Creating a world from nothing is a pile of fun, creating a world from the remains of another is double the fun. If you are an engineer or a deeply afflicted science geek, of which I am both, world building is the ultimate exercise of severe obsessive compulsion and imagination. This is how I got started building the world for “In the Land of Giants”.
One of my favorite stories as a kid was “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” He was innocent enough for a young boy, but also enough of a scamp to have a great adventure in the midst of an overanxious family and great personal danger. At the end I never once thought he regretted anything he did and would probably do it all again given the chance. I like that.
When I was a boy in Vermont my family was very structured. I had a ton of chores everyday, schoolwork that had to result in all “A’s” or else, required family reading (the whole Encyclopedia Britannica by age ten), and three sisters that I believe were intent on ending my life. More stories to come about that.
I escaped in a number of ways, books first of all, but also exploring the valley and mountains around us. I feel blessed and privileged to have been surrounded by so much beauty and nature during those years. In spring I would explore all of the melt ponds to watch the tadpoles erupting and growing so fast. The creek behind our house would run fast and icy while trout worked their way upstream, and everywhere there were more blooms and species than I could ever color or remember.
In the summer I spent hours hiking through the mountains or climbing through a myriad of abandoned barns, houses and silos. The smell of the old barn wood and ancient hay still lingers. Could I have gotten hurt, bit or lost, sure, but that was part of the fun. Fall was amazing, the forests smelled thick with new loam and the leaves blazed in a thousand shades of red and orange. Winter was fort building season and of course the prelude to Christmas. All of this resonated deep within me when I read “The Adventures of Tom Sayer”.
So my world for itlog needed to feel and look like this, be built on the ruins of this world, and have an array of the fantastic to boot.
It was actually pretty easy since the news each day was providing plenty of fuel for my imagination. Rising oceans from global warming, earthquakes from fracking, continental storms, devastating hurricanes and monsoons reshaping coastlines in a matter of hours. New technology and structures were made insignificant and obsolete in months rather than decades. Mass migrations and extinctions, and of course the ever pervasive stupidity and stubbornness of mankind in general. Through it all mother nature seemingly cooked up threats never seen or imagined, which ignited my new world.
So imagine this, scientists say sea levels will rise approximately three meters by 2100, but cannot estimate if there is a critical mass somewhere in the timeline that incorporates contributions of carbon from melting permafrost that will result in accelerated rise. The current water incursion models top out at about eighty feet in a couple of hundred years, but since this sci-fi, we’ll double that.
Goodbye all coastal cities, a huge swath of middle America following the Mississippi river turns into a shallow inland sea. Likewise, California’s San Fernando valley also becomes another inland sea. But this is just the beginning of our world building calamities. Two hundred years of fracking have weakened the geologic substructure of of middle America and the added weight of water causes a cascading collapse that lowers the surface elevation by another hundred feet. The ocean rushes in even further.
This brings all of the energy of the Gulf inland, and hurricanes are carried as far north as the Great Lakes. A battle between hot southern water and the arctic jet stream cause a hundred years of rain that swells the lakes to the breaking point, spilling them into the inland sea. The relentless rains and violent shifts of the arctic jet stream wreak havoc in the mountains from the Rockies and Tetons, through Canada, and back down to the Appalachians. All across the world similar scenarios play out and mankind is reduced to a few million trying to survive.
But, we all know how resilient we can be and new societies, traditions and cultures start to form. It is here where we find our characters, and our story. By the way, of course, some technology survives as well, but I’ll leave that for my books.
I was listening to the Gipsy Kings when I wrote this. Their song “Este Mundo” seems appropriate. Number 6 on the music player.
words & worlds 