There are two plots. If you boil all fiction down to ultima conclusio then you either have man versus man, or man versus nature. If you want to be persnickety, you could also have man versus man versus nature, but there you are.
I’m not serious, here. I think there may actually be six plots, but I’m on my first cup of coffee and what I actually wanted to talk about is ecology. On X the other day, there was a post and counter-comment about single-ecosystem planets. The first post said something to the effect of ‘a desert planet is lazy writing’ and the second was something along the lines of having two planets if you wanted to portray a desert and an icy wasteland, because it’s science fiction and that makes it seem like your characters traveled over more distance than just being on a single planet. I usually don’t think to screenshot these things, as I chew them over in my head if they catch my attention a bit, and can’t find them again later. The answer to both is yes, but no.
It really depends how much the planet, with it’s rich ecosytem, plays a role in your story. When I wrote a desert planet, I still developed a number of places on the planet which aren’t stark dry waste, because it was important to the planet. I didn’t need or want to add oceans, rainforests, et al, as they played no part in the stories I was weaving, not the like the sentient windstorms did.
So it may be that what the first guys is saying, and the second, is that only one environment is relevant to the plot. The first guy would like the author to acknowledge that there may be other parts of a distant planet, just as there are on our own. The second is pointing out that for plotting and worldbuilding, you might not need or want to describe the whole planet if your characters are only going to be standing on a small portion of it during the story. Further, setting it on two planets makes it more science fictional, I suppose? You have to think about what moves the story, and the reader, along.
It can be easy to get bogged down in thinking about, then writing, the swamps if your character is only ever going to deal with the deserts, even if they are on the same planet. On the other hand, if you have him crashland into the swamps when he expected to land in desert and was equipped for such, that’s a whole thrilling story on it’s own. And if you have a thriving spaceport way out in a terrible desert when there is temperate grassland and forest, some explanation of why people even bothered might be a good idea, a sentence or two will deepen your world for the reader without being an onslaught of description they have to hack through to reach the path of the plot again.
It can be a lot of fun to acknowledge the ground under your protagonist’s feet. Dorothy Grant’s research in Blood, Oil, and Love really shows, and gives a verisimilitude to the motivations of the characters and their antagonists which draws the readers into the conflict very well. It can be part of your world-building and slipped in subtly here and there without a real need to describe at length, unless the world itself is a character in the story, like the hollow world tale I have been serializing over on my blog. Even then, like character description, there’s no need for a wall of text telling the reader every last attribute, far better to gradually fill in the details and build up a mental image.
Now, I’m off to do a little more work in my garden before the temperatures fall all the way into the icebox. Did you know the soil is teeming with life, and may be linked to alleviating depression when you garden?
Mad Genius Club 
24 responses to “Freezing or Frying”
I remember the place I work at used to have a little indoor garden positioned at one of the general stair wells. sort of between the design area and the production floor. It was a nice calming spot for when we were heading down to find out what had gone wrong.
On different climates, one of the things Leigh Bracket did very well in her Ginger Star trilogy was going through all the difference climates of the slowly freezing world, ranging from the temperate equator to the arid deserts of the northern wastes to the frozen and dieing world of the polar latitudes.
I love the indoor garden concept in an office.
Where it’s pertinent to the story it’s awesome to get a well-researched ecology playing out along with the plot.
On the spaceport question, why would you take up your grass and forest land when you can pave over a patch of nasty desert few people will miss, and fewer will lament? Keeps the noise away from where people live, too. I’d make access to the spaceport via tunnel, to avoid sandstorms and other desert weather.
I’m planning a one-climate planet because at just over 500 miles in diameter it’s simply too small to support more than one. The terraformers will assemble a ‘gravity focuser’ maguffin in the core to give it just about Earth-normal surface gravity so it can hold on to an atmosphere.
You nailed what I was thinking, that using wasteland for a spaceport makes more sense than using up fertile land.
Now, now, calling the desert a ‘wasteland’ will trigger all the eco-freaks.
Isn’t all equatorial land a waistland? Especially on the isthmi between continent and incontinent?
You’re lucky this isn’t AccordingToHoyt; that comment would earn you at least 2 Ballistic Carp. 😛
Provided of course the planet-bound transportation is up to it.
Remember that the 19th century saw a massive increase in horses in the British Isles. The train got goods to the station, and the horse got them the final mile, and goods that were uneconomical to ship by horse except for the final mile — got shipped.
Cape Canaveral, Vandenburg, Boca Chica – two swamps and a dry desert. Ideal sites for launching rockets from, with a bit of infrastructure work.
There is a reason that Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico had some of the biggest SAC and missile bases in the past – lots of land useless for other purposes, and not much loss on an economic basis if they took a Soviet nuke or two.
Speaking of nukes – Nevada and New Mexico, you could test the REALLY BIG bombs there without bothering any neighbors (as they thought then).
The Air Force and the FAA both do clever math to assess whether a spaceport or rocket launch is far enough away from other people to achieve acceptable risk levels. See, e.g., part 420 of title 14 of the Code of Federal Regulations.
I’m checking right into it! As soon as I can…
A planet is huge! It can have areas the author never talks about because no one zips around an entire world just by walking around.
Not without taking enormous amounts of time.
If you don’t know what’s happening on the other side of the county, how could you (or your protagonist) know what’s happening on the other side of the world?
I’m looking forward to spring and a steroid shot in my spine. Then I can bend over and do some gardening again.
I hope it works! I’m going to raised beds – 2 feet, or just 1 at least – and my sister gave me a kneeler/seat for Christmas to help reduce the bending as well.
Past experience says it will. Now it’s just a matter of jumping through the hoops to get there.
Kneelers help a lot!
So does remembering to bend BACKWARDS after bending over forwards for a while. Bending backwards (I learned this from Cheryl the physical therapist) helps coax the disks back where they belong.
Bending backwards won’t heal a damaged disk but it can help prevent the early stages of one.
I will try that bending backwards. I found myself looking up good postures for weeding awhile ago. Pulling weeds in a squat hurts my back, but I keep doing it because it’s a) efficient, and b) I apparently don’t learn.
Until Cheryl the Therapist told me about bending backwards, I had never heard of it. Not in PE classes in school at any level, not in the Navy, not in exercise classes, not anywhere.
Yet it really makes a difference. When we bend forward, something we do all the time, the disks are compressed forward and can get damaged. Bending backwards periodically, especially when you’ve spent time bending forward a lot, like when you do sit-ups, can really help ease your spine.
Only bend enough to feel it. It should be a gentle pull. The more you bend backwards, the farther back you can go and the longer you can hold the pose. But, as always, if it hurts, you need to slack off.
Bending backwards after weeding, sewing, ironing, housekeeping, or any other work that requires me to bend forward has really helped me keep loose.
Good to know. Thanks.
The desert was the original settlement, for mines. The rest of it was settled later, by people who wanted to live there, so the desert continued to be the place where most of the space travel wanted to end up. Then inertia carried it on.
Also, planetary romance is also a form of SF.
You don’t need to read books to research deserts or frigid wastelands. You have a garden in North Texas. (smile)
Nah, a desert planet isn’t necessarily lazy writing – it’s a fact that water is kinda rare out there, and of the nine planets we have (Pluto is too a planet!), oceans of water are rare on eight of ’em.
I still want to write an eyeball planet – where the orbital period is such that it always faces the sun, and therefore it’s only got a habitable zone at the edge of dawn to the edge of dusk.
Now, I grant you, we don’t have much reason to colonize one… but I believe humans will settle into just about anywhere they can survive. We’re like all forms of life, that way. And the last time I wrote an ice planet, I wrote in that the terraforming had gotten screwed up and put on pause… but they fixed that, eventually.
When I wanted people out in the middle bone-dry desert, I made an alien archaeological ruin there… and it wasn’t always bone-dry desert. Or I had them in the rain shadow of the mountains, searching for a scarce resource.
That’s not to say that people can’t throw a desert planet or iceball into their lazy writing and lazy worldbuilding… but the single-ecosystem extreme itself isn’t to blame.
Worse than the single eco-system is the single economy. IIRC, it was the annoying doctor on Battlestar Galactica who came from a “dairy planet.” Really? That’s it? Only dairy? Surely there must be other industries to work in the different environments of a whole planet. Much eye rolling.
But there’s also a distinction between “those who are familiar with the planet” and “those who’ve only heard the name and don’t visit”.
Classic example is the planet Montana in Weber’s Honorverse. People who go there a lot know that Montana produces a number of things, and is capable of producing more. Mention Montana to someone back on old Earth and if they’ve heard of it at all, they’re likely to say “oh yeah, they raise beef.”
Agreed. This guy, however, was from there and really bore down on the hideous dreary drudgery of the dairy planet in its entirety. I think he was crying, and really chewed up the scenery, as it were. (It’s been a number of years, so my memory may be wrong about the crying.)