Last fall I was researching the H1N1 outbreak in Mexico City for a story I was working on at the time. You know how the trail tends to spider web as you go along. It branched out to yellow fever which had been and earlier epidemic to hit the city. From there, I checked out similar yellow fever outbreaks across the world. I ran across two very disturbing runs in the United States in which businessmen interfered with the spread of information by the press and medical professionals concerning the outbreaks within their cities. In short, they suppressed information that could have saved lives for fear that informing the population would result in a panic and an economic shut down.
One such case was the 1853 outbreak in New Orleans, Louisiana. Over a thousand people had died before the outbreak was formally acknowledged and roughly 6,850 more would perish. Twenty-five years later the lower Mississippi valley faced its most severe yellow fever outbreak.
In Memphis alone, 5,000 people died with more than 20,000 additional victims along the river headed south. Merchants in the city of Memphis have been blamed in several articles for the high death toll due to their interference with the reporting of this outbreak to the general population.
Every culture has its lore, especially in science fiction and fantasy. Deities and celebrities, myths and legends, and all the things that lurk in the dark. Some writers delve deeply into this as part of worldbuilding, and some skim the surface, impressing the reader to fill the gaps from their own reference.
It’s like that in real life, too. Some people have a holy book which they believe has all the answers, and some people build their own lore from their experiences.
What is your favorite lore in life and in fiction? What stories do you tell yourself?
Nobody likes red tape when it’s happening to them, but it’s one of those necessary evils without which we might as well kiss scientific advancement goodbye. Yes, scientists are those discovering cures and investigating phenomena, but they’d never have time for their research if not for the bureaucrats in the background taking care of the paperwork that makes science possible. But in fiction, if we see the paper-pushers at all, they’re usually either part of the scenery or casualties waiting to happen. When they’re given development at all, they’re often slapped with the same stereotype as postal workers.
For the record: Most Administrators are unarmed.
The unfortunate thing is that by ignoring the clerks and auditors, writers bypass numerous sci-fi plotbunnies (or at least sub-plotbunnies) with great potential. They may seem like expendable peons, but bureaucrats are a bit more like chaos butterflies; they push the paper that makes the world go around. And when they stop pushing, it all falls apart.
The finalists for the Science in My Fiction contest have been selected. The 10 stories have had the authors’ names removed, and have been sent to the judges.
We have not contacted the 10 authors yet, nor have we announced their names or the titles of the 10 finalists. This is primarily so that the finalists don’t go blogging about being finalists in places where the judges might notice. Authors will not be contacted until the judges have returned their votes.
I will mention that, completely unintentionally, we ended up with 5 finalists from male authors, and 5 from female authors. We ignored all information about the authors until the stories had been selected, but we were pleased to discover the even split when we finally checked. We also discovered that 3 continents are represented in the Finalists.
The results of the judges’ voting will be announced on or before July 23. The 10 finalists will be contacted shortly before the announcement.
Elena pulled up the map of the northern ocean on her holographic display. The ocean shimmered blue, shaded for depth, and the continental landmasses rose from the sea in progressively lighter shades of brown. She wanted to run her fingers over the mountain ridges, but she knew it was a trick of the brain. Her fingers would go right through the map. The western continent had mountains all along the coast, taller than the Andes back on earth. The eastern continent had complementary curves, separated by a widening ocean. The two had come together a few million years ago, forcing up the mountains, and were now heading apart in a complex ballet found on habitable planets across the universe.
Just as biomes fit in understandable places in relation to topography, mountains and oceans are found in understandable (and sometimes predictable) arrangements. Right now we only have one example to study closely, but scientists have figured out how it works. The Earth’s crust is made up of separate plates, and they slide slowly around the globe. When they crash together in slow motion, mountains are pushed up. When they pull apart, oceans widen. When the plates slide along each other, earthquakes occur.
How would anyone come up with such a scheme? Continents moving around, crashing into each other? Once we started making accurate maps of the globe, we quickly realized that the continents look a bit like a jigsaw puzzle, especially around the Atlantic. South America could nestle comfortably into Africa.
Geologists and explorers found other puzzling things: remains of reefs in cold areas, glacial deposits near the equator, similar fossils in widely separated areas. Minerals within rocks are aligned toward the magnetic poles when the rocks harden from magma, but in some areas the direction is wildly off from the current polar direction.
If you treat the globe as a giant jigsaw puzzle that changes over time, all of this information can be used to reconstruct what was where when. Fossil ages, rock ages, correspondences between far-away areas: all these can be used to reconstruct the patterns of continents at different times.
Here are all the pieces.
We know how they’ve moved in the past, and can predict how they will move in the future.
But what carries these huge heavy pieces of rock around? Convection currents within the Earth’s mantle, just like the ones in the atmosphere. The Earth is made up of layers. At the center is a molten iron core, very hot: about 7000C at the center, and 4500C at the outer surface. Above that is the mantle, a thick layer of partially molten rock, and at the top is the crust.
As you’ve probably noticed, the crust is a lot cooler than the mantle, at least in most places. The molten rock at the bottom of the mantle is heated by the very hot core. Hot rock rises, just like hot air. It reaches the top of the mantle and cools. Cool rock sinks. These large, slow convection cells carry the crustal plates along with them.
Currents can carry two plates together at a convergent boundary. This is the most spectacular boundary. One plate slides under the other, but the force involved is great enough to push up mountains. Volcanoes form along the edge and earthquakes occur. The Andes were formed this way.
The plates can be carried apart at a divergent boundary. The thin weak crust that forms in the gap is prone to volcanic activity. The gap will eventually fill with seawater. The Gulf of California and the Rift Valley in Africa are both divergent boundaries.
Two plates can also slide along each other. This doesn’t form any impressive topographic features, but can cause earthquakes. As the plates slide along each other, the rocks bend and store up energy. Eventually the plates will slip and release the energy, sometimes violently.
Smaller convection cells can create hot spots, like that responsible for the Hawaiian volcanoes.
The Pacific plate moves slowly over this hot spot, creating a chain of volcanic islands.
So there’s some really cool planetary science. But what about the fiction? Well, the above video predicted continental positions about 300 million years into the future – want to write an accurate far-future piece? (I’ll leave biome placement as an exercise for the reader.)
Or, on a smaller scale, after the recent earthquake Concepcion, Chile, moved ten feet. There’s a science fictional premise all by itself, except real. What happens to a city’s infrastructure when it moves? All the maps are wrong, your GPS says you are somewhere else. What else might occur?
Then there’s other planets. Venus doesn’t have much in the way of plate tectonics. Mars doesn’t either, but it used to. Larger planets are likely to be more active than small ones, and younger more active than older. The planet has to have a hot core and molten mantle to carry the crust. Small planets cool faster, and old ones are cooler than young ones. Oceans appear to help lubricate things. A habitable planet with open oceans is likely to have tectonic activity.
