Okay, so I'm still thinking I'll go with my *Beauty and the Beast* plot, but now I'm wanting to do it in an ice age world/realm/planet, and I'm wondering though, on the hows and why of it being an ice realm, ice age type planet, and was hoping for some thoughts on this. This is kind of a two part question.
I originally asked this over in sci-fi forum, because I thought *on another planet = it must be sci-fi*, but the answers I got over there told me that sci-fi had to be based on real science and real planets that could really support life etc, and since the planet I was describing couldn't possible be realistic, they told me I was not writing sci-fi, but was instead writing fantasy, and that I should be asking on the fantasy forum instead of the sci-fi forum. No one ever did give me any kind of an actual answer other than to send me here, so now I'm going to ask you guys here in fantasy instead, and see what you guys think.
I'm planning to retell 13 different fairy tales in a horror-type theme, but told on a distant ice realm planet setting instead of told on earth. Am I making sense so far?
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#1.) First off: What would you expect to find/see in an ice realm? Anything from landscape to plant life to what people wear to house people build to the type of daily weather. Basically, what do you think of when you think of an ice world? What would you expect to find if you was to visit or live there?
What types of animals, beasts, birds, fish, monsters, and/or mythical beast might you expect to find on an ice planet?
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#2.) Secondly: I'm going on the theory that the planet was originally like our earth, but somehow froze over. What would cause a planet to become completely covered in ice and snow, yet still be able to sustain life? I'm looking for either scientific facts or something that could convincingly *sound* like it was scientific fact even though it isn't. Though if being all scientific isn't possible, I'm open to listening to just plain old random guesses too.
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#3.) How believable is would it be for me to go with a back-story like this:
The way I'm plotting it out at the moment, I'm assuming that the planet was once a near duplicate of our earth more or less, but than a comet crashed into the planet's atmosphere and altered the planet somehow, causing most of the planet's surface to freeze over almost instantly, thus killing off 80 - 90% of the population. Those that survived have learned to adapt to the new ice world.
So my setting it with a primitive-lifestyle culture on a distant frozen planet, yet they have spaceships and laser weapons. I have a very clear image of these people in my head. I can see how they live and what they look like and I really, REALLY like them.
I'm liking the whole primitive folks on the ice planet, fighting off other aliens with space ships and laser weapons. (I did say Beauty and the Beast and other fairy tales in space right?) I'm plotting it all out in my head. Everything is moving along great, and I'm finally coming up with a story plan I think I can write for NaNo. So I 'm here, building up the planet and the races and cultures and plant life and animal life, and designing the ships and weapons and than it hits me:
Primitive lifestyle with spaceships and laser weaponry? WTH?
By primitive I mean not quite cave people but not quite medieval either, somewhere in between. They still wear furs and skins, but they have woven cloth too (maybe left over from before?). They hunt with spears and swords (guns and cannons not yet invented or reinvented). They have no cars, or such, and still ride on horses (and dragons, this will have dragons in it too). One or two wealthy families have a wagon-like thing, but every body else walks or rides a beast of some sort. They do not have electricity, but use some weird crystals that acts like fire to bring warmth and light but doesn't burn they hands so they can carry them around. (No way to build fires since the ice age started...uhm, not sure why yet.)
And yet, they have this huge intergalactic starship, and in it are several smaller space ships that can go from the planet's surface to the starship. And here's the oddest thing of all: they are carrying these laser weapons, kind of a 1950's ray gun like thing. (I can actually see this story going all 1950's B-movie cliche on me, if I'm not careful)
So here's the thing that brings me here to you guys: How can they be such a primitive peoples, and yet have these ships and laser weapons? Does anyone have any thoughts or ideas on how I might be able to explain this phenomena?
I'm thinking that maybe they had the tech years ago, but that some sort of massive *Armageddon* type event wiped out most of the population... and the ones that survived had no idea how to build the tech again, but somehow figured out how to use it at least minimally... (maybe leaving only children?.... thinking of the Star Trek episode Mira right now). Possibly that is also why they are living in an Ice Age as well?
And now my current era would be a few generations later.
Maybe they still have these items and keep them out of remembrance of their ancestors.
or maybe view these items as *god-like* because they have not figured out yet how to recreate them and so they only use them when *calling on the gods*?
Oh, and when I say they are a *primitive-lifestyle culture* I mean they are still living without advances sciences and stuff, so are still living like Medieval times without such things things as electricity and plumbing and such. I see them as very intelligent beings, but they just have yet to discover the ways to advance scientifically yet. I'm not saying that they are stupid or anything, just that their current science has not allowed them to advance out of a primitive-living off the land type of lifestyle yet. Basically they are content with the lifestyle they have so there is not too much goal to improve things; for the moment at least.
I'm still working on the details though, so I'm not sure exactly what I'll end up deciding.
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#4.) Anyways, sorry this post got so very, very, very long (much longer than the original one on the sci-fi forum was!) I'm kind of working out details as I type. But, yeah, anything else you could think of to say about ice worlds, ice realms, frozen planets, or ice ages would be great. Real history or off the wall fantasy, just anything about living in icy realms real or fictional, would really help.
Thanks!
~EK
----------
About Me
238,153 / 50,000
Oct 18, 2008 - 23 48
oh... and I'm seeing this going in a whole 10th Kingdom road... the 13 fairy tales being all kind of interconnected and turned into one long novel.
50,069 / 50,000
Oct 19, 2008 - 00 14
I originally asked this over in sci-fi forum, because I thought *on another planet = it must be sci-fi*, but the answers I got over there told me that sci-fi had to be based on real science and real planets that could really support life etc, and since the planet I was describing couldn't possible be realistic, they told me I was not writing sci-fi, but was instead writing fantasy, and that I should be asking on the fantasy forum instead of the sci-fi forum. No one ever did give me any kind of an actual answer other than to send me here, so now I'm going to ask you guys here in fantasy instead, and see what you guys think.
I'm planning to retell 13 different fairy tales in a horror-type theme, but told on a distant ice realm planet setting instead of told on earth. Am I making sense so far?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
#1.) First off: What would you expect to find/see in an ice realm? Anything from landscape to plant life to what people wear to house people build to the type of daily weather. Basically, what do you think of when you think of an ice world? What would you expect to find if you was to visit or live there?
What types of animals, beasts, birds, fish, monsters, and/or mythical beast might you expect to find on an ice planet?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
#2.) Secondly: I'm going on the theory that the planet was originally like our earth, but somehow froze over. What would cause a planet to become completely covered in ice and snow, yet still be able to sustain life? I'm looking for either scientific facts or something that could convincingly *sound* like it was scientific fact even though it isn't. Though if being all scientific isn't possible, I'm open to listening to just plain old random guesses too.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
#3.) How believable is would it be for me to go with a back-story like this:
The way I'm plotting it out at the moment, I'm assuming that the planet was once a near duplicate of our earth more or less, but than a comet crashed into the planet's atmosphere and altered the planet somehow, causing most of the planet's surface to freeze over almost instantly, thus killing off 80 - 90% of the population. Those that survived have learned to adapt to the new ice world.
So my setting it with a primitive-lifestyle culture on a distant frozen planet, yet they have spaceships and laser weapons. I have a very clear image of these people in my head. I can see how they live and what they look like and I really, REALLY like them.
I'm liking the whole primitive folks on the ice planet, fighting off other aliens with space ships and laser weapons. (I did say Beauty and the Beast and other fairy tales in space right?) I'm plotting it all out in my head. Everything is moving along great, and I'm finally coming up with a story plan I think I can write for NaNo. So I 'm here, building up the planet and the races and cultures and plant life and animal life, and designing the ships and weapons and than it hits me:
Primitive lifestyle with spaceships and laser weaponry? WTH?
By primitive I mean not quite cave people but not quite medieval either, somewhere in between. They still wear furs and skins, but they have woven cloth too (maybe left over from before?). They hunt with spears and swords (guns and cannons not yet invented or reinvented). They have no cars, or such, and still ride on horses (and dragons, this will have dragons in it too). One or two wealthy families have a wagon-like thing, but every body else walks or rides a beast of some sort. They do not have electricity, but use some weird crystals that acts like fire to bring warmth and light but doesn't burn they hands so they can carry them around. (No way to build fires since the ice age started...uhm, not sure why yet.)
And yet, they have this huge intergalactic starship, and in it are several smaller space ships that can go from the planet's surface to the starship. And here's the oddest thing of all: they are carrying these laser weapons, kind of a 1950's ray gun like thing. (I can actually see this story going all 1950's B-movie cliche on me, if I'm not careful)
So here's the thing that brings me here to you guys: How can they be such a primitive peoples, and yet have these ships and laser weapons? Does anyone have any thoughts or ideas on how I might be able to explain this phenomena?
I'm thinking that maybe they had the tech years ago, but that some sort of massive *Armageddon* type event wiped out most of the population... and the ones that survived had no idea how to build the tech again, but somehow figured out how to use it at least minimally... (maybe leaving only children?.... thinking of the Star Trek episode Mira right now). Possibly that is also why they are living in an Ice Age as well?
And now my current era would be a few generations later.
Maybe they still have these items and keep them out of remembrance of their ancestors.
or maybe view these items as *god-like* because they have not figured out yet how to recreate them and so they only use them when *calling on the gods*?
Oh, and when I say they are a *primitive-lifestyle culture* I mean they are still living without advances sciences and stuff, so are still living like Medieval times without such things things as electricity and plumbing and such. I see them as very intelligent beings, but they just have yet to discover the ways to advance scientifically yet. I'm not saying that they are stupid or anything, just that their current science has not allowed them to advance out of a primitive-living off the land type of lifestyle yet. Basically they are content with the lifestyle they have so there is not too much goal to improve things; for the moment at least.
I'm still working on the details though, so I'm not sure exactly what I'll end up deciding.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
#4.) Anyways, sorry this post got so very, very, very long (much longer than the original one on the sci-fi forum was!) I'm kind of working out details as I type. But, yeah, anything else you could think of to say about ice worlds, ice realms, frozen planets, or ice ages would be great. Real history or off the wall fantasy, just anything about living in icy realms real or fictional, would really help.
Thanks!
~EK
----------
About Me
#1: Plants depend on how much sunlight the planet gets. It may be more realistic if you world uses non-photosynthesizing life for the baseline; bacterial colonies that behave like slime molds and mosses, perhaps, metabolizing nutrients in the ice or on exposed rock surfaces or deep underground. Geothermal heat sources could also be valuable for making oasis-type areas. If the world used to be Earthlike, then there may be a rich layer of organic detritus frozen over that decomposers sink their filaments into; you wouldn't get plants, per se, but probably evolutions of fungi and the like, which might have internal chemical reactions to keep from freezing, or which might have natural antifreeze in them (there's a fish with something along these lines, long thought extinct but then discovered alive in the deeps). Depending on the winds, you might get tall fungus forests in relatively placid areas, or 'scrub plains' of puffball spores or the like in the windier areas. Animals are likely to be omnivorous and opportunistic rather than 'just' herbivores or carnivores, and either large, solitary, and always moving around looking for the next meal, or small, vicious, and pack-oriented, capitalizing on the solitary nature of the big ones to be able to take them down.
#2: Our world was fairly well frozen at some points of the various Ice Ages, but life really requires one thing to survive: a source of energy that it can use to sustain itself. Provide that, somehow, and you're basically set. There are entire oases of life in the deep, cold, oxygen-free deep waters, clustered around thermal vents; their biochemistry only bears a passing resemblance to our own, and they metabolize things like sulfur or iron the way we metabolize oxygen. Similarly, there are microbes living inside the surface layer of rocks in the deep Antarctic, in conditions so cold that until we found them, they weren't really believed possible. Given a chance, life will find a way to colonize any possible niche. As for events to cause the world to freeze over... A massive enough cometary strike could raise a dust pall, or a sizable body might rupture between the world and the local star, causing a gaseous cloud to occuld at least some radiation. If you don't mind fairly steady bombardment, the star system could wander into a dust cloud, which would have all kinds of nasty effects, not the least of which would be the rapid onset of an ice age as local space became saturated with gas and dust. Most life would likely be driven underground, and the surface pounded into ruin by countless micrometeors, but at least at first it might be livable for long enough to tell your tales.
#3: Check out Warhammer 40000. Most people in the Imperium don't have any idea why their machinery works, they just know that if they follow the sacred rituals as explained to them by the senior tech-priests, the machine spirits will be placated and will operate properly. Failure in machinery is due to the machine spirit's anger that must be placated, rather than being a broken machine to be repaired. Also see some of Stephen Baxter's works. It's entirely possible over a sufficient length of time for a sapient, machine-using race to evolve in such a fashion that their maintenance of the machinery is basically instinctual and their actual intellectual ability atrophies. Baxter illustrates it with both ships full of degenerate creatures that maintain the ship and raid other vessels for supplies purely on animal instinct, and colonies that turn into eusocial hive structures, with various subraces emerging to fill various roles - including, for some of the hives, members whose entire purpose in existence is to become sapient and self-aware long enough to interact with individuals from outside, and then die to prevent their self-awareness from endangering the hive itself. You don't need to know how the Ancient Magic Device works, if you know the correct rituals, or if your family line has been nothing but engineers for so long that the behaviors of maintenance and repair become encoded into your very structure growing up.
96,868 / 50,000
Oct 19, 2008 - 01 12
Keep in mind that there's a big difference between an "ice age planet" and an "ice planet". The former would absolutely be "scientifically plausible" (smacks people in the scifi forum), and I mean, hell, our _own_ planet went through that phase. It does not, however, necessarily mean that the entire planet is frozen all year round. An "ice planet" would imply that it was all ice, all the time (like Miranda, in our own solar system), and hence the only life likely to be supported would be deep under the ice if there were liquid water down there.
Look up how people on Earth have survived in arctic climates -- Alaska, northern Canada, Russia, Scandinavia, etc.
50,259 / 50,000
Oct 19, 2008 - 04 43
I was recently (in the last year) watching something that discussed, Ice Ball Earth. Evidently at least twice in the history of the earth it has frozen almost totally over.
The first Ice Ball Earth event followed the spread of single cell organisms in the waters of earth. Earth had at that time nothing to balance the growth and spread of life. The only form of life at the time consumed CO2 (creating much of the limestone that we know of today). The drop in CO2 resulted in the balance of warmth in the atmosphere dropping until an ice age that swept to the equator occured.
It was only volcanic activity that restored the CO2 to the level enough that earth returned from the first Ice Ball World event.
During the Ice Ball Earth event there would still have been some life preserved around melt pools that were near volcanic activity but the rest of the world was covered in ice for much of the year.
I am not as sure on the cause of the second Ice Ball Earth event.
For what a world would look like, go to something like google pictures of photo bucket and type in search words asociated with winter, glacier, siberia, iceland, or similar ideas.
You could also look up inuit culture to determine how they survive and adapt the information to your story.
12,600 / 50,000
Oct 19, 2008 - 05 52
When I think of tundra and/or permafrost, I think of foxes, rabbits, bears, walruses, orca, albatross, puffin, krill, salmon...I don't know why. It's just a vague pastiche of television shows. I wouldn't use horses for mounts I think...would they be able to handle the environment? I imagine it would be very slippery for their hooves, and not to mention lack of grazing or agricultural crops for them. Perhaps huskies. Your people would probably have a high protein diet. I'd imagine they'd be quite reliant on the animals for food and clothing, which might lead to a high respect of animals. Since your ice planet would be all ice, though, you'd be missing out on the coolness of aurora :(
Your idea of your race having lost their technological knowledge in an apocalyptic event has a similarity with my story. Lack of knowledge is definitely a good reason; my people unearth things such as generators and electric cars and use them when most of the people are still burning fires for light and uses horses. A culture also begins to develop in my story revolving around the excavation of books, machines, artifacts and other valuable items that can either reteach them or they can work out how to reverse engineer from.
0 / 50,000
Oct 19, 2008 - 07 28
I worked on an archaeological site in which we found an extinct species of bison, mammoth, and ice age camel. Look up "Pleistocene Megafauna" and see what you get. Strange things existed not too long ago.
238,153 / 50,000
Oct 20, 2008 - 04 05
Thanks!
wow, all kinds of details here.
I never heard of the Ice Ball Earth thing before. I'll look into that.
I was just searching for houses made out of ice and I found out that thee is this big hotel in Sweden, built out of ice... the whole building, furniture and everything! It's all carved out of ice. WOW! People actually live in it. That gave me some ideas for having my people live in similar type houses.
Look up how people on Earth have survived in arctic climates -- Alaska, northern Canada, Russia, Scandinavia, etc.
I'm thinking Ice Age Planet rather than Planet Made of Ice; because it's got places where there are still trees growing (warmer equator regions) but the ice is sort of spreading over everything and so the people are being forced into a smaller and smaller region, as the ice age spreads across the planet, freezing everything in it's quake. Under the ice, everything is still there, it's just now frozen.
I'm thinking maybe the planet has some how change orbit slightly, not enough so life dies, but enough so that the planet is now starting to freeze over. Which is why I was thinking maybe a comet had hit it, knocked a chunk out of it and altered the orbit enough to freeze over most of the planet.
I'm trying to think of what earth would be like if we were tomorrow thrown into a sudden ice age. And than a 100 years from now, when the ice had spread out and really changed the culture worldwide so that people are really going backward technically now, because they have to focus on survival against the spreading ice, and have no time to do more leisure type studies to advance themselves anymore. (Maybe days are really short now so no time to study, with a lot of focus just on staying alive??? Don't know, I'm still working on that bit.)
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How I Reached 50k
Creating Character Profiles
Create a Fantasy Realm
Some Thoughts on Writing Fantasy
238,153 / 50,000
Oct 25, 2008 - 10 02
I just got a book out called "World Building" edited by Ben Bova... OMG! I should have started there to begon with. It is soo helpful. If anyone else is building a planet go get that book!
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What Genre is My Vampire Story?
Creating Character Profiles
Create a Fantasy Realm
Some Thoughts on Writing Fantasy
24,123 / 50,000
Oct 25, 2008 - 11 38
I watched this movie a while back and keep thinking it was called the postman but it wasn't -about earth in the future when the environment has been permanantly damaged and it is uncivilised almost prmitive but they have extreme technology u cud use it for inspiration