Worldbuilding Critical Mass

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Well, I’ll be damned! Designing a calendar is a million times easier when your conworld’s planet is just Earth with the serial numbers filed off! Turns out other people have already worked out enough options that I can cherry-pick. What the hell was I thinking building planets with 90-degree axial tilts or retrograde rotations or double stars or tide-locking to a gas giant? Nobody spent millennia figuring out THOSE. I have to do that myself.

And I’d say that’s also good news for JRR Tolkien. Can you imagine if some freak radioactive transporter accident had combined him, with his obsessive calendaring, with a golden-age sci fi planetbuilder like Poul Anderson or Larry Niven? The resulting hybrid abomination’s head would probably explode.

Comments

[van.livejournal.com]

I did a world (moon) tidally locked to a gas giant once. FUNTIMES. I probably got it all wrong too, but what I came up with was a lot of fun anyway...

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I didn't know you were a worldbuilder! Did anyone live on that planet?

One of my alien species lives on a gas giant's moon. I was all bugged when Avatar came out and people would start thinking I'd gotten the idea from them. I'm not sure why that bothered me; I am resigned to the fact that for any idea I have, Poul Anderson already had it.

[van.livejournal.com]

Oh, I love worldbuilding, at least when it suits a novel I want to write. As for my moon, it was a resort world, so small pockets of people did live on it, but there were no native intelligent life, just lots of lovely flora and fauna. I even painted it, once. I actually designed a whole solar system for that novel, including several other human-colonized, interesting worlds in the system. The resort moon was just the one my main character(s) spent the most time on and which I therefore spend the most researching and developing.

Is Pandora a moon? I honestly had no idea. I thought the world in Avatar was its own planet. Not that I think moon-orbiting-a-gas-giant is a particular original idea in the first place. Unique enough, I suppose, though I first recalled it of Yavin IV in Star Wars, ahhahahaha. I can only assume if Pandora is a moon that it's not tidally locked, anyway . . .

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Lovely painting! And I'd be interested in hearing more about your novel. It sounds like my kind of story. It's always fun to meet someone else who sits around mathing planets into existence.

Most moons are tidally locked to the bodies they orbit--so I assume Pandora is locked to its gas giant (Polyphemus, I believe), but not to its suns (1 major sun and a minor one--it's a binary system). Apparently they worked out a complex day/night cycle for Pandora, but I have no idea how accurate it is.

Habitable moons, of gas giants or otherwise, are actually fairly common in science fiction books, but that's one of those things most people don't know about until a big-budget movie comes out, so I'm going to get a bunch of people assuming that's where I got the idea. Nope; I stole from MANY sources for that one! ;)

Yavin IV sounded way cool, especially in the EU books. I loved the description of the light show when the star would be eclipsed by the edge of the gas giant.

[van.livejournal.com]

Thank you. :) I honestly can't say if it'd be your sort of story or not, since I know very little about what you actually read, but if nothing else you might enjoy watching my MC going from world to world and enjoying the worlds themselves, even if you don't have interest in what he's doing on them. Actually, it'd be quite fun to have you read it after I've cleaned it up a bit with an eye specifically on the worlds and say whether they read as believable to your or not. I kind of went to route of making several inhabited worlds in one solar system, and that's always a bit tricky since I really pushed the "Goldilocks Zone" for a few of them.

I don't remember night/day being odd at all on Pandora, so I guess that's why it never struck me as being a moon or tidally locked or otherwise interesting. I guess it's a reason to rewatch and enjoy the movie more. I guess it'd explain some of the bioluminescent stuff more, though. My moon ended up with a bit of that too (though not to the extent on Pandora), just out of the practicality of a near month-long darkness.

I actually wish I could sit around "mathing planets into existence." I'm so bad in math I cannot remotely do this. I have to go at it sort of assbackward and create it and then hope I can get the science to fit my model. Fortunately, the universe is vast and complicated, so almost anything I come up with can be explained by science. I just create it and then make the numbers fit instead of creating the numbers and then developing the worlds that'd fit into them. Whichever. My stories aren't hard SF, but it doesn't completely ignore science-as-we-know-it either.

[beccastareyes]

But orbital dynamics is fun!

(Says the astronomer.)

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Well, yes. But thet problem after that is figuring out how the people on the planet would think to keep track of it.

[beccastareyes]

Well, true. I suppose with Earth, you just have solar, lunar, luni-solar and, if you're really weird, things based on successive conjunctions of Venus.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Exactly! Plus, the people on this Earth are human, so their choices of how to count time aren't too outlandish. And I don't really have to math them out for myself, since people have already mathed it. I just figure out what seems to work best, then come up with names for the months and the weekdays and whatnot.

(I may post the two calendars for said not!Earth here soon. It may not ever come up in the story itself except in passing, but I had way too much fun with it not to share it!)

[beccastareyes]

True, but at least light-dark and climatic cycles are probably a good bet. As is ignoring anything that's far longer than a lifespan.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

What, you don't measure all units of time as fractions of a galactic year?

[beccastareyes]

Nah. We don't know it to enough significant digits.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

True. Calculating a galactic leap year would be a pain in the ass. ("Every 9.73528*!0^9 years, February gets an extra day!")

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Damn! 10^8, I meant! It is important that I get the calculations I pulled out of my ass in the right ballpark!

EDIT: Now my number pad is FUCKING WITH ME.

[bean-bunny.livejournal.com]

You worldbuild a lot. How do you get plots, if I can ask a totally stupid stupid question?

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

It's a feedback loop. Sometimes, like with this story, the plot comes first, and then I have to worldbuild to fill in blanks--though since it's a fantasy, the "world" I'm building is maps and landscapes and taking the planet to be Pretty Much Earth. In other cases, I will worldbuild just for the grand hell of it, because I'll read something interesting about astronomy or biology and get creative with it. In those cases plots suggest themselves as the world takes shape: "If this species is marsupial, how do they respond to their joeys? What about unwanted pregnancies? Medical emergencies? How do they define families, and what can I do to throw a monkey wrench into that?"

Often in the cases of aliens the worldbuilding starts with a species with a biological trait or two that interests me, and I make the planets to give them something believable to stand on while they do their thing. Although sometimes a planet's differentness from Earth is enough to drive a story.

In some cases, though, I don't even bother with a plot. The worldbuilding itself is entertaining enough. The stories may just be bonuses.

[tomatocaco.livejournal.com]

I want to gather radioactive waste and start hurling writers at eachother.

[caprine.livejournal.com]

Beautifully said!

Permission to post this entry -- and tomatocaco's comment -- to metaquotes?

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Quote away!

[caprine.livejournal.com]

Here it is.

[coyotegoth.livejournal.com]

Great- now I'm imagining a ringowrld; on its inner face is engraved, in the Black Spoeech of Mordor, "One world to rule them all..."

[ironychan.livejournal.com]

I'm still trying to come up with a calendar for my Martians. It makes my head hurt.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I believe it! Trying to account for Mar's orbital eccentricity alone would probably kill me dead. I'd love to see it when it's done, though.

[joisbishmyoga.livejournal.com]

*sneaks in from metaquotes, reads other comments*

I kinda figured that Pandora in Avatar
- was tidally locked (gas giant + laws of gravity).
- had a gravitational vortex due to tidal lock making that impossible mountain range where the dragon things lived.
- had an orbit somewhere around the 24-hour range, and is probably going to fall into the planet within the next couple million years.
- is bioluminescent as some sort of adaptation to all the killer radioactivity that would be spewed out by a gas giant. Energy in, energy out, yeah?

Corrollary to that last one: the Sky People not in Avatars are going to die horribly within the next few months, considering how much shielding there was not on those breathing masks.


Also, the modern global Earth calendar once took into account how many planets (plus sun and moon) are visible to the naked eye, and what speed they seem to travel at across the sky, and how many hours result from sacred number combinations of water droplets dripping, and how very uncool it is to use a prime number instead of a four-season-divisible one. (Chinese weeks were decimal, and we all know their zodiac though most people don't know it applied to hours of the day too.) I'd figure an alien calendar would've at least started with similar mixes of "what do we see happening regularly, what signals the getting-of-food" and sacred numbers.