Where we sleep, and how, depend on a great many factors. Species is one! Aliens or animals will sleep differently from humans, and that's worth mentioning when you are dealing with SFF worldbuilding. Even for humans, though, there are a lot of different factors that enter into the question. Socioeconomic status is important. So is culture, and architecture, and climate. How we talk about it and how we feel about it also differ a lot.
Is the question of where we sleep an appropriate topic to speak about? Why or why not? Is it intimate? Is it shameful?
In Doctor Who, the Twelfth Doctor once encountered a room which was only made of bed, and struggled to understand it.
We acknowledged that where one has sex is a relevant question, but not a question we wanted to delve into in this hour. Paul could imagine that it would be possible for a culture to think it was inappropriate to have sex in the same place where you sleep.
In Babylon 5, the Minbari don't believe in sleeping on your back because they think it would invite death, so they sleep on angled platforms that humans find precarious.
We don't all sleep lying flat! Some people have slept in bed closets that create a closed wooden space to help keep people warm while sleeping. Good for cold climates, but they might not allow you to lie full length. Some people sleep in recliners.
Ventilation preferences vary widely for sleepers. Is it considered acceptable to have air blowing on you? Is it considered dangerous?
Cultural rules can be very complex.
Do babies co-sleep with their parents? This is an enormous, hotly debated topic that differs greatly across the world, and people are often eager to argue for their view.
What happens if you don't have "your own side of the bed"? Some people don't feel attached to the side of the bed they sleep on. For some, they do feel attached to their location relative to the bed. For others, it's less the position on the bed that's important and more their position relative to surroundings, like a window, or a bathroom. Some people want to sleep with their head facing in a cardinal direction, like north. People who use CPAP machines to help them breathe need to be near an electrical outlet!
Do you sleep with your pets? This question is another one that can rouse strong emotions in people. Would characters in a fictional society sleep with pets? Why or why not?
How hard is the bed? Is it preferable to sleep on a plush mattress or a board, or something in between? Why?
What if you had bat people? What if you walked into their home and they had a rail intended for sleeping?
Kat has a multi-species café that she writes about that asks a lot of questions about how to accommodate different species' needs. She says it's much easier to do visual storytelling, i.e. to imagine a movie or something, than to describe all its features verbally. Who is there? What do they need? What does the café provide?
How long do you expect to sleep at an uninterrupted stretch? Three hours? Eight or ten or twelve? Can the sleep come in multiple sessions? Is there a distinction between a night's sleep and a nap? A siesta?
What happens to our beds when we are not using them? Do they get put away for the day in a closet, like Japanese futons? Do they get used by someone else who is sleeping in shifts?
How much privacy do we expect while sleeping? Do we expect our sleeping activities to be segregated by age or gender, or by other factors?
Kat asked, what if you had sentries who slept because during sleep they were more sensitive to ambient sounds, and while they were awake, they were expected to be focused on a particular thing/activity?
Think about what it's like adjusting to an unfamiliar sleeping place. Why would it be like that? Would it be like that for your fictional people?
Do you need sentries at home? Why?
Do you prefer to sleep in light or darkness? What happens if your sleep cycle doesn't match with that of the planet you're on? What if you're in the Arctic during summer?
People in NASA or JPL who work with the Mars mission have to work on Mars day length, which is an interesting challenge.
We tend to believe that the day is divided into segments of a particular type, but if all parameters are open for consideration, it would be possible to change the nature of those segments a lot!
Kat compared life on the space station to life on a boat, which she's very familiar with. It has some very interesting similarities.
The International Space Station experiences about 20 sunrises and sunsets per day.
Is the species you are working with diurnal, nocturnal, or crepuscular?
How uniform is the cultural expectation of daytime? Are there people who prefer to be awake at night? Kat mentioned that she was reading that some Pacific peoples began their day at moonrise because that was the best time to fish.
Babies have weird sleep schedules and can be very unpredictable. A being with a small stomach will wake up hungry quite often!
Kate mentioned that some medieval people would go to sleep at 5pm in the winter when it got dark, then spend some time awake in the night, and then sleep again before morning.
Any population must be diverse and variable. If we didn't have people who preferred different times of day and different kinds of activity, society would not function as it does.
Morgan mentioned that people who prefer to be awake at night may be trying to avoid the overwhelm of daytime stimuli.
Can you sleep with a lot of noise? What kind of noise?
Can you sleep without weight on you? With a sheet? A blanket? Can you do without? Would you struggle if you had to sleep without weight because of heat?
The adaptations that people make to sleep in particular climates, such as loose-weave cotton blankets or bed styles or even sleeping times, can be lost when people move into a diaspora. Korea has something called a mink blanket designed specifically for very cold winter nights. Quilts are also regional, though they have become something of an international art form at this point.
Do we sleep with clothes on? What kind - socks? Hats? How different are our sleeping and waking clothes? Do you have money for different sets of sleeping and waking clothes? Are you allowed to be seen in clothes you have worn to bed? How old are children allowed to go out in public in their sleeping clothes?
Are people culturally permitted to sleep in public places? What kind? Can they sleep in restaurants if their parents are nearby? Do sleeping children require a sentry?
What kind of pillows are there? There are lots of different kinds in our world: buckwheat, foam, feather, synthetic fiber, etc. What is the shape of the pillow? Do other species want to have their heads supported when they sleep? What about other body parts?
What do you do with your tail, your hair, your beard when you are sleeping?
Do we sleep in nests? Pillow forts? Hammocks?
What do you do when there are a lot of people in a very small space? Do you have a capsule hotel or sleep in a drawer? Do you bunk? Do you have scheduled bed-sharing with others? Is your bed your private castle, or do you just have a pillow and blanket that belong to you, which you keep in a locker? How would high-density sleeping arrangements change family structures?
Do you have to re-form or reconstitute your bed every night?
Do you sleep wedged in a crack like an octopus? Do you velcro your body or your sleeping bag to a wall in microgravity?
Kate talked about a book called "All Yesterdays," which talked about what dinosaurs did when they were not hunting. How did they sleep, and where? How do ostriches sleep? Some birds have feet that reflexively grasp the branch when they sleep.
If you were on a multi-species space station, could your workplace be the kind of environment another resident might want to sleep in?
Many species are territorial about sleep. It's a vulnerable time, so we tend to go to ground, or want to sleep in a locked place.
What would happen if you felt you were in privacy for sleeping but another species was able to perceive your activity because they had enhanced or alternate senses? What is private to humans may not be to animals or aliens.
Do you want to sleep in an elevated place? How elevated? How much overhead space do you want? What is claustrophobic to you?
Is there a particular smell you need to sleep comfortably? If you were a hamster, you might appreciate the leaf litter smell or the cedar shavings of your people...
Odo from DS9 would sleep in a bucket.
Do your people have any legends, superstitions, or traditional narratives about where sleeping should happen and how? Do they "hit the hay" literally to even out the bed surface and get rid of bugs?
Thank you to everyone who came and participated in this discussion. Dive into Worldbuilding will meet next week on Tuesday, April 16th at 4pm Pacific. I hope you can join us!
This was a great discussion! The topic was suggested by Che, who was listening to an audiobook recently and got to thinking about what governments, cultures, and countries choose to memorialize. Sometimes it's people, sometimes it's events...
You do see monuments in speculative fiction, but perhaps not enough. They are incredibly useful worldbuilding tools! They serve as cultural memory, or as propaganda, or even just as landmarks. You can find anything from plaques to statues to towers.
Paul said his research suggests that as early as 12,000 years ago, people started building decorative or ceremonial structures of very large size. We know about the pyramids of Egypt, but in fact, similar constructions began as early as the neolithic. One of the striking things about this is that there must have been some kind of agreement to pool the labor required to pull together the resources required for such a construction project. Some things must have taken generations to build (like the cathedrals of Europe, which we mentioned again later in the discussion).
What motivates us to create monuments? Is it that we strive for a sense of immortality? Is it that our communities value focus points? Perhaps it's that people value the feeling of coming together for a large-scale project, or that we appreciate something that symbolizes our community.
It may be in part that people need things to do, especially if their labor is tied to their income and ability to eat. In Egypt, because of the seasonal flooding of the Nile, there were times when people couldn't farm. Why not build amazing things instead of sitting around?
We spoke about the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. This monument was built for Napoleon, and completed in 1836. Not only was it intended to honor Napoleon for his victories, it was also meant to evoke the monuments of Rome. Monuments can mimic other monuments! People have built obelisks in mimicry of other obelisks that they stole from other cultures. And then there was the pyramid of Sestus - built in Rome by a man who wanted his death to be memorialized like the deaths of the Pharaohs.
Monuments of this nature are expensive to build. Not only is there the expense of the materials required - there's also the cost of the labor involved, and the opportunity cost of having so many people diverted from labor that might otherwise contribute to a food supply or local economy.
How do people decide to make this kind of investment? It's easy to think of times when a person (or people) in power commanded the investment from people who would either benefit from the employment, or couldn't choose to say no (or both). Was this always the case?
When you see the Argonath in the Lord of the Rings, what do they make us think? We are invited to think about who built them, and when, and why. We're also invited to consider how that kind of power and expense can be expended... and then the original purpose of the effort can be completely lost. (In notes we exchanged after the hangout, Cliff mentioned the poem "Ozymandias," which also examines what happens when the underlying motivation for a monument has disappeared. If you haven't read this poem, click through the link here, because it's awesome.)
What motivates monument-building? What would motivate it in your world?
Is it useful to focus an economy on something decorative? What is the value of such a symbol? Such a project?
Morgan pointed out that in the area of video games, people's desire to create better art has driven the technological advancement of the computers on which the games are run. Monument-building can drive the creation of new technologies of other kinds as well - maybe a new style of arch, or new techniques for creating a building. Someone has to have come up with the idea of flying buttresses!
Paul talked about the development of the Egyptian pyramids. Originally, the Egyptian peoples of the era built tombs called mastabas, which were just thick flat layers of stone over the burial site. Then they started stacking mastabas of decreasing size on top of each other, resulting in step-pyramids. Then they tried to integrate the mastabas with each other. At first this didn't go perfectly, resulting in structures the Bent Pyramid. Finally they ended up with the pyramids as we see them at Giza.
When your society is building something that takes generations, there will be developments in technology over time. You can see this in the architecture of Rouen cathedral in France, where the two towers were built in two different styles because they were built four hundred years apart (when I checked this, it became clear that the later tower and just the topmost story of the older tower were built in flamboyant Gothic style, while the lower parts of the older tower are in a simpler style. Photo is here, and you can get information about the Saint Romain Tower as well as the Butter Tower.)
When people build monuments that deliberately imitate or echo past monuments, they may be trying to evoke a sense of the majesty and grandeur that people associate with the past glories of powerful societies.
As you're worldbuilding, think about what you are evoking about our own history, because resemblances between your monument and ones in our real world will influence how readers react to that monument. Think also about whether your world is evoking its own past.
I spoke about a sort of monument from my Varin world, the main building of the Pelismar University, which is the basis for the insignia of the Kartunnen caste. This building was designed to imitate the canonical "university," which in the world of Varin means the first university ever established, before Varin even existed as a nation. The Kartunnen are not aware of this resemblance because the story of the first university has been lost - they can only track it back as far as the construction of the Pelismar University itself.
Morgan mentioned that MIT has an iconic building at 77 Mass. Ave. that has become associated with the university's identity.
This brought us to the idea that certain places become symbolized by their monuments. It's incredibly unusual to see Paris used as a setting without any use of the Eiffel Tower as a visual cue to the location. In the larger context of narratives about places, it is extremely common for one or two specific monuments to become emblematic of that place. It would even be hard for people to recognize the location if those iconic images did not appear.
We wondered what the symbol of New York was. Is it the Empire State Building? (It was at one time.) It certainly was the Twin Towers before they fell. Is it the skyline itself, even though the skyline changes? Is it the bridges? How about the Statue of Liberty?
What symbolizes the cities in your world?
People build monuments to memorialize battles. They build statues of people like founders, or heroes (even though most cities don't have a single founder!).
Geneva has a clock of flowers that symbolizes the city (as well as the Jet d'Eau). Frankfurt, Kentucky also has a flower clock.
Some people take the Glorious Leader approach and fill their towns with images of the person they want standing over the people. When you put up the statue of a leader, you can end up having the issue of people pulling the statue down when the leader falls. Such an image becomes symbolic of the power associated with it and can become the target of revolution and political change (and vandalism!).
Back in Rome, the statues of Emperors were re-purposed - the faces would be re-sculpted to match the face of the current Emperor. Buildings can also be re-purposed, and they may not lose all the features of their previous purpose. This is a really great way to give a sense of history in a created world.
You can google ugly or weird monuments.
There are monuments to pets in different countries, such as the Hachiko statue in the Shibuya district of Tokyo, or the relaxed cat statue on a bench in Turkey.
Any monument can be considered ugly. The Eiffel tower was very controversial at its inception, as was the glass pyramid entrance to the Louvre, though they have become iconic since. The statue of quetzalcoatl in San Jose is not universally loved either (I love it, though!).
Then there are the instances where monuments destroy what preceded them, as in the case of the Seven Grandfathers formation, which was destroyed to create the sculptures of Mount Rushmore. Sometimes people who have done immense harm are memorialized in statues. The Glorious Leader statues can be an example of this, but so can things like the statue of J. Marion Sims, which was quite recently removed from a New York Park. He was memorialized for his contributions to gynecological science, but in fact his advances were made as a result of experimentation on enslaved women. There was a wave of monuments to the Confederacy built well after the civil war whose purpose was to remind a segment of the population that the power in the region belonged to people who wished them harm.
If you have two populations coming together to live together, how does this affect their monuments? Is it an invasion or colonization, where old monuments might be removed? Would new monuments be put up to interact with or accompany the old? How do monuments form a part of the symbolic narrative surrounding the convergence of these civilizations?
Are your monuments intended to be destroyed and rebuilt in a cyclical fashion?
Which monuments get neglected? When did people stop caring about them or knowing the stories behind them? How much forethought is given to the future care of a monument while it is being built? The eternal flame at the tomb of the unknown soldier is an example of very explicit maintenance of observance at a monument.
Don't forget that fountains can be monuments! Water features can be monuments and sometimes simultaneously be used as drinking water.
Thank you to everyone who attended the discussion. We will meet again next week on April 9th at 4pm Pacific, topic TBA.
There are a lot of different types of competitions, but we started with one that is a favorite of genre authors - the competition for succession to a seat of power. This is something that occurs in a lot of stories, including N. K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, Frank Herbert's Dune, and many others. Such a competition happens in my forthcoming novel, but I wanted to run it in such a way that it would not be a battle royale or a bloodbath!
Cliff mentioned that in the Ottoman empire, assassination was the way to go to assure succession, and that it must have been weird knowing all your siblings and half siblings would have to die for you to achieve power.
In Jenn Lyons' The Ruin of Kings, there is a battle royale that happens in a prescribed space, so the king can't choose the Heir.
Kat wanted to see a story told from the perspective of someone who is not wily or strong and is stuck just waiting for someone to off them - the story of the non-victor. In this vein, "I, Claudius" was mentioned, as was Pillars of the Earth. An interesting story might involve someone saying, "Screw you, I'm just going to live as long as I can." In the Vorkosigan novels, everyone thinks they can co-opt Miles or his brother. Kate felt that a Peter story would be amazing. Cliff mentioned The Goblin Emperor, in which an unexpected heir turns up because everyone else was killed in an airship accident.
Historically, Henry IV became king of France when the previous king had no heir, and they had to search back along the genealogy and back down again to find someone who had blood relation to the royalty. They found Henry IV in Navarre and told him he was the king of all France.
Much is implied about a society by the kinds of competitions they set up - both for power successions and for other purposes.
Kat wanted to see more exploration of cooperative games as opposed to winner-take-all games. What would a world look like if it were based on cooperation and measured by cooperation? Even D&D has an us vs them mentality.
When you are looking at a siege, it's easy to think about how the people who are trapped might get supplies, but make sure also to consider how the besiegers get their supplies.
There is a large-scale assumption in narrative that we have to have competition, particularly antagonists.
Our sense of competition is often gendered. How do competitions designed by men or boys differ from those designed by women or girls? Would there be differences with non-binary gender?
Cliff told us that Babylon 5 featured coexisting competitive and cooperative philosophies which ended up striving against each other.
Do we need to have competition in order to foster excellence? How else might it be done?
Competitions often create pressure to divide groups by different criteria, and the selection process can be a site of shaming.
In classes, we tell people to do group projects without teaching them how to do group projects.
We ask companies to compete for bids on government projects without considering how competition encourages people to cut corners, which harms results.
Not all stories require people to compete against one another. We also imagine adventure stories that pit people against their environment, etc.
Why don't we have more stories about seed growers?
Cliff said he liked hacky sack because it was a cooperative game. He noted that Stephen King's The Stand involved people who were trying to build community. The show Jeremiah talked about trying to rebuild civilization after an apocalyptic disease.
Paul mentioned that the game Dead of Winter requires players to cooperate to win. He also mentioned that Spirit Island, while it has colonial tropes, has spirits working together against colonial invasion.
Kat talked about the game Terraforming Mars, which is not cooperative, but in which people can find themselves inadvertently contributing to each other's success. Settlers of Catan, she described as "let's go invade this place with individualistic goals." Monopoly is clearly competitive, and was originally designed to teach the evils of capitalism, but was interpreted by most in a non-satirical way. It's essentially "Gentrification, the game."
In Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis series, the alien species called the Oankali does not have a competitive drive but an acquisitive one. Butler specifically examines the ins and outs of these differences. It does feature xenophobic humans, and the Oankali have a dodgy sense of consent. It's not posited as a utopia. The Oankali's critique of humans is that they are both intelligent and hierarchical. The story plays into fears of someone taking your germ line.
Dune has a grand game competition. The Snow Queen by Joan Vinge has a foot race. Game of Thrones has a lot of bloody battles. Nine Princes in Amber also centers a competition, but the pursuit of the throne changes to a larger project.
What it would be like if a potential leader were required to have a 5 year, a 50 year, and a 500 year plan?
Paul recommended Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire.
Romance often involves competition in the form of rivals for a relationship. Why not have that become a three-way relationship?
Kat said she's seeing more poly stories, but none that have made a major splash. Kate mentioned that there were such relationships in Sarah Gailey's hippo stories. Kat said Laurell K. Hamilton has some non-monogamy. There is an audience for fiction that features such relationships but perhaps less of one at the publisher level.
We all felt we would love to see "Cozy Marvel stories" where the day to day life of Marvel superheroes got explored.
At that point I brought up The Hunger Games. One of the reasons I feel this is such a brilliant series is that Suzanne Collins gets readers deeply invested in the outcome of the games, and then points out that readers have become complicit with the viewers of Panem. There is a tension between rooting for the hero and indicting our sense of competition.
The book A Player of Games by Iain Banks features a person paid to go and disrupt an empire. In this story the winner fo a game competition becomes Emperor. The book critiques the notion of competitive games. At the end, you find yourself wondering who won and who lost, what is left for the empire, and whether the intervention was good.
Competitions are not all one versus one. They can be one versus many, or many versus many. Many times, competition is not equal or simple.
Ritual combat is a way to simplify a larger competition, but it has drawbacks.
Many competitions are rigged. Either the competition itself is skewed so not everyone has an equal chance, or entry to the competition is limited.
Cliff recommended the book Interface by Stephen Bury, talking about electoral politics in the United states and how it functions differently from what we are told. He said he found it very disturbing. Stephen Bury is a pseudonym for the writing team of Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George.
We touched briefly on the question of competition in writing. Are we competing with each other? This question's answer depends a lot on the gatekeepers of canon. Marginalized people can be told that there are limits on the number of stories about their issues, while mainstream people get fifty slots for the same kinds of stories. Outside the mainstream, people thus get forced into competition. If you are visible, you end up doing emotional labor. Are you allowed to be just "a writer" or are you slotted into a niche?
Genre culture can be very competitive because of the limited number of slots for writing workshops, awards, etc. It often runs along socioeconomic lines. Money should always flow to the writer, but we are often called upon to make investments in our careers like paying for workshops, or even developmental editing etc. If you have limitations on your free time, this can also become a factor, when workshops run for long periods of time.
We didn't even have a chance to do much about science fiction and fantasy sports! Sigler has a football-based novel with aliens. Fonda Lee wrote Zeroboxer. Matt Wallace has a book with wrestling martial arts. Run Time by S.B. Divya and Achilles' Choice also came up in this context. We wondered whether people are still publishing sports stories, and whether demographic changes have influenced this at all. Kate Elliott has sport in Court of Fives. J.K. Rowling created quidditch. In DS9, aliens play baseball.
Thank you to everyone who participated in this discussion! This week, Dive into Worldbuilding will meet on Tuesday, April 2 to discuss Monuments. I hope you can join us!
This was a really great discussion. Special thank you to our guest author Vida Cruz for persisting until she actually made it into the hangout, despite technical difficulties, and to our discussants for their patience while we resolved those issues to the best of our ability.
We started by discussing Vida's story "Odd and Ugly," which she describes as a retelling of Beauty and the Beast set in Spanish colonial Philippines. In this tale, the Beast is a Kapre, a kind of hairy giant who lives in a tree and smokes cigars, while Beauty is a farm girl. The story is told in second person from the Beast's point of view. Vida told us that she had written about these two characters in different iterations, and the Beauty and the Beast portion of the story came last.
Since the Spanish were in the Philippines for over 300 years, education has been heavily influenced by them. There is a dearth of good literature about the early colonial period. When Vida attended Clarion workshop in 2014, she did more research for that story.
In the story, the kapre views the farm girl with a combination of guilt and fascination. He's been living the bachelor life in a magical tree, and it's a bit of a mess. His servants can't do work, because they are flowers. He hoards things he has found in the forest over the years.
Vida told us that Tade Thompson was one of her beta readers and helped her flesh out the connection to world history. Spoilers - the kapre is a former runaway African slave who was transformed. It appears that some of the origins of the kapre myth include the fact that the Spanish told the natives of the region that escaped slaves were monsters. This added historical element is integrated beautifully and sensitively into the story.
Another character in the story is a diwata, which is most closely translated to "fairy" but is also like a mountain goddess who roams mountains and lakes. In this story, the diwata is missing, and Beauty wants to know where the diwata has gone and why she is not helping to chase away the Spaniards. This diwata is modeled on a diwata called Maria Makiling who is the spirit of the mountains outside of Manila, the protector of both the mountains and the bay. There are many stories about her, quite a number featuring mortal lovers she had who either had to go to war or spurned her. There are stories about her from the Spanish colonial period, and also the American World War II period.
Recently there has been a resurgence of interest in Philippines mythology in the Philippines. There is a zine called "Spirits of the Archipelago" that focuses on them. Vida directs those who are interested in this topic to The Aswang Project website.
A lot of the mythological stories grew out of oral culture, so it is hard to recapture them since the people experienced colonial invasion. People have tried to write down these stories a few times.
Kate remarked how this mythology would be a rich vein to mine since the West has had so little contact with that body of knowledge.
Vida told us how the Spaniards tried to stamp out these beliefs and stories. Most people in the provinces, though, still believe in aswang and you will be able to see things like hanging garlic and brooms across windows. Tagalog people had four local gods associated with death and dying. The Spanish took their names and turned them into witches in order to demonize them. It's important for us to try to find the original versions of these stories and preserve them wherever they can be found.
Next we talked about Vida's story about the origin of the mango. She told us this one was difficult to write. She worked on it during the Clarion workshop and had intended it to be the story for week 1, but ended up having to postpone it to week 2. This story is set in the pre-colonial period. There isn't much literature on this period - more now than there was in 2014, but at the time she had to rely on Google searches. The story features a mountain tribe living on rice terraces. The main character is a servant who works as a handmaiden to the heir to the tribe. This tribe values telling stories and singing, but the princess can't sing. The servant's brother falls in love with the princess, and she helps him court her, but he dies hunting the dowry boar. His sister goes and sings for him, and impresses the diwata of the mountain so much that she grants her one wish. The sister wishes to have her brother alive again, and the diwata brings him back as a magical mango tree.
One of the stories that inspired this piece was a story about a very good boy who dies and when his parents beg the diwata to bring him back, she turns his heart into a mango tree. Another variant is about a girl who kills herself, and when her heart is buried it grows a mango tree.
The mango tree is culturally important.
Vida expressed some uncertainty about the hearts being buried, because she explained that in pre-colonial times your liver, not your heart, was considered more important. However, it may be that the heart was chosen because mango fruit physically resembles a heart.
Kate asked if there were any spirits or deities associated with weather and storms. Vida said there was a creation story where someone fights a giant bird and the fight causes storms, but the world is born from that fight.
No one person knows everything about these stories. If you talk to different people you get different pieces of them, like trying to assemble a puzzle.
Vida has not yet written a story about the purple yam called ube. We were encouraging her to do so!
In fact, food features in both of the stories we discussed. A kapre who is courting a woman gives her food, but you are not supposed to eat it - especially black rice - or you will be stuck in his realm. The kapre favors a single tree. When you go inside it, it's one room of his house. The talking flower-servants were Vida's own invention. In fact, they livened up the story quite a bit! She told us the story was much slower when it was just the kapre and Maria, so she added the fire tree as a second in command. The flowers mirror aspects of filipino social communities where people know each other, gossip and have petty fights.
Right now, Vida is working on a Tiptree grant for a project involving an alternate Philippine archipelago with mythological creatures, told in the form of news articles. A journalist is determined to expose gender issues, the rise of fascism, and other things. One of the stories, "First Play for and by Tikbalang Triggers Uproar on Opening Night," has been published, but four more are planned. In one, Maria Makiling the diwata runs a popup cafe with human heartbreak as her secret ingredient. She picks up people really suffering as victims of martial laws under Marcos. In a sense, she said, writing this was to counter the revisionism that is currently happening in Philippine politics, where there's a resurgence of fondness for Marcos. Vida says that recent talk about the "good things Marcos did" have her worried about upcoming elections.
Still in the works is a story skewering the Duterte regime, in which there's a civil war between mythological creatures and the government because Duterte kissed Maria Makiling without consent and she demanded an apology.
Another story is about a human girl, age 12, and a mermaid marooned on shore after Typhoon Haian, trying to survive in the post-typhoon city. This one features a mermaid hierarchy, climate change, and sea pollution diminishing the mermaids' power to stop typhoons.
When asked what other filipino writers she was inspired by, Vida cited Dean and Nikki Alfar, who she calls the Oberon and Titania of speculative fiction in the Philippines. She says that the genre didn't really boom until the 2000s, but that every spec fic writer there owes them a debt. She also recommends The Infinite Library and Other Stories by Victor Ocampo.
Vida told us she really wants to see an alien invasion story set in the Philippines because the people there are so used to such things. She said if they met an alien "we would invite it to our houses and serve it lunch, but make it take its shoes off first. We're kind of doing it all the time."
Vida also recommended a great image of the three diwata Marias (Makiling, Sinukuan, and Cacao) and a friend, which can be found here.
Vida, thank you again for coming on the show and sharing your work with us! This was fascinating, and I hope you can come on again sometime.
Don't forget, if you like the blog and the show, you can come support me and get extra worldbuilding goodies like links and topic prompts at my Patreon, here.
This was a topic that came up because of recent online discussion of "right to repair" laws. I had initially understood these as laws intended to counter planned obsolescence, but in large part they are to protect businesses that refurbish and resell electronics etc. from being sued (under accusation of violation of intellectual property law).
Kat noted that our culture is very pro-corporate and forces people to be consumers. Would it be possible for people not to be consumers? What kind of legal structures exist that make it easy or difficult to choose not to consume?
Morgan noted that something as simple as a faulty charging cord can turn a sophisticated piece of equipment into a "brick."
Who builds things in your society? What is repairable? Who repairs it (if anyone does)?
Che noted that repairing something often voids a warranty, so we discussed what a warranty is and what it does. Essentially it is an agreement saying that the item is rated to keep working for a period of time. Short-term warranties protect against defects. Longer-term warranties restrict the purchaser so they can only get their product repaired by the company that originally made it.
Why don't companies do more to protect consumers? Where is the benefit? Why not have an onboard surge protector in the computer itself?
Repairing things used to be normal. Now it has become (as Kat says) "hipster and twee." It's also become commercialized so that in order to do a "life hack" you need to buy a product.
Do you own a sautering iron? Kat feels as though she should have one, but says this is likely because she lived on a houseboat where she needed to weld things.
Screws used to be standardized, and most things used screws. Now companies have started using proprietary screws. They will make things that can be assembled without tools, but that can mean they can't be disassembled. Sonically welded plastic is sealed so you can't open it, or so you can't open it without breaking it.
We often assume things should be thrown away, but we aren't even very good at knowing how to throw them away properly. People often ignore recycling rules, for example.
Sometimes you will see a post on social media about decorative repair of clothes, where you patch something and add an embroidered flower or something. This is an option only for people who have the necessary skills.
Culturally, we have lost some of the "hand-me-down" tradition of passing things along to younger siblings or cousins. Clothing has become more common in landfill.
People are having fewer opportunities to learn how to use tools like hammers, etc.
You can also repair other things. If a recipe has gone wrong, you may be able to change it in some way to make it come out all right.
Having knowledge of how something is constructed (object or food!) is useful to knowing how to repair it.
Medical care, especially first aid, can be a kind of repair. Especially if you are on a boat or otherwise isolated from the immediate opportunity to seek care on the outside, you need to have some skill at handling this yourself. Kat thinks having an army medic's kit would be very helpful! We're encouraged to go to experts for healthcare.
Repair could be considered a cultural right and ritual.
There used to be people who would travel around and offer their skills as a tinker to repair pots and pans and other items in the home.
Science fiction loves its engineers and inventors, and repair of spaceships etc. occurs numerous times in Star Trek. However, when you have replicators, disposal and reconstitution atom by atom is an option and makes repair of everyday items less common.
Fantasy has a very interesting thematic concern with repairing what is wrong with the world.
Morgan pointed out how interesting it was that the thirteenth Doctor constructed her own sonic screwdriver.
What would a science-fictional Radio Shack look like?
It's worth taking inspiration from Neal Stephenson and asking how things degrade over time.
We're often too busy in our stories to think about whether things break and whether they need to be repaired.
How often do we look at how things get washed?
Many stories get written by the type of people whose tea appears mysteriously. It's worth taking some time to look for the tea-bringers.
Anne McCaffrey's Harper Hall books were great because they gave some attention to who does menial tasks, and who does labor.
In fantasy, we often have repair, and clockmakers. But if you see a cauldron, who made it? Think about where to find the woodworkers and blacksmiths.
Are some things repairable at home, and others only repairable by experts?
Are ceramics repairable? How?
Often our repairs are visible, and documentable. What would happen if you had nanotech to repair things? How would that effect carbon dating or the other means we use to reconstruct the history of an object?
Was the pot broken for a reason? Sometimes haunted objects get broken or buried in faraway places. Maybe something was broken to annihilate it, and it should not be repaired.
Think about the social context of repair. If everything gets thrown away, repair might be transgressive. If everything gets repaired, getting a new thing might be transgressive.
Poor people might need to repair things more. If you have more money and more leisure, you might dispose of things. Tossing things out is a sign of privilege. Poverty encourages repair, but it means people might not have tools or skills to accomplish the repair.
Kat noted that people who live on farms or boats can still use tools that seem outdated in cities (like a tool to turn wire into a hose clamp!).
In science fiction you don't often see people tying things together. Snaps are much more common. Buttons are a very old technology.
Think about whether an heirloom artifact might be repaired. I used an artifact like this in my 2008 story "Let the Word Take Me."
Science fiction sometimes forgets that people do collect and keep things.
Some cultures are geared to preserve objects and others to destroy them.
Thank you to everyone who participated in this discussion! Dive into Worldbuilding will meet tomorrow at 4pm Pacific to discuss Competitions. I hope you can join us!
This topic was so much fun that we gave it two hours! We came into it from the question of how worldbuilding drives footwear. Obviously, climate and geography are involved. We certainly have to get beyond the default fantasy assumption of boots. What other kinds of rugged footgear are there? We also talked about footwear behaviors.
Kat asked: do people take off their shoes as they enter a home? If so, those shoes must come off easily, and can't be exclusively-lace-up boots. Does a house have a place where you can sit to buckle or lace shoes? She remarked that she used to think of shoe removal as an East vs. West phenomenon until she learned about Western no-shoes-in-the-house culture in Finland.
Sometimes you need different footgear for school.
Roman lace-up sandals stay on. Geta come on and off.
Some boots lace and zip both, to let them be more flexible. Morgan said she remembers going out without her boots zipped to save time.
In heavy snow regions you can find snow boots, and stairs made of grillwork with holes to let the snow fall through. There can be snow scrapers beside the door. You can also add special traction apparatus to your boots to increase your safety on ice and snow.
Boat docks can have grooves to make sure people don't slip on them.
Your shoes can influence your gait. Some shoes encourage tiptoeing or small steps. Others encourage sauntering. Shoes can reflect social status.
Cliff mentioned that hobbits wear no shoes at all. It's particularly noticeable when you arrive in a place like Bree, where humans are wearing boots and hobbits seem in danger of being stepped on a lot. They would end up standing on tables with their muddy feet, though!
In WWI, boots were both protective and dangerous. Trench foot and gangrene caused people to lose toes or their entire feet. When the trenches flooded, people's feet would swell and they might not be able to take their shoes off.
What are snowshoes made of? What materials would be available for your people to make shoes with?
High heels used to be male footwear, but now they are predominantly female footwear. Certain styles of footwear are coded (like dominatrix boots). Shoes can indicate subcultures. Watch out if you think lucite platform shoes are cool looking, because they have been marked as street-walker gear.
Nurses wear particular types of footwear. Certain brands cater specially to them.
Kat talked about the problem of shoes not fitting our feet. Different populations might tend to have different foot size and shape, as the Dutch who are statistically tall with large feet.
When rental shoes are critical to participation in something like ice skating, roller skating, bowling, etc. shoes and their fit can become an access issue.
Paul remarked that we haven't always had Left and Right shoes; they used to be symmetrical.
In science fiction, creatures can have clawed feet that are hard to shoe (this happened in Star Trek, for example).
Cliff talked about the ritual of footwear that used to take place on planes: people would take off shoes and put on foot covers.
These days, shoe sizes are somewhat standardized. They are cheaper, but don't fit all. Custom shoes will fit, but you need a cobbler and the means to pay them.
Sometimes shoes are designed to create an impression that feet are larger or smaller, since culture creates pressure for smaller feet among women. This is only a piece of the larger pressures surrounding women and the expectation of delicacy.
Foot binding was an indicator of social class in a particular historical time period in China, but to ask modern Chinese or others about it now is a racial microagression.
We should not exoticize the pressure to constrict feet for delicacy: bunions on feet only happen when you wear confining shoes many hours a day, but here in the US they are accepted as relatively normal.
Cliff told us about a conflict of cultural expectations between himself and his wife. Debby was a ballet dancer, and had pointe shoes hanging on the wall as decoration, but Cliff had spent so much time internalizing the expectations of his sitar-playing circles, which say that shoes should not be near musical instruments, that he found it uncomfortable to have shoes hanging on the wall.
Kat said if you are worldbuilding about shoes, consider whether a home has a designated place to put on shoes. There generally isn't such a place in white American culture. In any culture which requires shoe usage to differ drastically between outside and inside, you will typically find a designated shoe-donning area. In Japan, schoolchildren line up at the start and end of school to use shoe cubbies like lockers. Cliff mentioned that he encountered a similar setup at the college where he studied sitar. Western architecture tends to lend itself just to piles of shoes, although as Morgan mentioned, some homes have mudrooms, especially in the Northeast. Even those rooms, though, don't always offer a place to sit.
People who will have to put shoes on and take them off all the time are more likely to have a long-handled shoehorn that allows them to put on shoes while standing. Shoehorns themselves are not as common as they used to be.
Cliff mentioned that shoeshine businesses used to be found on street corners and largely service men's shoes. If you are looking at shoe-shining, ask who is doing the shining. Is it lower-status people? Marginalized ethnic backgrounds? Children? In the past, children used to do the job of shoe-shining, at least in many parts of the US, but they were discouraged by child labor laws. In some cultures a job like this would be gendered, and in others it would not be. If a shoeshine business is in a male-centric culture, women can be discouraged from going there even though their shoes also need care.
How does your footwear link your climate and the way you walk? A particular type of shoe will be adapted to protect the foot from a particular range of temperature and moisture. That type of shoe may also constrain how a person can set down their foot while wearing it.
The European hard leather-soled shoe is not made for many environments. In particular environments it can be lethally slippery! It's good for sidewalks that are just a little rough, but not practical for mud, ice, or wet areas. It is often presented as an emblem of civilization, ideal for durability and traction, but the contexts in which this is actually true are limited.
What kinds of footwear do workmen wear? In Australia you can have elastic-sided boots, in England you'll have rubber boots ("wellies"), and in Japan, truck drivers will also wear rubber boots, but a cook will wear a particular type of white rubber boots. American workers often wear steel-toed boots.
Floridians will tend to underprotect their feet and wear flip-flops all the time (we heard a story about a welder wearing flip-flops!).
In Japan there is also a kind of boot worn by workers who must climb scaffolding. It's a canvas boot with a rubber sole and a separated big toe.
Shoes with a separated big toe can leave calluses between the toes. You could have a plot point where people were looking for a callus between the toes to see if a person was an insider (who wore insider's split toe shoes) or an outsider.
How often do you wear shoes? If you wear them a lot, your feet may be tender and soft.
Some shoe companies argue that letting toddlers use hard-soled shoes will incline them to flat feet. We weren't sure how true this was, but cultures do have many different beliefs about what kind of shoes one should wear for one's appearance and one's health.
There is no one kind of foot for optimal health. It all depends on what you will be doing with your feet. In some environments, flat feet are not necessarily a problem.
Cliff mentioned the shoes that are coded for children with lights and wheels. Some of us wanted them for adults, too.
Are you allowed to take a dead man's boots? Are they spoils of war? Are they haunted boots?
What kind of footgear should you wear on cobblestones?
Are there special types of ritual footwear? Yom Kippur forbids leather sandals because they are considered a signifier of high class, and you are not supposed to do things that indicate class status.
There can be a lot of social pressure to wear particular shoes.
Motorcycle boots are supposed to protect you from the heat of the motorcycle. There are firefighting boots. There can be magnetic boots. What is on your feet under your space suit? It may have more to do with culture than practicality.
Morgan noted that the TV show Bones makes a point of talking about the inappropriate footwear of the character Booth, asking why he's wearing fancy shoes in a muddy, wet crime scene. It's a reversal of the trope of criticizing women for the same reasons.
A lot of shoes are coded for gender. Shoe shopping is stereotyped as female.
Going barefoot is relatively normalized in Australia, while in the US there are signs reading "No shoes, no shirt, no service."
Regionally there are different words for the same footwear, like "sneakers," "tennis shoes," and "trainers." Then there are lots of shoes referred to by their brand names, like Doc Martens, Keds, Converse, etc.
At this point, our time was up and we felt like we hadn't finished our discussion! So we decided to resume two weeks later. For the purposes of not making my readers look around for the post, I'm combining the two sessions here.
Part 2
In this session we began by talking about orthotics, where you either have special shoes, or you put special inserts into your shoes in order to improve foot health or compensate for foot problems of various types (everything from low arches to legs of different lengths).
There are also special therapeutic boots that you can wear to protect an injured foot. These are bad in many ways, but better than a cast!
You can also get prosthetic feet and legs. These take various forms, including running blades, lifelike prosthetics, and art prosthetics, which can be very pretty!
Some footwear is designed to change your foot for a particular type of use. Ballerina pointe shoes have a structure designed to allow walking on the toes.
Much footwear is designed around a certain set of expectations about which of your toes will be longer. This varies, however. The Vibram 5 toe shoes assume you have a flat toe profile, and thus are only appropriate for people with a certain foot shape. Some people love those shoes, and some find stimulation between the toes to be uncomfortable.
Morgan noted that our footwear is seasonal, with sneakers or barefoot in summer and boots in winter. Kat told us she has a pair of Baffin island boots with a cuff which were designed for frozen mud, and are too warm for a great many weather conditions. It's valuable if you live in a snowy climate to have a variety of snow boots for guests who might not be prepared.
Kat pointed out that in Japanese, the word "ashi" incorporates all parts of the lower extremity from the hip down, though people can obviously refer to just the foot.
Cliff mentioned a fictional situation in Samuel R. Delany's Nova where spacers wore only one shoe so they could have a third hand.
Sometimes, animals can wear shoes, as when their owners are trying to protect their feet from heat or cold.
Sometimes, humans can wear animal-foot-shaped shoes, as when we wear flippers to improve our swimming abilities.
What if you need your shoe to grip? In the last session, we mentioned magnetic shoes. This time we talked about grippy shoes, including gecko shoes and gloves.
We talked about roller skates. These have taken many different forms. They started with metal wheels and clamps that would go over normal footwear, with a key to tighten them. Then they got vinyl wheels. Then they had a divergence between the rollerblades, which are fastened like ski boots, and the quad skates, which continued to have skateboard wheels. Quad skates are the only ones that work for certain forms of roller dancing. Now we are back to having clamp-on skates again, but with a different kind of technology.
Rocket boots are also a type of footwear.
Shoes can be designed to attach to leg braces or other kinds of medical support for the legs.
Roller derby has its own subculture of footwear. One of our discussants described it as a "badass feminist subculture with aliases." They use quad skates. The sport grew out of 1920's roller skate races, which in the 1930's moved onto racetracks.
Ice skates began as tie-on blades for shoes, and now they have become both complex and diversified. Hockey skates differ from figure skates in that hockey skates don't have teeth at the front of the blade, which are used in the jumps in figure skating. Long track speed skating uses clap skates, where the blade is only attached to the top of the skate at the very front, allowing a skater to raise speed by keeping the blade on the ice as long as possible. Henry Lien has used ice skates in fiction, in his Peasprout Chen world. He created a martial art that combines kung fu and figure skating. People in this world don't skate on ice, but on a material called "pearl." We all agreed this was epic footgear worldbuilding!
Folklore is surprisingly full of unusual footwear, including seven league books, winged sandals, the single-toothed geta of the tengu, red shoes that dance you to death, red hot iron shoes used as punishment, ruby slippers, shoes enchanted to be perfectly quiet, and fairy shoemakers.
People may distinguish themselves by not wearing shoes, as in the case of mendicant monks and mystics. Foot-washing may be a tradition when footwear lets in dirt.
Some people design special footwear to create a deliberately unusual footprint, like a cryptic footprint. These are less than plausible because they typically show no flexibility of the foot bed.
Wooden shoes have existed in many locations. In the Netherlands, they are called klompen. In France they are called sabots. People throwing wooden shoes to stop the working of machines gave rise to the term "sabotage."
Don't forget to ask if there are any special turns of phrase related to footwear! How do we talk about our shoes?
Gestures with shoes can be culturally important, as when someone threw shoes at George W. Bush, or when Kruschev banged his shoe on the table. What would be the significance of something like this in your world?
How we put on or take off our shoes can be important as an element of character-building. Do you toe your shoes off? Shuck them off? What, exactly?
Sneaker culture is a modern footwear-centered phenomenon. It's intense, creates a drive for increased fashion and consumption, and has its own community. What kind of social groups might be designed around particular footwear, or marked by footwear?
In Greece at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the guards wear special shoes with pompoms and do formalized marching.
Many dancing styles come with their own style of footwear, like ballroom dance shoes, jazz shoes, tap shoes, clogs, etc.
Kat mentioned "taxi shoes," which are shoes totally impractical for walking which people will wear if they intend to take a taxi from place to place in New York. She mentioned in particular "scrappy thin-soled high heel spike" shoes.
A shoe can give you foot habits.
Sandals, which we often talk about as though they are a single style of shoe, vary incredibly widely. They are "any shoe that shows your foot." Some people try to hide parts of their feet, such as "toe cleavage."
The wearing of Birkenstocks is a subculture. Teva had its own subculture for a while, when it was the only brand of wet/dry shoes.
What would happen to your shoes on a heavy-gravity planet? Would there be no high heels? What about platforms?
You can choose shoes that change your body's appearance, making you taller, or tightening your backside. These shoes can fit you to chairs and other things intended for taller people.
You can have fireproof shoes, or chemical-resistant soles.
There can be rules for color and style according to the season.
Are you expected to match your shoes to your other clothes? Is this gendered?
How are shoes gendered in your society? Are they?
Some people remove the heels from high heels and modify them into "hoof shoes" to create the illusion of having horse-, cow-, or goat-like feet.
Thank you to everyone who attended these two sessions and contributed your wealth of footgear-related ideas!
Don't forget, if you like the blog and the show, you can come support me and get extra worldbuilding goodies like links and topic prompts at my Patreon, here.
It was an absolute pleasure to have Dr. Heidi Stauffer on the show to talk about her area of expertise, Geology. Our thought was initially that geology was underused in genre, but she had the insight that it can be overwhelming for people, and they don't often want to take that dive.
If you're really wanting to go deep into geologically grounding a story, Heidi recommends you start at the solar system level, at least for hard science fiction. It's fine also to start at the planet level. Many people make the mistake of having an entire planet have the same climate. Remember, even frozen planets differ at the poles and the equator. If you are working with fantasy, it's fine to start at the continent level. If your people have a concept of the whole world, it's a good idea to think about the planet. If your people think at the level of the country or kingdom, then the continent level is fine.
You have more control the closer in you go.
There is no problem with using known Earth climates. They would be statistically likely given the size of our universe, and the possibility of other universes!
Heidi was asked whether it works to say that on Titan, water ice is like bedrock. She explained that many people struggle with the concept that hydrocarbon liquid can behave like water. Titan is missing free oxygen. Earth's free oxygen came from life. If you want free oxygen on another planet, you must find a way to put it there. In fact, it's not great for living things, because it's highly corrosive. It caused one of Earth's mass extinctions.
You can look at atomic structure similarity if you try to hypothesized silicon-based life. It will however be "life unlike we've ever known."
Chemistry is important to apply to worlds. So are biology, ecology, math, etc.
Heidi's Ph.D. is in climate modeling, but she did traditional geology for her Bachelor's and Master's degrees.
Consider the scale you are working on, temporally and physically.
Heidi told us she TA'd the natural history of dinosaurs, which allowed her to teach people about body size vs. metabolism vs. gravity. These are a set of calculations that work one way for our planet, but would have to be recalculated on another planet. Big insects can only exist on high oxygen planets. A lot of paleo-botany hasn't been done, and we don't necessarily know what plants dinosaurs ate, which leaves us making educated guesses based on their physiological needs and the general features of the climate.
Small changes in a planetary/geologic system can have a domino effect.
You don't have to choose between science and story. Both are important. If you want to tweak the story science, you must do so plausibly. A hot planet can still have frozen water depending on its orbit.
The snowball Earth phenomenon had partly to do with planetary configuration and the life cycle of the star. Our sun was 25% dimmer at that point. In fiction, you could knock a planet a bit out of orbit, and when everything aligns, you get a heavy glacial episode.
Think about how to link the geology to the lives of your characters. What are the seasons like? This grows out of orbit speed and planetary angle. For example, what are things like on Mars? What would happen if it were 50% bigger? What if there were one less planet? Maybe there might be a planet where the asteroids are.
Start with known, established things, and work from there.
What if Venus orbited Earth? Venus right now is too hot and too corrosive, and our instruments dissolve before they can measure much. What if it were cooler? It did have plate tectonics once.
Kate remarked that Tatooine would have weird tides if it had two suns.
Heidi suggested that we look at the moons of Saturn and Jupiter for complex tidal effects.
If you put a civilization on a rocky moon around a gas giant, how would you see daylight? When might it be blocked by the planet?
Heidi suggests the NASA websites, the NOAA website, and the US Geological Survey for research purposes. RealClimate.org is a good source where people deal with controversies and new research about climate. The Intergovernmental panel on Climate has summaries written for non-scientists.
PBS Learning Media website is a place where you can search by subject and grade level.
Think about maps and plate tectonics. Earth has layers that differ in density and rock type. The asthenosphere has a texture like silly putty: it's solid in the short term, but liquid in the long term. The rock plates rest on this. They are not like continents in an ocean, but like broken ice on a pond, all of them moving at once. They can move relative to each other in three ways:
1. Pulling away from each other.
2. Crashing into each other. When two plates collide, the one that is denser (the oceanic plate) is forced under.
3. Sliding past each other. This is called a transform fault.
Mountains are generally formed by number 2. This is how the Himalayas were formed. Number 1 forms ocean ridges, a mountain range on the abyssal plain.
These movements can change over time. The "young" coast ranges in the US were formed when the pate boundary was subduction rather than transform. Mid-continent mountain ranges can exist but usually are old and blunt.
A downgoing oceanic plate gets melted as it goes further down. The melted rock can rise up as volcanoes.
The Himalayas were formed when the Indian subcontinent broke off of Gondwana and slammed into the Asian continent. They are still rising. There are marine fossils on top of them! A spreading ridge by Antarctica causes this. New mountain ranges are high and sharp. Weathering will slowly wear it down like the Appalachians. The Hawaii emperor seamount chain is considered to be caused by a hotspot. We assume the hotspot to be stationary with the plate moving over it (otherwise the math is a nightmare). In Yellowstone, magma keeps pushing up.
In a possible twist, there may be the equivalent of mountain chains pointing toward the core of the earth.
Volcanic eruptions lead to increased sulfur and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Lake Nyos in Cameroon is a crater lake with a volcano underneath. Carbon dioxide built up under the surface of the lake, and then the lake water overturned and the carbon dioxide flowed out into the surrounding area, wiping out every living thing including people in local villages.
The Long Valley Caldera by Mammoth mountain east of the Sierra Nevada has been monitored for decades. The idea for the terrorism alert level colors come from the volcano alert levels. They monitor carbon dioxide, ground motion, and earthquakes. A caldera forms when magma empties out of an area and the ground collapses.
Heidi recommends the movie/docudrama Supervolcano from BBC/Discovery channel. It can be found on Netflix and YouTube. (Not the one made by others).
Methane clathrates are substances where methane is enclosed in a crystalline structure with water. They contributed to the Permian extinction. An eruption of basalt that lasted for a million years filled a basin of sulfur deposits, releasing toxic gas and warming Earth, which was further contributed to by methane clathrates.
Geology is very relevant to daily life. It affects how your house is built, and where, and what you need to withstand shaking. Heidi has worked with natural hazard disclosure which includes things like how close you are to a fault, how likely the ground is to undergo liquefaction, whether you are in a flood zone, or in a dam break flood zone.
Thank you so much, Dr. Heidi Stauffer, for joining us! We had such a great time and continue to be curious about the effects of geology in daily life, so I hope we can have you back on the show very soon.
Today at 4pm Pacific Daylight Time, we will be joined on the show by guest author Vida Cruz! I hope you can be there.
Don't forget, if you like the blog and the show, you can come support me and get extra worldbuilding goodies like links and topic prompts at my Patreon, here.
