Zainter

For this week’s science fiction theater, I welcome Zerraspace from the Speculative Evolution Forum and his world, Zainter. Zerraspace already has a story in mind for this world, but in this exercise, I figure out some possible stories I might set there. Watch how the setting informs the story.

ZERRASPACE:

My world is Zainter; it’s third of seven planets in the Beta Comae Berenices system (astronomical data regarding the planets can be found in the attached document, with that for Zainter on the sixth page), and although it orbits a considerably brighter star than our sun and holds a significantly thicker atmosphere than does our Earth, its greater distance makes it somewhat cooler, and the lower gravity (exactly 75% Earth’s) allows for higher mountains that help to give rise to an overall drier climate. Oceaniis created a climate map for it here, and I posted my own depiction of the planet within a later post on the same page.

DAN

So we have a rich world with a biosphere that can already support human colonists (and perhaps industry? Are there any organisms on Zainter that might be sold as food or drugs, jewelry, or something else? The economics of this will depend on your technology). That might give your characters something to want.

ZERRASPACE

The native biochemistry sufficiently resembles that of Earthly macrofauna for us to derive nutrition from it; this is one of the primary reasons for Zainter’s original habitation, as few Terran species had to be introduced and acclimatized to the planet prior to colonization efforts. A brief description of the chief animal phyla can be found here, with information regarding their evolution provided in the rest of the text, though only four of these have yet made it to land; the vertebrate-like Rigidia (whose members include both endo- and exoskeletal species), the somewhat arthropodal Hard Worms (defined by a keratin endoskeleton that simultaneously allows worm-like flexibility and enormous durability), the hexapodal Morningstars (possessing an inflatable hydrostatic skeleton that allows them to switch between flexibility and rigidity), and the plated Two-Flowers (who live a generally sessile existence and have yet to entirely shake off features of their aquatic heritage). All but the last of these four includes at least one pre-sapient, but because the setting is meant to explore an all-human universe these will not be explored in much detail – that being said, any of these could come to dominate and rival man in alternate continuities. The planet’s autotrophs use iron-based porphyrins in place of chlorophyll giving them red rather than green coloration

DAN

Here’s a place where the world-building might inform the plot: nitrogen is the limiting factor for plants using chlorophyll, but porphyrin might require an “iron-cycle” to keep the biosphere running. I can imagine environmental problems arising from the clash between Terran and Zainterian life, as well as problems growing Terran crops on Zainter, forcing colonists to eat native autotrophs. Some potential for conflict there.

ZERRASPACE

The chief departure from Earthly life lies in that there is no single group of advanced “plants”: autotrophs are instead assorted over three separate domains, represented by the once-animal Bone Trees (relatives of the Rigidia), the sponge-like Sheath Grass (which most closely resemble Earthly plants) and the ubiquitous Bushmats (colonies of unicellular algae and diatoms working together to create complex structures).

DAN

This difference from the familiar world is interesting and important, so it might be interesting to tie it to a theme. Perhaps you can make an analogy to how very different “plants” coexist in an ecosystem and how different groups of people work together to run a society. Tying in with agriculture, the theme could be progress versus conservationism (and conservation), as people force themselves to eat things they don’t recognize as food and come to grips with the changes they need to make to the native biosphere if they are to survive. Or perhaps one of these native plants turns out to be economically useful (perhaps bushmats are really good at terraforming Mars-like planets). Of course you can just let these plants grow in the background of a story about something else entirely, but I like books where the setting is intimately connected to the theme, plot, and characters.

Such welcoming conditions made Zainter a primary target for interstellar settlers; within only three to four centuries of settlement, it will reach a population of over 200 million, and at times it translates this relatively large population into political power over neighboring systems.

DAN

Here’s more story-fodder. If planets with Terran-compatible biospheres are rare, then this planet is enormously valuable as real-estate. One possible source of conflict is its potential to grow into a rival of its colonizer planets (the relationships of Britain versus the US and Portugal versus Brazil, however, show that big, prosperous daughter-states are usually more help than hindrance to their parent-states in the long run). A potential source of conflict, and therefore plot, might be a discussion among the Great Powers of the stellar neighborhood discussing how they plan to deal with Zainter in such a way as to produce a useful ally and partner.

Another idea (and I like this better because it ties in with the world more) is that humanity is starving. We don’t have enough arable land on our planets to grow food for ourselves and hydroponics in space or on planets like Mars is a net loss of resources. Zainter promises a vast increase in food production, but there’s a catch. The planet’s soil system won’t support chlorophyll-using plants without significant  changes. Test farms that transplanted Terran soil ecology onto Zainter work, but produce catastrophic boundary effects with Zainter lifeforms that sterilize the soil around the test farm. The choice is to push forward with Terran crops and basically plow over native life-forms (dealing with ever-more-serious environmental calamities) or find some way to make native “plants” farmable.

Real-world parallels would be global agribusiness versus local produce, the way that global crops like wheat and potatoes compete with indigenous crops, environmentalism versus humanism, and the ethics and economics of GM crops. On the one hand, Monsanto might solve world hunger. On the other, they will ruthlessly drive any competitors out of business, including old man Zuckermann and his heirloom potatoes, who’ll starve come winter.

The characters suggest themselves as a farmer of native “plants.” Because they (he/she) are working in such a new field (literally and figuratively), they need a lot of education, and so this farmer is less old man Zuckermann and more explorer/naturalist with a biochemistry lab in the tool-shed. The farmer is trying to breed more productive strains of some native species, but their work is in danger because a big terraforming company is rolling across the landscape, evicting homesteaders and replacing the native ecology with something that feeds people back on Earth. The antagonist is the front-man (or woman) for this organization. “We don’t need food in a generation maybe, we need food right now. People are starving while you’re playing Johnny Appleseed.” Add in some extremists who want political sovereignty for Zainter (what do we care if people on Earth starve to death? Zainter for Zainterians!) and perhaps a mad genetics lab making microbes that mediate between nitrogen- and iron-cycles, as well as weaponized native organisms.

These real bad-guys descend on the native farm while the agribusiness rep is there, forcing him and the main character to cooperate in order to escape as well as exposing them to a compromise solution to their mutual problem of feeding people on Earth. During their escape, they’ll have lots of opportunity to come into contact with interesting native life forms, as well as illuminate the differences between urban and rural people. It would be nice if there was some romance between these characters as well.

That’s the story I might tell about this world. Notice I didn’t talk about non-human natives, but putting some in might be a good idea (a) because global agribuisness touches on indigenous rights in many places and (b) because previously domesticated plants makes the native-plant farmer’s job easier and more defensible as an alternative to terraforming.

ZERRASPACE

Efforts to populate mankind’s first colony were hampered not so much by the native conditions, but the difficulty of growing Earthly crops, largely due to competition with the better adapted local flora; though these could be weeded without much difficulty, little could be done to save nitrogen fixing bacteria in their roots from being run out by the native microbes, and without these all cultivated plots withered. Introducing artificially fixed nitrogen (via ammonia or nitrates) would have required industry beyond what the still fledgling colony could offer, requiring a relatively low effort solution; ultimately native nitrogen fixing species were discovered and introduced in the place of earthly ones, averting the problem and allowing colonization efforts to commence in earnest.

There are perhaps some twenty inhabited worlds by the time of my planned novel (the Earth being the most notable amongst them), but most of these are only marginally habitable (in particular, a few have oxygen atmospheres due to native microbes, but no multicellular terrestrial life as of yet, and hence no soil to grow our plants); those five that are more Earth-like host much greater populations and hence attain much greater power and development.

Hence, Zainter is as much a political player out of necessity as it is out of the desire for further influence and power, as its population naturally attracts the attention and influences of those seeking to expand their reach and capabilities. This is most heavily realized in its direction of interstellar trade routes, giving it some command over the distribution of resources and thereafter the economic welfare both of developed and developing worlds; moreover, by controlling colonization efforts it is effectively shaping its new allies and vassals. That being said its control is not sufficiently complete to shake off all attempts at manipulation – the Zainterian Civil War transpired largely due to foreign efforts to destabilize the planet’s government, and although the responsible body ultimately took the greater damage, Zainter’s recovery from the infighting would be decades in its realization.

Zainter’s soil is surprisingly poor in magnesium, though the ocean has some supply of it in various salts, requiring infusions of planetary sea water to irrigate Earthly plants (it’s a critical mineral in human nutrition, without which insanity-like symptoms transpire – I’ve seen it happen – and it’s the basis of chlorophyll, a magnesium-based porphyrin). This was not a problem once some infrastructure had been set in, but proved problematic during the civil war, when continental outposts no longer has access to salt water. The resulting mineral deficiencies and difficulty in growing Earthly crops resulted in almost total reliance on native foodstuff, expanding an already diverse Zainterian cuisine.

For another world (which I will currently call Mauvia, though it is not yet named) in the greater setting, difficulty in transplanting earthly crops has resulted in their accessibility to only the richest factions, creating a schism between those with the wealth to afford them and those forced to subsist off the much more meager native flora. It does not help that pigments in the local autotrophs accumulate in the skin (much like beta-carotine), coloring any regular browsers and immediately identifying them for castigation.

Its history I worked on through the eyes of multiple characters over the course of generations in one of my earlier writings. However, this has all come to pass by the time of my current story, Voice of the Virtual Phantom.

DAN

Great minds think alike

The astro-politics would make an interesting backdrop to a personal story. I would caution you that a fertile country with a dependance on particular resources usually ends up under someone else’s thumb (see Poland, Ukraine, all those “federal republics” inside the Russian Federation, the aptly named Banana republics in Central America…) Turkey might be a notable exception: they held onto Great Power status by dint of a convenient stranglehold on the Bosporus and a genius in charge at the right time. The life of Attaturk might give you a good basis for a story, in fact.

Mauvia is close enough to Zainter that you might be able to merge them.