Wonderful living worlds

I'm in the process of  writing a workshop for Havant and District Writers' Circle about creating story worlds.  As an SF writer, I need to create every aspect of my story worlds.  Even if a story is set on Earth, it will be in the future and some things will have changed from today.  But most of my stories are set on other planets which I'm designing from scratch.  That means a lot of of thinking about geography and climates, flora and fauna for each biome, what species live there, and how they live.

That might sound daunting, but science has some useful rules to help me.  From what we've seen of the universe so far, it looks like all planets are spherical, so I make mine spherical too. And if I want human characters to be able to live on it then it has to have an atmosphere they can breathe.  And if they want to walk on its surface, then the gravity can't be too different from Earth's.

There's no reason to think that the principles of evolution by natural selection and sexual selection don't apply on other worlds.  So that will give me predators and prey, plants that defend themselves against being eaten with poisons and chemical signals, plants that lure pollinators in with nectar, and brightly coloured birds.

Species will need to sense their environment, and most likely they'll do it with variations of the sense organs we have.  So creatures who live in the light will probably have eyes.  Organisms need to eat to gain energy, so they'll need a mouth.  Most species find hearing useful so they'll have ears. In the oceans creatures will need to be streamlined like the ones on Earth, so there'll probably be similar-looking marine creatures.  The fish will most likely have sensitive lateral lines to detect movement around them.  Some may have electric sensors, the deep sea creatures may make use of bioluminescence.  And if you're thinking this sounds boring, take a look at Avatar's creatures.  Horse, wolf, bird.  They're recognizeable types, but also very alien.  

Creating a new world takes from the wonderful diversity of habitats and wildlife on Earth and tweaks them a little.  A bigger world and a bit more gravity.  A blue sun or a red one instead of yellow.  White skies and red grass instead of blue and green.  There are so many possibilities, even staying within the rules of known science.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlivesl. Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com