New CBB

Having cleared it in the quick questions thread, I'm going to start my own thread about a planet I'm working on, since I need your help. (I've never done this before!)

Perelandra is an Earth-like water world, with no land masses save one, which is about the size of Australia and on the equator. Solid, perpetual cloud cover is coppery/gold in color. The ocean is shallower than Earth's and vastly less saline.

Fully one hundredth of the surface area of the ocean is covered with mat-y/reed-y "islands". They exist as a partnership between tough, photophobic "plants" (actually animalia) on the underside and fragile, anti-submerging plants on top. These bendy, flexible mats are very buoyant and people make them their homes. There are even smaller "tree" species are many islands.

There are no extra-large species. Flying dinosaurs and birds, sharks and whales do exist, but a killer whale would be the biggest animal there is. A majority of species are amphibious, starting off on "land" as young and then maturing to a life in the air or under the sea. The number of unique niches is very small, with a lot of overlap and very little species specialization.

The Coriolis effect carries islands around and around, circling their half of the planet once or twice a year. The polar caps are smaller because there are no underlying masses to cool them, and larger because fresh water freezes sooner than salt water. I imagine the sizes to be about the same, therefore, as the north pole ice here on Earth.

Three large moons produce tidal action. I need a mechanism to prevent Great Red Spot storms from being too numerous or common.

The purpose of this conworld is to facilitate a language where there are almost no solid objects. No sun, no moon, no stars, no land, no rocks, no need for species names (only genus and function). I need your help flushing this out and making it more robust. Flames and arrows welcome.

Sources:
C.S. Lewis's Perelandra
Edgar Rice Burrough's Venus series
Isaac Asimov's Venus book

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What are the sentient species that are the human-equivalents for your planet (if you have them)?

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aquatiki wrote: Perelandra is an Earth-like water world, with no land masses save one, which is about the size of Australia and on the equator. Solid, perpetual cloud cover is coppery/gold in color. The ocean is shallower than Earth's and vastly less saline.

Assuming Perelandra has Earthlike geology, there will be more landmasses than on the Earth if the oceans were shallower.


Maybe I just don't understand, but how the polar caps can be smaller and larger at the same time?

aquatiki wrote: I need your help flushing this out and making it more robust.

Sounds interesting.

Some points:
- the plagiarism makes me very queasy. Thank you for acknowledging it, but wouldn't it be better to avoid it altogether by changing the name? Perelandra is, as you know, already the name of a well-known world that somebody else has created. And I'm not sure about the legal details, but if Lewis' estate is anything like as litigious as Tolkien's, I'd bet they could succesfully sue. Not that they would, if they never hear about you, but it still makes me a bit uneasy, when you could just call it something else.

- I don't see why lots of oceans means no need for names of species. People will always want to distinguish things from other things. Indeed, if there's no need to do that, it's hard to imagine intelligence evolving.

- You wouldn't have Spotlike storms - nowhere near enough energy, but I think that whatever you do you'll have a LOT of storms, including VERY big ones. The shallow seas should help with that, though, and there'll be large parts of the world without many storms at all (because there isn't the land to deflect them). One interesting idea might be to slow the spin of the planet - longer days, longer nights, less energy in the system, and only one cell per hemisphere, atmospherically.

- My hunch would be that there would be no icecaps, but I don't know. shallow seas wouldn't help here either - they could freeze to the bottom, which I seem to recall is a Bad Thing. Don't know how bad, though.

Thank you everyone for your replies! I'm so excited about having discovered CBB.

cybrxkhan wrote: What are the sentient species that are the human-equivalents for your planet (if you have them)?

There is one totally human species on the seas and one "elf-like" species on the singular continent. I say "elf-like" because they are more "pristine", immortal and generally less phrenetic. The humans are scare of them and stay away from the one land-mass, therefore.

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Not if the planet were more uniformly flat, right? With less geologic variety in the crust, you could have less water and still have shallower oceans everywhere. I'm imagining a smoother, more polished ball of clay. It could have less glaze, but without ridges, it would all be covered.


Yeah, I wrote that badly. I meant, the forces for shrinking and expanding the area of ice would balance each other out.


Do toilets really swirl the other way in Australia?

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Salmoneus wrote: Sounds interesting. Some points: - the plagiarism makes me very queasy. Thank you for acknowledging it, but wouldn't it be better to avoid it altogether by changing the name? Perelandra is, as you know, already the name of a well-known world that somebody else has created. And I'm not sure about the legal details, but if Lewis' estate is anything like as litigious as Tolkien's, I'd bet they could succesfully sue. Not that they would, if they never hear about you, but it still makes me a bit uneasy, when you could just call it something else.

I have no attachment to the name. Thanks for pointing that out. I'll get to work thinking of a better one.

Salmoneus wrote: - I don't see why lots of oceans means no need for names of species. People will always want to distinguish things from other things. Indeed, if there's no need to do that, it's hard to imagine intelligence evolving.

Yeah, I'm struggling for the conceit that would make a language of only verbs viable. I decided it can't really be subject-less. Instead, everything is a process, actively involved in doing something. No species needs to be distinguished for what it is, only for what it does.
Humans are non-native to this planet. The "elves" are indigenous. see above.

Salmoneus wrote: - You wouldn't have Spotlike storms - nowhere near enough energy, but I think that whatever you do you'll have a LOT of storms, including VERY big ones. The shallow seas should help with that, though, and there'll be large parts of the world without many storms at all (because there isn't the land to deflect them). One interesting idea might be to slow the spin of the planet - longer days, longer nights, less energy in the system, and only one cell per hemisphere, atmospherically.

Excellent! This is what I was hoping for. With the absolute cloud cover, night would be pretty close to pitch black anyway. I am trying to avoid insane hurricanes too often, though.

Salmoneus wrote: - My hunch would be that there would be no icecaps, but I don't know. shallow seas wouldn't help here either - they could freeze to the bottom, which I seem to recall is a Bad Thing. Don't know how bad, though.

Can you elaborate on this or point me in a resources' direction? I had reasoned that the South Polar region is much larger b/c of the underlying land mass, but the north still have solid regions, right? I mean, isn't it the north pole where submarines like to poke through? There just aren't any penguins!

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I think you mean "less frantic"..."phren- tends to suggest (imho) phrenology, the study of skull shapes.




hm, up until you mentioned being smoother, I was going to suggest that there's only one continent because this water world mirrors early Earth, back when the continents were first forming.

but if it is smoother, then maybe this is what Dr. Gillett refers to as a cueball world, one where the tectonic processes have long since stopped, and thus erosion has worn everything down.

or its perfectly smooth because somebody built the planet. :)




the South Polar region is large, because it is a continent surrounded on all sides by a current of cold water.

Phrenetic is an alternate spelling of frenetic, which is basically a synonym of frantic

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my apologies then.

That's alight: I genuinely am bad at spelling

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I claim coxswain on your first hunt of the Hnakra! BTW are hnakeru on Perelandra or Malacandra?
And, how does one travel from Malacandra to Perelandra?

Malacandra

My conceit it that some Outlier-Polynesian humans and some Semitic humans got there through black magic a long time ago, and now their languages are one.
I'm not sure about getting to and from the planet. I'm in it for the language now, but maybe I'll write from prose eventually. I have lots of ideas, but for now, the language.

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To what extent is this intended simply as an alternate Venus? "Venus" might be a perfectly good name for it. If you wanted to be a bit more imaginative, you could try some other real-world name for the planet that has been used in the past, such as Hesperus or Aphrodite.

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A lot of sci-fi authors were fine with calling it Venus before they found out about the whole 900F thing. After that, the name dropped off. I like the idea of other names: there are so many choices because it's both "the morning star" and "the evening star"! In Māori: Meremere and Tāwera.

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Their language is (probably*) related to my conlang Adpihi, then.

Adpihi seems to have root morphemes descended from Polynesian roots; but a morphology similar to Arabic's, or, at least, to Afro-Asiatic natlangs with "Triconsonantal Root Systms"; and yet have a syntax** in some ways reminiscent of Japanese's.

*The scholars of Adpihi aren't really sure how the language originated.

**Especially because of topic-marking, for instance. But the "word-order" seems like some Semitic languages', and the clause-chaining and switch-referencing system seems like some Oceanic languages'.

***Adpihi don't have "magic"; but they do have prayer and miracles.

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