So is this just silly

[Jimmy Magnusson]

As usual when working on a project a completely new idea for a setting has popped up in my mind (I'll file it under "future projects"). I've seen it (the setting) done before in some ways although I don't think (and hope) it's not been done in this exact way. This world has no solid ground but rather small islands floating in the air, along with various aircrafts that are used for transportation and living. Can this be taken seriously? The main issue I see with it is the risk the everyday man has of falling off an island an plummeting to an endless/very far drop. What do they say, non-OSHA compilant...

[Malloriel]

Well, I've seen it done here and there, though in my experience it's not overly common. I would say that if I were to make it and/or be running the place myself, I'd have railing or walls around the perimeter, as well as a regular mobile guardian force to walk it, or drive it or whatever, to ensure that people don't get to close, or try to jump/climb over. I'd also leave a land allowance on the other side of the wall for an added measure of safety, should anyone make it over. That also allows for some kind of fugitive or espionage, with someone sneaking very cautiously around the ground allowance outside the wall, with the wind whipping at them, and clouds around their knees.

That would be my route, anyway. I hope it helps.

[The Judge]

Presumably there is a planet there below them, though?

Was there land once, but they had to escape some disaster and took to the skies in man-made (sorry person-made) islands or is this a natural phenomenon? If the latter, how deep are these islands? A lot of Earth's mineral wealth is found by digging - are you going to run the risk that someone might tunnel out the other side?

Man seems to have originated in one place and spread by mass emigration, taking to the seas to get to different continents. Animals, too, would have found their way to different islands by walking across now-submerged land bridges or swimming narrow straits - even surviving long crossings by luck. Your peoples and their animals aren't going to be able to do that - producing some kind of rudimentary boat is one thing for a primitive civilisation, but flying machines...? That means that for practically all of their existence your peoples would be marooned on one island. Even allowing for it to be a big one, that brings with it problems of development - societal, economic, intellectual. Are they ever going to develop sufficiently to produce craft to get to the other islands??

And how far above the planet will they be floating? The higher you go, the colder it gets - so if you are planning on having vegetation on these islands to feed the animals which evolve into your peoples, you are going to have to think hard about what kind of plants are likely to grow there. The less vegetation, the fewer animals, the less chance of evolution producing sentient creatures, the harder it is for any such creatures to breed in sufficient numbers to throw up the geniuses needed to make developmental steps in civilisation - and the easier it is for in-breeding to create a race which goes nowhere.

It would be warmer inside the islands I suppose, but then you've got issues over lack of photosynthesis - plants and animals can survive in caves without ever seeing daylight, but you're back to numbers and evolution having a hard time again.

If the islands are only a few thousand feet up (and that can still get pretty cold and barren) then your peoples will easily be able to see the planet below them - it's still a very, very nasty drop but it's not endless. And people being as stupid as they are, surely from the very beginning they would be trying to get down there all the while, to explore - creating a very long rope to go down is a damn sight easier than building a plane to get to another floating island. Even if there is no land, presumably there is something - liquid perhaps. Unless it is corrosive, wouldn't it be as easy for them to build boats to live on the liquid. No crops down there, but still the possibility of creatures in the liquid which they could hunt.

And you thought your only worry was making sure they didn't fall off!!

Sorry. As you can guess I like to follow things through - it makes reading hell sometimes as I sit and nit pick away. Luckily I'm not any kind of scientist otherwise I'd never be able to pick up a SF book without making lists of all the things that are wrong!

Please don't let me stop you going ahead with your idea - and let's face it, if it's fantasy you can re-write whatever laws of physics you want! - but I think it might help if you spent some time brainstorming how the people have evolved and how their society has developed because that will inform their spiritual beliefs which will have an impact on how they relate to each other, particularly those who are different (eg those who have made a life on the liquid, or those who have separately developed on a smaller island which split away from a larger one centuries beforehand) - giving you conflict that might be helpful in your plotting.

And when you make your first million from your best-selling range of floating islands books, make sure I'm remembered!!

J

[iansales]

You should probably check out Gulliver's Travels.

[Jimmy Magnusson]

Originally Posted by The Judge

Presumably there is a planet there below them, though?

Was there land once, but they had to escape some disaster and took to the skies in man-made (sorry person-made) islands or is this a natural phenomenon? If the latter, how deep are these islands? A lot of Earth's mineral wealth is found by digging - are you going to run the risk that someone might tunnel out the other side?

Man seems to have originated in one place and spread by mass emigration, taking to the seas to get to different continents. Animals, too, would have found their way to different islands by walking across now-submerged land bridges or swimming narrow straits - even surviving long crossings by luck. Your peoples and their animals aren't going to be able to do that - producing some kind of rudimentary boat is one thing for a primitive civilisation, but flying machines...? That means that for practically all of their existence your peoples would be marooned on one island. Even allowing for it to be a big one, that brings with it problems of development - societal, economic, intellectual. Are they ever going to develop sufficiently to produce craft to get to the other islands??

And how far above the planet will they be floating? The higher you go, the colder it gets - so if you are planning on having vegetation on these islands to feed the animals which evolve into your peoples, you are going to have to think hard about what kind of plants are likely to grow there. The less vegetation, the fewer animals, the less chance of evolution producing sentient creatures, the harder it is for any such creatures to breed in sufficient numbers to throw up the geniuses needed to make developmental steps in civilisation - and the easier it is for in-breeding to create a race which goes nowhere.

It would be warmer inside the islands I suppose, but then you've got issues over lack of photosynthesis - plants and animals can survive in caves without ever seeing daylight, but you're back to numbers and evolution having a hard time again.

If the islands are only a few thousand feet up (and that can still get pretty cold and barren) then your peoples will easily be able to see the planet below them - it's still a very, very nasty drop but it's not endless. And people being as stupid as they are, surely from the very beginning they would be trying to get down there all the while, to explore - creating a very long rope to go down is a damn sight easier than building a plane to get to another floating island. Even if there is no land, presumably there is something - liquid perhaps. Unless it is corrosive, wouldn't it be as easy for them to build boats to live on the liquid. No crops down there, but still the possibility of creatures in the liquid which they could hunt.

And you thought your only worry was making sure they didn't fall off!!

Yes... *chuckle*

Originally Posted by The Judge

Sorry. As you can guess I like to follow things through - it makes reading hell sometimes as I sit and nit pick away. Luckily I'm not any kind of scientist otherwise I'd never be able to pick up a SF book without making lists of all the things that are wrong!

Please don't let me stop you going ahead with your idea - and let's face it, if it's fantasy you can re-write whatever laws of physics you want! - but I think it might help if you spent some time brainstorming how the people have evolved and how their society has developed because that will inform their spiritual beliefs which will have an impact on how they relate to each other, particularly those who are different (eg those who have made a life on the liquid, or those who have separately developed on a smaller island which split away from a larger one centuries beforehand) - giving you conflict that might be helpful in your plotting.

And when you make your first million from your best-selling range of floating islands books, make sure I'm remembered!!

J

Thank you for all of your comments. Certainly the world will have to be properly hashed out before any story writing can begin, but I wanted some thoughts on the concept. Is there a planet below? Oh, if only I could hanwave that one away! I've fallen in love with the idea of islands floating in nothingness... Maybe you could have some kind of catastrophe break up the planet; then you would've solved the plantlife and animal question. I know it's ridicolous from a realistic perspective, but hey, SF light.
I suppose that's how I would ideally like to solve most of the issues though: by just saying it is what it is. Imagine speaking with someone from this world. The islands float around "because they do so". How long have they been doing that? For as long as anyone can remember, but there's a mythological past with one whole planet.
How did people and animals migrate? Hm, perhaps they used gliders or hitched a ride with an airborne creature.

What inspired me for this whole idea was this picture, which, as you can probably tell, follows the "because it's interesting" route.
RPG Motivational Posters/aimfortheskies
It is at this point that I ask again, is this simply too silly to consider? Or can it be forgiven, since it's such a wonderful world?

[pyan]

Hmm - another one to look at first is a game called Skies of Arcadia...

Travel between the numerous dungeons is accomplished by piloting an airship through the overworld, a three dimensional sky with massive floating rocks forming islands and continents.

[goldhawk]

You might want to check out Larry Niven's "The Integral Trees" and "The Smoke Ring". They're about a survey vessel's crew descendants marooned in a ring of air about a large planet. Since everything is in orbit, the environment has only micro-gravity and tides. Real physics but with interesting consequences.

[WafflesToo]

You just described the Skyrates browser game to a tee, so it has been done with some amount of success.

It also somewhat describes my current novella, "Into Harm's Way" and there have been others so I wouldn't worry too much about it being silly. Sometimes silly is just plain fun to do

[Teresa Edgerton]

If they're just islands floating in space, there's that whole tedious gravity and atmosphere thing you have to account for.

[Writers Blocked]

The wonderful thing about science fiction and fantasy is that it really doesn't have to BE possible, as long as it SOUNDS possible.

For example, millions of years ago alchemists trying to produce a rare and dense material accidentally started a chain reaction in the planet's surface which continued to the core. The resultant explosion/implosion caused the formation of a small star or singularity around which the planetary fragments fall into orbit. The gravitational pull of the central star/black hole is sufficient to hold an atmosphere and possibly have enough gravity for the people not to fall off the rocks.

And life wouldn't have had to evolve there. A space faring race could have found it and settled it... possible to mine that valuable mineral.

I'm somewhat doped up on cold medicine, but that at least sounds viable to me.

[chrispenycate]

Originally Posted by Writers Blocked

The wonderful thing about science fiction and fantasy is that it really doesn't have to BE possible, as long as it SOUNDS possible.

For example, millions of years ago alchemists trying to produce a rare and dense material accidentally started a chain reaction in the planet's surface which continued to the core. The resultant explosion/implosion caused the formation of a small star or singularity around which the planetary fragments fall into orbit. The gravitational pull of the central star/black hole is sufficient to hold an atmosphere and possibly have enough gravity for the people not to fall off the rocks.

And life wouldn't have had to evolve there. A space faring race could have found it and settled it... possible to mine that valuable mineral.

I'm somewhat doped up on cold medicine, but that at least sounds viable to me.

But if it's in orbit there's no falling off; microgravity and tides, and then you have to read the Niven gas torus books.

What if, to compensate for gravity, all the rocks were magnetic monopoles, all of the same polarity. You'd need a planetary mass, of course, to give enough gravity field to hold a breathable atmosphere, but the magnetic repulsion would keep the individual pieces away from each other and the core.

Be a devil to maintain an ecology, unless you go high tech; everything non-magnetisable would tend to fall down to the centre of gravity, and ths means not just humans but just about anything they could eat or drink.

Air pressure gets higher the lower you are, so nitrogen narcosis and the bends are serious risks.

Now all I need to do is work out how soil and ordinary rock tend to stick to the magnets, and how fast gravity decreases as you get lower; muscle powered wings might be an option in the nether zones.

[Shoegaze99]

Originally Posted by Jimmy Magnusson

As usual when working on a project a completely new idea for a setting has popped up in my mind (I'll file it under "future projects"). I've seen it (the setting) done before in some ways although I don't think (and hope) it's not been done in this exact way. This world has no solid ground but rather small islands floating in the air, along with various aircrafts that are used for transportation and living. Can this be taken seriously? The main issue I see with it is the risk the everyday man has of falling off an island an plummeting to an endless/very far drop. What do they say, non-OSHA compilant...

Sure it can be taken seriously. If you paint your world honestly and believe in it yourself, you can convince the reader of the world, too. It's a fascinating concept (it's been done, but not a lot) that people will want to explore.

Why don't people fall off the islands all the time? Because they live there and have for generations. It's part of their life. My home has water on two sides, with a dropoff of a few feet into water. In 14 years of living there no one has ever fallen into the water. Not once. Not through big parties and BBQ and kids playing in the yard and more. They don't fall in because no one wants to fall into the water.

If it was nothing but sky, I think people would have even more incentive not to fall.

Think of big ol' mammals that spend much of their lives scrambling up the sides of cliffs. They pull it off because it's their life. It's how they live. It's second nature to them.

Living on these islands without wandering off them is how your people live. It's second nature. So, no problem.

I wouldn't worry about the issues The Judge and others raise. The concept alone clearly indicates you're not dealing with real science. No need to suck the fun out of your concept by worrying about the origins of mankind and photosynthesis and temperature and gravity and atmosphere. You've got a culture living on islands floating over a void. Sounds good enough to me. Give me an interesting story to read in that setting and I'll read that story, and I won't ever worry about how they got there.

I think you're right to say the islands float because they do and leave it at that.

(I also second a look at Skies of Arcadia. If you like RPG games it's a fun one, but even more, there are ideas that can be snatched from it.)

[goldhawk]

Another scenario is to have humans colonizing a high-gravity planet. Because of the dense atmosphere, they can only live on the mountain tops. Below a certain level, they would suffer from carbon-dioxide poisoning. To get from place to place they would have to fly or take an environment-sealed vehicle (think of a submarine on tracks).