#north-atlantic

An Armada of Icebergs Has Just Invaded The North Atlantic

GR: Swarms of icebergs are another symptom of global warming that we meet as we cross the threshold of accelerated change. RobertScribbler reports on its complex connections and dangers in many posts. Here’s a sample. “I have about a decade of experience with the Ice Patrol, and in my time here, and talking with people who have been here longer, I’ve never seen anything like this or heard of…

At Caladria we us a Terran Proximity Scale when engaging in world-building. It helps us consider the question of how different to 'Earth' we should build our world. There's a creative urge to aim for the unusual, but that comes bundled with the risk of producing a world so alien that fans and readers of our stories cannot engage with it.

In Star Trek, many of the alien species resemble humans wearing strange, bulky costumes and/or having suffered from back-street plastic surgery. They have enough difference for us to accept them as not-human but not so much that we do not engage. By comparison, Ambassador Kosh Naranek, installed on Babylon 5, has almost nothing along bi-pedal lines and he never seemed capable of engaging with his (human) audience. Like Star Trek, we tend to start with a Terran model and then bend it a bit.

Visitors to Caladria and fans will know that we have undergone a fair degree of building, ramped up of late. We have five main species and a long-term historical arc sketched during which events will occur. With a truck-load of cultural development to fill for the species (not to mention their subdivisions), the question of direction arises. Applying the TPS means starting with broad cultural paradigms that have evolved in our welt-society and addressing questions that arise therefrom. Endless analytical paradigms exist, but we've concentrated on three for illustration.

First, we have the acquisitive and improving culture best dubbed North Atlantic. We might see societies sheltering under this umbrella as outward-looking with a road-map to survival based on control. These people use technology, based on free-will, unencumbered with religious guidance, to control the environment (and climate effects), their health and other cultures. They are expansive, aware of and willing to engage with other societies.

Then there are the 'circle-the-wagon' cultures evident in China (shelter behind a big wall and a language equally challenging to foreigners) on a large scale and in, say, the Menonites (refuse to accept recent technological developments), on a smaller one. They have awareness of other cultures, but little inclination to engage.

Finally, there are the Inuits, kayak artists formerly known as Eskimos. We have to take care, of course, because our view has a North Atlantic filter, but, if they form a single culture (again more assumptions), their history suggests a different outlook to their southern neighbours. We might hypothesise that this culture may have had little awareness of others.

These are just conceptualisations scrawled on the back of a fag-packet - plenty of other ways to slice and dice Terran cultures exist - but they form the first stage in generating Caladrian cultures.

The second stage consists of using the W-word.

We could apply (he may have done so, but I can't find my copy of 'Guns, Germs and Steel') Jared Diamond's killer question and ask WHY the Inuits didn't invade and conquer Europe or North America (or both).

We could also apply the same question in a slightly different way, as does Gavin Menzies in his book about the Chinese navy discovering America before Columbus. The question this time is WHY did they stop their explorations beyond the wall and get back behind the wagons?

i want to walk into my best friend's house at 8 at night, when its cold outside. i want to shed my thick, forest green jacket on her bedroom floor and search her room for her card to starbucks. i want to smile at the two people who mean the world to me, and follow them into the bathroom to take cheesey pictures, and look 'metal' with hand signs, and our tongues sticking out. i want to leave that house, bundled up, and walk down dark roads, reassuring eachother nothing will happen and telling creepy stories of slenderman and the rake, having my teeth jitter. to sit down, with an apple-cinnamon tasting hot drink which name escapes me, and discussing all the things in our life. i want us to walk back, sit on the back porch bundled up, listening to soft manchester orchestra songs waiting for the sun to rise and to keep my eyes cracked open just enough to see, and not doze off in the metal chair coated by two pillows for comfort.