Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 8426792" data-attributes="member: 59082">Lots of good replies, thanks. I'll re-read them to tease out ideas and considerations.I think a lot of it comes down to where on the spectrum of scientific realism I want to place myself, with the major demarcations being hard sf, soft sf, and fantasy (with lots of gradations in-between). For my purposes, I'm looking at somewhere between soft sf and fantasy, so issues around gravity, planetary density, etc, don't matter--or at least don't have to be explained (still fun to think about, though).Actually, this brings up a tangential--but related--issue, which is the question around, what approach to big questions do I want to take? Hard sf tends to take the approach of trying to scientifically explain how something that we normally wouldn't understand works, given our current scientific paradigm. Much of it is written by professional scientists, and all of it by the scientifically literate. For them, the joy is answering those questions, if only speculatively and theoretically.My preferred approach is more about exploring the mystery, and using it as a context for story. We could call this the "Terra Incognita approach": there are always places on the map that are unexplored and unknown, or cannot be explained by our current tools of cognition, and perhaps imply places off the map. I mean, the horizon always recedes. This is not to say that I don't like coming up with explanations, but that I don't feel beholden to scientific canon, circa 2021.That said, whatever approach I take, a lot of the same questions can considered. How does the world work? Hard sf, soft sf, and fantasy all have different requirements, yet all do require certain things: internal consistency and some degree of verisimilitude.For instance, Jupiter has 120x the surface area of Earth. Would the world have continents and oceans that are proportionally the same, or from orbit would it look like countless smaller landmasses and islands? Meaning, would it still have about six major landmasses, three larger than the rest, that are a hundred times as large as our continents, or would it have hundreds of such continents? Or, my likely answer, a bit of both?And what about life? Would this world have flora and fauna similar in size to Earth, or would it have a wider range, with perhaps gargantuan trees like the theory that the Devil's Tower is actually a primeval petrified tree stump?Or what about the length of the day? And the range of climate? Etc etc.p.s. After posting the OP, I did remember Jack Vance Big Planet and Robert Silverberg's Majipoor books.</blockquote>

Verification