Neritia is one of my current thought-toys, a setting built to throw a whole lot of things I like together in what I hope may be a coherent whole, including:
Sci-fantasy. There's no magic in Neritia, at least none in the casting-spells sense. There are powers of the mind, and there's at least some manipulation of the energy flowing between dimensions, and like that. There are no gods, but there are spirits and supernatural beings, and there are cosmic intruders, of whom more below. This is a style of imaginary world I grew up reading about, in young-adult fiction of the '60s and '70s and in adult fantasy and sf of the same vintage.
Sea and sky. The world of Neritia has no land, just ocean and atmosphere. There are reefs and shoals, yes, but various things wear them down again, and the same with volcanoes and anything else that would push land permanently up above the high-tide line. I'm thinking there'll be something like Space 1889's liftwood to support some long-term habitations in the sky, but haven't worked out just what yet. Liftkelp, perhaps? This is a desire that runs back to my childhood fascination with nature shows: Jacques Cousteau's documentaries, other National Geographic documentaries, Wild Kingdom, and like that.
Anthros. There are no standard fantasy (or sci-fi) races on Neritia. All sentient beings native to Neritia (which is to say that they've been there long enough to have no history or memory of life elsewhere and to have societies built on the realities of life here and now) are anthropomorphic, combining humanoid (not necessarily homo sapiens) legacy with traits from a wide variety of animals. I'm deliberately keeping the biology of this fluffy and weird. I have no real sense of the society that produced the anthros, but mix in advanced technologies, probably of multiple alien races, and psi, and a bit of this and that, and you get an outcome that would make for a dull expository lump. The fact is that cross-breeding and hybridization of various sorts work, so there.
No apocalypse. There are no epic disasters in Neritian history. The founders came from somewhere, and it's at least a bit of a lost world, but civilization didn't crash: the founders had time to adapt. There are ruins of much older civilizations, but they rose, fell, and passed the ways civilizations do, and are not the legacy of planetary catastrophes. There's no lost Golden Age, no great achievements once held but now lost. The present day is a time of diverse flourishing experimentation and development and is as good as it's ever been for a whole lot of people of many different kinds.
Smart technology. Inevitably, there's not a lot of mining and such on Neritia. There's a lot of use of growing plants and their resources, and a fusion of biotechnology with psionic craftsmanship and other stuff to make ingenious use of what's available to let people lead lives that are clean, safe, and filled with comfort and beauty. A particular inspiration here is my first reading of the companion book for Connections, looking at the pictures of things like evolving water mill technology and pondering what could have been done with relatively simple means if only people had realized it, combined with the picture of the past in stories like Lest Darkness Fall and "Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks" that emphasized past societies as filled with people who were busy having insights and dealing well in many ways with the challenges of life as they had it.
Society. "Gender" is almost as flexible a concept as "species" on Neritia, given the various forces at work, and I want to run with that. Insofar as there's a gender-based power structure in Neritian communities, it's matriarchal, with patriarchy being as rare there as actual Amazon-type communities on Earth. But Neritia is a place where love and desire have a bunch of means at their disposal with which to trump most biological constraints, which makes "what do you actually want?" a much more significant question, precisely because there's less need to have to settle. There's still room for all kinds of power abuse—indeed, the environment and internal resources create a bunch of new ones—but they have to coexist with alternatives and responses also not available on Earth.
The threat: aberrations. I have a great fondness for the exotic menaces of D&D, the ones from the Far Realm, twisted alternate realities, ghastly futures, and primordial pasts. But then I started reading Lovecraft early, too, so what can you expect? These will be the perils confronting Neritia, thanks to a developing conjunction of influences that strengthens them and complicates resistance to them.
Yes, but why? Because I can. Because it's a thing to think about when I'm not working on Something Wicked or otherwise engaged. Because I've been really impressed by the work of others doing just what they thought would be fun, and feel like I should do some of that too. :)
Ruins: These would be below the water line, or swimming?
ReplyDeleteIn a world like this, the question really is why live on the water surface and not below. Basically, Captain Nemo's underwater utopia. Dry agriculture could be done on rafts, like the Aztecs did, or in underwater greenhouses.
Synthetic food would start with marine organisms.
Submarine settlements could be above or below the ground. If you have a functioning technology base, you could use either regenerative energy (wave action, underwater currents, geothermal energy, wind) or hydrogen fusion.
Below the water line - from a few feet below down to really, really deep.
ReplyDeleteAnd yeah, I'm figuring that not much complicated lives right at the surface. Shallows with good light and currents, now, that's a thing.
Love the thoughts! Thanks. :)