for some mountains, at least, their sheet of ice can actually act to <i>protect</i> them from erosion, allowing them to attain heights they would otherwise never reach. Be that as it may, though, glaciers obviously do have a erosive effect, and I strongly suspect that if a mountain is better off with an icecap than with exposure to wind and airborne grit, it's even better off if it doesn't have to deal with either ice or wind--as the Tregillian range would be, once it rose above most weather and was able to sublime away its ice layer.</div>
</div>Ronanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00684192607563802594noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2916192627556250246.post-44943687021293994732011-12-02T20:03:00.001-05:002011-12-02T22:07:01.901-05:00XenoastronomyHey now, would you look at that! I'm not dead, and neither is the blog! My apologies for the long hiatus, but...well, the ends of classes and mountains of grading demanded my attention, and they were extraordinarily persuasive.<br />
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Anyway. In what will, I suspect, be a recurring pattern, I think I'll need to renege on my earlier decision to simply barrel on ahead with infodumps regardless of backstory; the background of my world is so tightly wound into all the foreground details that it's often impossible for me to separate them. It seems best, then, to take the King of Hearts' sage advice and begin at the beginning, go on until I get to the end, and then stop. From the very beginning, then...<br />
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My world, Gavanna, spins through the spacetime of a not-terribly-unfamiliar universe, whose laws of physics don't differ from those of our own universe (or if they do, they differ so slightly that only academic interest could be found in the variations). The speed of light is 3.00•10^8 meters per second, Planck's constant is 6.626•10^-34 Joules times seconds, and the gravitational constant is...um...well, whatever the gravitational constant is in our universe. Six point sumfinoruvver times 10^-11 meters cubed per kilogram per second squared. Doesn't matter, you get the picture. It should be noted, incidentally, that I don't currently know whether Gavanna actually <i>is</i> in our universe, or whether it's just in a suspiciously similar universe right next door. It's somewhere and somewhen, and the somewhere, at least, would be familiar to any mote of interstellar hydrogen within Earth's recent lightcone.<br />
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But not the somewhen. Gavanna is a world of a far older universe than ours, a universe that celebrated its 13.8 billionth birthday many, many, many billions of years ago. The longest, reddest, tiredest photons of light in this universe are...well, I must be cagey in some way, mustn't I? Let's just say they've traversed a good three hundred billion lightyears of space, but haven't yet wriggled their way past a round trillion lightyears.<br />
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Such a universe, of course, is different from our own in many ways. Naïvely, one would suppose it to be a dim, dead universe, as all of the normal stars we're used to--stars like good 'ol Sol--live hot, fast, furious lives, burning out within a few tens of billions of years, at most. But one must have a little perspective. Our star, and stars like our star, are a comparative rarity in the universe. Far more common are a more unassuming, retiring group of stars: the red dwarfs. These little beasties are, at the very most, two-fifths of the mass of the sun, and often much less (although even the very lightest are above about 7.5% of the sun's mass--below that, they aren't massive enough to fuse hydrogen for energy, and become either brown dwarfs or planets with delusions of grandeur, depending on who you ask*. Now, in our young, hot-blooded (there is a fantastic joke in there about interstellar plasma just waiting to be made) universe, the red dwarfs haven't really come into their own; they mostly just hang around in the dark of space being dim, dark, and red. Oh, they'll occasionally amuse themselves by swooping in unannounced on a hapless solar system, wreaking a little gravitational havoc, and then departing, snickering evilly, back into the dim dark, but in general they don't do much to draw the interest of a proud, hot-burning star like ours, or for that matter of the creatures living on the worlds orbiting such stars.<br />
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They're just biding their time, though. For reasons a bit too lengthy to go into here (although check out <a href="http://www.astroscu.unam.mx/rmaa/RMxAC..22/PDF/RMxAC..22_adams.pdf">this paper</a> if'n you're interested), although red dwarfs burn dimly they burn <i>long</i>. Eons after our own sun has cast off its hydrogen and shrunk to a rattling, screaming white dwarf, the red dwarfs will still be burning, and they won't be quite so red or so dim anymore. Unlike normal stars, as red dwarfs age they're expected to skip that whole uncouth red giant phase, and instead of bloating themselves out they'll just get brighter--much, much brighter, and bluer to boot. As the young, massive suns die, the galaxies will still shine as the far more numerous red dwarfs begin to brighten, and they'll shine not with the yellow-white of today, but with a pure, piercingly beautiful blue.<br />
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That universe is the universe that my world finds itself in; an old universe and an old galaxy, filled with aged, aged planets whose night skies glimmer with the light of blue stars. And the world itself, the planet Gavanna, looks something like this:<br />
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Not my best work, I grant, and I know that it looks like I loaded a few dozen hurricanes into a blunderbuss aimed in the general direction of Gavanna and let fly, but it'll do. The thin blue transparent lines indicate the world's axis of rotation, with the north pole visible up-a-top (the native inhabitants use a different system of directions than our north, south, east, and west, but that's a matter for a later post). Also visible is one of Gavanna's two continents, the polar landmass referred to by certain offworlders (more on <i>them</i> later, too. Don't worry, they're worth the wait. Well, one of them is. He's fabulous, and will gladly tell you so whether you ask him or not) as Scriven. The first thing that the attentive observer should note is that it's, well...green. Surprisingly so, considering the example set by our own Antarctica. Gavanna, however, is a far warmer world than our own, and just as Antarctica was a far more clement land during the Mesozoic, Scriven manages to scrape by with nothing worse than harsh winters and cool but not cold summers--no kilometer-thick ice caps to be seen. Scriven is also, regrettably, not all that developed; I've worked out little about the life and characters to be found there, and other than being the home of Tulla, Heireggan (certain readers may recognize these individuals as <i>extremely</i> altered versions of a pair of characters who, some years ago, went by the names of Ms. Sunshine and Hedwig. Incidentally, I believe I did once ask you about this before, but if the original creator of both of these characters is (A.) reading this and (B.) objects to my playing about with their names and stories, just let me know and I'll take the appropriate action (whatever you might deem that to be), and Iliaka (more on them la--Oh for goodness' sake, I should just abbreviate that. From now on, M.O.T.L following a namedrop means you'll hear about it again), Scriven does not play a large role in my stories.<br />
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The same is very much not true of the southern continent, Tregillia (the name is, again, that used by the offworlders previously mentioned, M.O.T.L.). This is where most of my stories are set, where most of my characters live, and where I've devoted the most attention to biota, geology, paleohistory, and pretty much everything else. Tregillia is a little knot of rock thrust up from the ocean floor, a tectonic oddity that, properly speaking, should not exist--it's essentially one immense, Saudi Arabia-sized mountain, an Olympus Mons of the seas, with its highest peaks rearing three times higher above sea level than the Himalayan plateau manages on Earth. Just like Mauna Loa on Earth, this gives it an immense range of biomes, stacked atop one another as the elevation rises, and many of which have no direct cognate on Earth. M.O.T.L.<br />
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And more on Tregillia later, as well--and for that matter, more on Gavanna later. We still have another world to mention. Gavanna is a binary world, orbiting around another planet of approximately the same mass (a bit more massive, actually, but who's counting?), and this other planet--Oblu--is also rife with life.<br />
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Unfortunately for sky-scryers, Oblu is not very photogenic from orbit. This world could best be described as a temperate Venus, a planet that, like Earth's evil twin, is cloaked in a thick, crushing sea of carbon dioxide and suffocated beneath a runaway greenhouse effect. Unlike Venus, however, Oblu is not heated nearly so intensely by its dimmer stars, and although the pressure at the surface would still crush a human like a walnut under a triphammer (thank you, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle!), the temperature is well below Venus' Hadean temperatures, with an average of about 40˚C. Still too hot for humans or most other multicellular Earth life, of course, but below boiling--and that's what counts.<br />
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To really do justice to it, I'd need to do a separate post entirely devoted to Oblu, so I'll leave off with that extremely brief summary, pausing only to leave an exercise for the reader. For insight into one of Oblu's chief oddities, I recommend looking up the phase diagram of carbon dioxide, the chief component of Oblu's atmosphere, and then...thinking about it, and what I said above, for a bit.<br />
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This post draws to a close, but before I depart one more thing must be mentioned. The following logograph is a more elaborate version of the symbol that the native inhabitants of Gavanna and Oblu use to indicate their own kind in their writing (which, incidentally, is a logographic writing system).<br />
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It is also, incidentally, a reasonably accurate (if-stylized) depiction of the solar system in which my worlds exist. The deep blue and gray dots represent Gavanna and Oblu, respectively, while the light blue and red orbs in the middle are the twin suns of the system, Gan and Tul (I mentioned that my system has binary planets orbiting around binary suns, didn't I? I didn't? Silly me). Far down at the bottom, the distant, far-orbiting third planet in the system, the gas giant Relau. It tends not to bother anyone. The thin, blue connecting lines and curves indicate various things, but mostly they map the journeys of the local intelligences themselves, both within their star system (the closed curves) and without (the bow-shaped lines branching off from Gavanna).<br />
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And that, I think, is really quite enough. Auvoir, all, and thank you for reading.<br />
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*Astronomers who know what they're talking about say that they're brown dwarfs. I say that they're planets with delusions of grandeur, because I think it's amusing to anthropomorphize inanimate objects.<br />
<br />Ronanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00684192607563802594noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2916192627556250246.post-16495463986266775822011-11-13T16:21:00.001-05:002011-11-13T17:38:48.732-05:00Cute 'n Fluffy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Well, she <i>is</i> cute and fluffy. The critter above is a Screffling, a representative of one of the major branches on my fictive tree of life. Sometime in future (perhaps after a series of independent, one-beastie-at-a-time posts, perhaps in one massive infodump) I'll include the whole overarching phylogeny of my various imaginary beasties, but for now I'm not going to attempt something quite so grandiose. Better, I think, to start simply.<br />
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So! Screfflings. Screfflings occupy roughly the same position, ecologically speaking, on Gavanna that mammals in general did on Earth during the Mesozoic, or that rodents do today; they aren't rare, exactly, and they do pretty well for themselves, but they aren't about to win any prizes for the largest/fastest/most colorful/most dangerous/highest flying/etc. critter around. Like many Gayenni* beasties, screfflings are capable of adjusting their metabolism between endothermy and ectothermy as conditions demand, and the layer of insulating fur-feathers covering their bodies helps them maintain their body temperature when they're in an endothermic state. Said fur-feathers (the in-world name for them being "screff," hence the name "screffling") are made up of many tiny fibrils, all intertwined and matted together into a hollow, insulating shell. The quick diagram below shows a pretty typical example of a screff.<br />
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The darkened patch towards the lower left is where the screff would be rooted into the skin, while the cutaway at the upper right shows the (not terribly interesting) cavity inside. Some species of screfflings have taken this basic form and run wild with it, producing rigid armored plating, loosely connected tufts of fibrils, delicately arcing pennants, and in a few cases even barbed, irritatant tufts that can be dislodged to deter attackers--but the simplest form of screff is by far the most common, and has persisted more or less unchanged for as long as screfflings themselves have existed.<br />
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Well. Not much to elevate, instruct, or amuse in the above, I'm afraid--for it to be interesting, I realize one needs to already have some sort of investment in my world, and as it is I suspect this is only particularly enthralling for me. I'll try to have something a bit less abstruse and more interesting next time 'round.<br />
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*Of or relating to Gavanna, with Gavanna being the name of my world. I did mention that in the first post, I believe, but Hey, no harm in offering a little clarification.Ronanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00684192607563802594noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2916192627556250246.post-11193454355315393862011-11-08T22:39:00.000-05:002011-11-08T22:39:16.855-05:00PlanetfallWorldbuilding, or the art of creating a cohesive, internally consistent fictional world, is something that every science fiction or fantasy writer (and for that matter, many writers of literary fiction) must do in order to create the scaffolding upon which they build their stories. Most such writers only build their worlds just as far as is necessary to tell their tales, and no further--as is right and proper, of course, if the main goal is to tell a story. For some folks, though, the story is not enough, and they become engrossed in the world itself, weaving it out into strange complexities that sprawl far beyond what would ever be useful for a story. Eventually, the fictive world itself becomes the primary "work" of the worldbuilder, and any stories, paintings, languages, sculptures, songs, etc. that may be associated with it become not individual works of art, but threads in the overarching tapestry that is the world.<div>
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For most of my life, I've been imagining, refining, and adjusting a fictional world (universe, really) of my own, with most of my energy devoted to threshing out the details of a single planet which I currently call Gavanna. I've written a vast number of short stories set on this world, covered reams of paper with doodles of the various critters, plants, characters, and landmarks that exist on it, and have even worked out a few details of a script, counting system, and language (the last being very crude; I'm no linguist) for the creatures that inhabit my world. I figure it might be productive for me to throw such imaginings up here, and while I can't promise any regularity in my posts (heck, I can't promise that this won't be both my first and last post), I shall try to keep this alive, and will be sure to post plenty of purty pictures so that my reader(s) aren't subjected to nothing but walls of text. Sound good? Excellent. Onward!</div>
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...Wait, dagnabbit. Not quite onward just yet. I forgot one detail, and a rather important one. The title of this blog is a reference to one of my characters, an extremely metafictional character named Dejerara who functions, in my world, as a sort of legendary--well, not a deity, that's not an appropriate descriptor (and she would never stand for being worshipped), but a--<i>patron</i>, I suppose, is a good term. A mythical patron of stories. Her story, in my world's chronology, is the oldest and most important story that's told, and the first story ever told to any young beastie going out into the world. All other stories are told because her story exists, and her story dictates the nature of all other stories. We'll get to her later, I think; I imagine that most folks reading this will already be well familiar with my world already, so as I plow ahead my modus operandi will probably be to simply post updates as they come along, with little attention paid to getting any newcomers caught up--simply because I don't really anticipate any newcomers. If that changes in future (and heigh-ho to the comments to pronounce your newcomer status, if'n you aren't already familiar with Gavanna!), then I'll likely add a set of primer pages on the astronomy, biology, history, paleohistory, and civilizations of my world.</div>
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Alright, that's better. Got things cleared up, mild incoherence notwithstanding. Now, onward!</div>Ronanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00684192607563802594noreply@blogger.com1