Climate Science for Fantasy Writers. Part I: A Sphere with an Atmosphere

Posted on | By The Chaostician | No comments

Fantasy writers often want to make their worlds realistic.

Making your world realistic draws readers in more easily and more clearly defines challenges your characters will face and solutions they might use to overcome these challenges. Realism is especially important in historically inspired fantasy because “Popular culture is often how we, collectively, wrestle with these issues [history or organization of other cultures], so it is worthwhile to ask how much truth and meaning there is in it, and what that means for our discourse.“[1]Bret Devereaux.

I am not a historian, so I will leave historical advice to other people. But I can help you with climate realism. How can you make the climate of your world more realistic?

This is a multiple post series:

Prerequisites: None.

Originally Written: Spring 2022.

Confidence Level: Established science.

As a fantasy writer, you have tremendous freedom as to what your world will be like. I could not hope to describe all of the possibilities you might choose.

I have a simpler goal: Earth-like planets. These planets have a solid surface and an atmosphere. I will also focus on planets with at least one continent and at least one ocean made of water. The locations of continents, mountain ranges, and other geological features will be given beforehand. This is not Geology for Fantasy Writers.[2]Although that might be fun thing to write at some point.

As a particular example, I be using the planet Urras and the moon Anarres from The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (1974).

Fig 1: The planet Urras (left) and moon Anarres (right) from The Dispossessed.

I encourage you to pick out a different map and follow along. Here are some suggestions:

  • Inverted Earth. The oceans are continents and the continents are oceans.
Fig 2: Inverted Earth. Source. He put some thought into the climate, but not as much as we will in this series.
  • Mars or Venus with oceans.
Fig 3: Mars (left) and Venus (right), if they were about as covered with water as the Earth. Source.
  • A randomly generated map.
  • The map from your favorite story, as long as it is a sphere with an atmosphere.
  • A world you are building.

I should also mention another excellent example of the sort of thing I’m doing here: Cassini from XKCD: What If? This was a major source of inspiration for this series. XKCD takes a map, rotates it by 90°, and then figures out the new climates, and what it would mean for Lake Wobegone. Please take a look at it if you want more another example of how to lay out climate zones.

The next post will be an aside to look at Middle Earth, even though it is not a sphere with an atmosphere. After that, we will start describing Earth-like planets.

References

References
↑1 Bret Devereaux.
↑2 Although that might be fun thing to write at some point.
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Thoughts?