Clockwork Dreams

I was reading this article (which is interesting, if extremely limited in scope), and one bit at the beginning really struck me. Specifically, the bit about how having just one government or society is not believable. Which my first reaction to is agreement. My first reaction, mind you.

Now on my world, I haven’t limited it to just one society/culture/government – not at the “present”, at least. But there used to be, back before the Cataclysm. It’s why they all speak variations of the same language. Now, you and I imagine this author would immediately declare that to be unrealistic and unbelievable. Which would be true.

If.

If my world was like Earth. The size of Earth, or at least with equivalent land mass to Earth. You have all that space, all those groups of people spread out over this whole huge planet with limited travel, with their own ideas and personalities and developing their own cultures.

If your world is like Earth.

Let’s be honest here. Most people, they don’t put that much thought into the planet that their fantasy world is set on. It’s rarely very important to the story, after all. But I am, because – well, because I want to. And it’s ending up developing things in fascinating ways. Ways like the moon(s). My world doesn’t have moons, or a moon, at all. It is a moon, a tidally locked satellite of a gas giant, and that fact has had a drastic impact on my development of the culture.

And this is also why my people wound up becoming one unified society – this world of mine, this moon, is about the size of Ganymede. It has two continents, only one of which is populated by my people (for… various reasons).

And this continent is about the size of Europe. Or the United States.

Now before you start off about how Europe is full of different nations and countries and cultures, I want you to first look at, again, the United States. And then I want you to look at the European Union, and the Roman Empire. And then, I want you to think again about how believable it is that a species in these conditions could wind up united under one government and language.

Tags: 'ari, articles

This entry was posted by Inventrix on Wednesday, March 16th, 2011 at 14:16 and is filed under Ramblings, World Building. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.