World Creation 9: Beasts, Practical and Not

This week, I’m going to a look at the fauna of the setting. Obviously, before one can examine wildlife, one must first examine the Wild in which wildlife Lives.

For the most part, the climate in the world is singularly unpleasant. It’s dry, dusty, harsh and barren, with a nice side order of rocky. Most of the plants that spring up are small, tenacious shrubs or plains grass, clinging to what little moisture and nourishment can be clawed from the soil. Rainfall is scarce, and there are few bodies of water, even near the mountains.

Within this dry area, most of the animals are kind of pathetic. They’re small, miserable creatures who don’t require much to survive, and find even that hard to get sometimes. Depending on whether the area is cold and bleak or hot and bleak, they may be furred or scaled. Birds prey off the vermin below, or scavenge anything unfortunate enough to get lost, injured, or just plain fail to find food.

However, while this sort of landscaping does account for large swathes of territory, it does not account for the whole. There are, of course, areas of more consistent rainfall, where proper plants and animals can survive. Not surprisingly, these are also areas in which the center of the Great Machine is located, where the vast breadbaskets and slaughterhouses of the Machine operate. In the marginally lusher outskirts of civilization, larger creatures can survive, and thus, larger predators begin to emerge. Larger…and stranger.

Let me go ahead and pause the Slightly Bogus Ecology Special here to be brutally honest with all of you. For religious, personal, and political reasons, I felt at this stage that I had no choice but to include some genuine, bona-fide, 100% all-natural friggin’ monsters already. Nasty, horned, fanged, snarling, drooling, spitting, dear-god-what-is-that-thing-why-does-it-have-so-many-mouths-monsters.

It’s like, no magic, I can live with that. No elves or gnomes, fine, sure, don’t let the round tree door hit you on the way out. But come on—a setting without bizarre, freakish monsters is like a setting without sunshine.

A lot of my decisions regarding the creation of this world have been emergent—a needlessly fancy word to describe “okay, given this setting, this and this and this and this would emerge, and then this and this would emerge from that.” I came up with a few causes and extrapolated reasonable effects. Trains exist because there’s already a reason for there to be trains. Mechas exist because there are a few plausible functions mechas would naturally be called upon to fill. In this case, however, I’m starting with the effect and coming up with a cause.

More specifically, my effect is going to be non-sapient, animalistic creatures with abilities and appearances (eyes that glow, mouths on kneecaps, tentacles on land creatures) that would probably not just pop up naturally out of evolution.

The way I see it, I can take a few different roads here. I list these approaches in order of the amount of effort it would take to create:

1.) Nobody cares. These creatures exist, but don’t even merit a one-line throwaway as to why. I just treat them like, say, an armchair made of human flesh: horrifying and unnatural, but ultimately, just a piece of furniture.

An advantage of this approach is that hopefully, if I don’t try to explain the wackiness, I won’t call attention to it and nobody will notice that I have a bunch of creatures that make no sense running around. However, not only is this not likely to occur, but the setting loses a golden opportunity to add a bit of flavor. I discard this approach immediately.

2.) Nobody knows. This is kind of a more sophisticated way of handling the above solution. The fact is, while there may be theories, nobody in-universe is actually certain why there’s a cat-creature with a hand on his head and an eyeball up either nostril skulking around. The answers to the quandaries just don’t exist in-universe or out, period.

I often think science fiction settings underuse this approach. I always thought that if I had a series set in the future, and there was some sort of improbable technology (like light speed drives, or laser pistols), and it was foreseeable that fans would want to know how they worked, I’d just have one character ask the character using it something along the lines of, “Wait. Command gave you a ship that can go faster than light, while buttering both sides of a piece of toast and manufacturing a diet soda that doesn’t taste of diet soda? How exactly is this possible?” To which the other character would exasperatedly reply, “I don’t friggin’ know, man. I’m not a scientist.” It’d be like a catchphrase.

…Ho-kay, tangent over. Upshot is, this approach, while a little more satisfying than the Nobody Cares approach, lacks the benefits of a good solid explanation.

Which brings us to option three.

3.) Come up with something. How did I know I’d end up here?

Alright, off the top of my head, I’m thinking something to do with the cataclysm hundreds of years ago threw a few species in a few areas off. This kinda dovetails with the Nobody Knows explanation, since Nobody Knows what caused the cataclysm (this being an intentional and necessary ambiguity). Anything from plagues to aliens to communist radiation (the worst kind) could have caused the strange animals. Hmm. This gives some handy breathing room as far as plausibility goes, but it’s still a bit unsatisfying to have so little to tie the strangeness to. An imperfect solution, and one I may want to revisit at a later time. At the moment, I’ve got no better ideas.

There may well be a few improbable freaks coming down the pipeline in this week’s content, so stay tuned.

(Heckler) Hey! You!

(Rutskarn) Who, me?

(Heckler)  Didn’t last week’s post state you would be dealing with human waste-dwellers?

(Rutskarn) Aha. No, in fact, I stated that I wasn’t merely…

(Hecklet) Okay, seriously. At the very least, you heavily implied it.

(Rutskarn) Well…

(Heckler) You are a bad person, and you have disappointed me. If I’d ever bookmarked you, I would be righteously deleting that bookmark right now. You, sir, should be ashamed of yourself.

(Rutskarn) Well, okay, I am. But the truth is, I realized as I sat down to write this that by dealing with waste-dwelling peoples, I was dealing with pretty much all non-Great Machine humans, and that’s a can of worms that deserves a post to itself next week.

(Heckler) Well…okay. That’s fair. Just be more careful about what you…

(Rutskarn) Plus I’ll provide a complete essay on the effects of Cantinflas on Mexican culture.

(Heckler) Now there you go again.

Next week, folks. Next week.