The Ice Planet

A week ago, I reminded you that as we hit the home stretch for Tales of the Vuduri, I won't have time to truly flesh out all the Big Ideas I had for the novel The Milk Run. Instead, I am presenting some capsule summaries of the motivation behind a subset of those ideas. Today I wanted to talk about the idea of an ice planet, one just at the far edge of the habitable zone. My thinking was that the planet cannot be so cold that there is never any liquid water. I didn't think life could start on such a world and it was important that I had some life there. And that life, such as it was, would have to adapt to maintaining whatever warmth the sun could provide.

So I started with the plants. I figured that leaves would be very inefficient. They maximize surface area to capture sunlight at the expense of exposure. So I made the trees, at least, toughened and I made their bark the photosynthetic surface. A cylinder would have the least surface area exposed and the trees simply had to grow large to collect sunlight. I also wanted to portray the trees as crazy zig-zag, like Superman's Fortress of Solitude, as if they were huddling together for warmth. Here is my original concept art and then my brother Bruce's full realization which you can click to zoom in on:





If you look carefully in the middle of the lower image, you can see the Ice Saberoo hiding beneath the snow and leaves. I made his primary sense modality infrared since warmth would be the most treasured commodity on the planet. The two things on the top of his head are not ears but extremely sensitive heat detectors which he keeps balled up when not in use. Again this is to minimize heat loss.

When the colonists from Ark IV arrived there, they settled on the equator where there was liquid water a few months out of the year and they made their homes deep in the woods for maximum protection against the elements. It wasn't comfortable but it was survivable. It is luck for them that Aason Bierak came along and discovered their whereabouts. A rescue or resupply mission would come as soon as he found his sister and returned to Deucado.