Natural Inspiration

Writing science fiction or fantasy is a tough ask. Other genres have the benefit of life and society around them, or events that have been recorded. The sci-fi/fantasy writer doesn’t have that.

What they write is pure imagination; from the creatures created to the mock science behind starship propulsion.

It is no easy task to sit and think of a creature that could be real if the right environment is present – of course a writer has to create that environment, too. To make that environment, other factors have to come into play, like cosmology. Where you place your planet and how close to what kind of sun dictates what kind of animal is going to exist, what kind of weather systems and land masses, what kind of atmosphere and how the biology of the animals works or what kind of flora.

It takes a lot of work and it is no surprise that many authors veer away from that and simply place have a solar system similar to our own and recreate evolution or to take our own planet to it’s extremes for human existence and leave it at that.

But there is much more to this Earth of ours than most realise.

The use of mythology, for example, can give an author an extraordinary palette from which to draw creatures. Not just the well-known gods and goddesses of known ancient civilisations like Rome, Greece and Egypt, but the Mayan, Aztec, Japanese, Celtic and African mythologies.

In the book, The Expedition Journey of Pliny the Elder: Inventorum Natura, artist Una Woodruff details how ordinary animals become mythological: unicorns, which are rhinoceros or antelope; the Amphisbaena (two headed snake) which are two snakes entwined; carnivorous plants; the butterfly fish which is the flying fish.

Dougal Dixon takes a different route in The New Dinosaurs: an alternative evolution. It explores the evolution of dinosaurs if the great extinction had never happened and climate change was slow. The drawings are beautiful and the science, precise.

These ‘what if’ books are fascinating, however writers need not look any further than the nearest jungle for astonishing fauna: flying lizards (with extended ribs and skin between arms and legs allowing them to glide) and frogs (skin between the toes), moon-walking birds (their feet move so fast it, they are the Michael Jackson of the bird world), murderous chimps (have a political system that allows them to hunt down and murder rivals), mimicking birds (the Lyre bird that can sound like a camera winder, or the magpie that can imitate a kookaburra or mudlark), microbes that live in extreme cold, heat, water depth or even salt or sulphurous water.

It’s not just camouflage that makes the animal kingdom so interesting it’s their habitats, their societies, family groups and lifestyles.

There is so much we don’t know about our own planet, but with each new discovery, we authors can create a lot more, all we need do is look around and look closely and the new words we create can come ready made with its own flora and fauna.