Maybe they’re like cicadas, they only come out briefly to breed, and the rest of the time exist underground in a larval form?
Just the fact that inhabitants of Westeros speak of 5 year winter suggests that the seasons don’t work like seasons on Earth do. On the other hand one of the methods the Maesters use to detect seasonal changes is a change in day lengths. And the seasons change at random, and not on any predictable cycle.
Late to the party, but just pointing out that the Wood-elves of Mirkwood hunt a lot, so I suppose the Silvan folk of Lothlorien are similar. Also, the narratives suggest that Elvish fruits and other foods are magically delicious to mortal senses, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve got an edge at growing things too.
Heck, a little bitty box of Lorien garden earth blessed by Galadriel makes the whole Shire blossom like morning-glories on an outhouse. I bet she doesn’t have to worry any about bacterial wilt on her cucumbers, the bitch. [\envious resentment]
We never actually see any Dwarf communities up close, but it’s made pretty clear that they trade their artisanal skills for foodstuffs.
o/ Lembas travel cakes, They're magically delicious! o/
“Eat them on their leafy plates,
No need to wash the dishes!” 
I mean seriously. At the one end of the spectrum we obviously have to rule out totally surrealistic things like Beanworld; at what point does the question of whether it “makes sense” begin to apply?
The latest I saw was Divergent, a dystopia where Chicago breaks into five social groups: Dauntless, Abegnation, Erudite, Amity and Candor. Somehow, just the one city has become like this, with the US government apparently okay that the 3rd largest city in the country has become a walled-off communal social experiment that violates human rights as a matter of course.
It pains me to say it, because as much as I hold dear The Dark Tower series, if you really try to take in the patchwork world he assembled from pieces of other worlds King had devised, it’s a mishmash of non-sense. I get what he was trying to do though, create an over-world as the mother universe of which all his other great novels somehow weaved into and out from, and tonally everything fit together (perhaps with exception of a few parts in the last three books) that was a hell of a read with incredible characters. But the world itself never seemed to gel into anything but a contrived hodgepodge to drag the plot across.
LOST too. I loved the series, but shit, none of the mythology or the island made sense. At all.
The merchants in Fable will walk right up to within three feet of next to a hero who is fighting a werewolf, and stand there making comments on the fight. They will watch you slaughter three other merchants, one after another, and stand still while they tell you that they disapprove as you stalk towards them, blood soaked sword raised and murder in your eye. These people are not all that bright.
Once they understand “running away from the killy things” I will expect some progress on the whole travel business.
At least for the silvan Elves, I figured they were like woodland creatures: they foraged. Picture it: a Hobbit comes around a bend in a path, and behold! He sees a lovely elf maiden, a vision of otherworldly beauty to stun the heart. The Hobbit watches, enchanted, as the elf maiden… chews elaborately on a mouthful of grubs. :smack:
Dune has some climate variation. There are ice-caps on the poles, and things get more “deserty” and drier as you move towards the equator. There’s moisture enough for condensation, which is presumably what the flora and fauna live off.
There’s also apparently underground water sources the worms live off, or something. I kinda zoned out in the later books where the worm life-cycle was explained.
That doesn’t really count, it’s an artificially created effect; the “practice effect” of the title. And it has nothing to do with entropy not applying any more than intelligence altering the world in more normal ways does.
Ice worlds exist in our own solar system; Europa and so on. If a world is cold enough and has water you are going to have an ice world since ice is what you get when water is cold enough.
In fact it’s questionable as to how typical our own world is; we have an odd amount of water that prevents Earth from being either a dry desert world (and probably lifeless or nearly so), or an ocean planet.
That is a failure in lots of SF, actually; the worlds where the action takes place are usually depicted as having breathable atmospheres, even if there is no life to produce that oxygen. At least Dune attempts to explain where the oxygen comes from, even if it wouldn’t work in practice if I recall correctly.
Planets like the Earth, with shirtsleeve conditions and gently changing seasons, are likely to be very rare indeed.
Yeah, but there’s no open vegetation, at least as far as I can tell. What the hell are people eating? It’s possible that an ecology can develop that has plants hidden away, or super-cacti that barely show and carefully shepherd their water, And where the hell is all the plant life or its equivalent that recycles CO[sub]2[/sub] into oxygen? On Earth we’ve got lots of grassland, rainforest, and forest, and even so most of the conversion takes place in the ocean. On Arrakis there are no large exposed areas of plant life, and there’s no ocean. How come everybody isn’t dead? It is, I suppose, possible to come up with some alternative means of feeding people and restoring oxygen, but Herbert never so much as hints at this (and in a book celebrated for his attention to ecology, no less).
don’t get me wrong – I love the Dune books. But it certainly doesn’t appear to be a fubnctional system.
Yeah, but we’re taklking about planets where people can live in the open. I expect much more variation in the climates in order to maintain a human-friendly environment. The oxygen on Hoth has to come from somewhere. Ditto the food for the abominable snow beasts.
Hey, it worked in The Lion King!
I always fan-wanked it that the Children of Tam can make whole sentences, they just choose not to in public, and especially not with aliens. Up in ‘polite society’ on the bridge, the captain sends down the word “Mirab, his sails unfurled” and the engineering staff is all “set the warp drive coils to 40%, adjust the anti matter flow, and watch the flux capacitors” or whatever. Sentences are for little children and technicians; proper adults speak only in metaphor.
Someone on this board postulated that the Tamarians are telepathic with each other. That makes more sense in the context of the episode than my theory.
Yeah, her books started at great, combining Hornblower with Pern in a way. But then she fell in love with Napoleon, and the stories got grimmer, bleaker and less fun every book.
I agree with** MaxTheVool** about the STtNG epi. How easy it would have been for the writers to slip in a line that they only use that form of speech for political and diplomatic talks. And- how do the stories even get told int he first place? What story is there for “Honey the babies diaper needs changing!” ? How do children develop speech?
It also appears that the most of the leadership are idiots, and the population has massively declined, at least in the North.
Right. So the world should be literally LITTERED with food, vehicles, weapons, ammunition, fuel and other resources. There simply wasn’t time to use any of them up, and once a person zombified, they would walk away from their car/gun/backpack/trailer of survival goods etc.
There’s also the question of how zombification spread as fast as pneumonic plague (e.g., must have been one mofo of a virus) but did not affect the survivors. It can’t possibly have happened that fast one bite at a time.
But I guess it’s a better show for watching the stupid survivors trip over M-16s, tanks and 4WDs to grab their rusty revolvers, swords, sharp sticks and Kia brand transport.
I’d nominate this for the worst world-building of all, given the scale of the audience.