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]

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.