MaW’s Blog

This is not a question about the nature of the Earth, it’s a question about the world where my NaNoWriMo novel for 2007 is currently slated to take place.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the idea is that it’s a fantasy-ish world (probably with a higher level of technology than the normal mediaeval setting) where the major Gods have all recently died of some sort of divine measles (the actual cause of that is to be left for the writer to discover later, but it’s probably got something to do with power-hungry wizards and some serious genetic engineering).

I was considering what’s going to happen when the major Gods all die, and why the minor Gods are going to have to get a move on to start taking over some of the essential world-maintenance tasks which keep everything going and everybody alive. The first thing of course is the sun. Obviously in this fantasy universe, the sun orbits the world and needs a God (or perhaps a suitably powerful wizard) to push it. It also needs refuelling from time to time. Fail to push, and it eventually succumbs to gravity and crashes into the world, burning it to a cinder. Fail to refuel, and it goes out, plunging the world into freezing darkness, where people had better discover huge-scale nuclear heating before the atmosphere freezes out.

So if I’m having a world that really does have a sun that goes around it - and not thanks to Newtonian physics either - why have a world that’s spherical? A spherical (or nearly-spherical-ish) world gives you polar ice caps, tropics and so forth. Why not have a cylinder? The sun and moon(s) can still go around it, you still have different climatic zones, but you don’t have those round bits at the top. What do you have instead? Perhaps some forbidding mountains, but the protagonists know that beyond them lies adventure, and indeed it does, because they can then climb carefully inside the hollow core of their cylindrical world and find a whole extra world on the inside surface, lit by glowing birds and magic, and subject to an inverted variant of the gravity spell which stops people flying off the outside surface into space.

The nature of the inside world? Well, I’m not sure about that yet, but I might be predictable and populate it with grumpy dwarves.