Ecology of a Fantasy World

It’s understood that if characters travel about anywhere in a fantasy realm, they won’t be able to get more than five pages before they encounter some toothy beastie intent upon devouring them. This leads to the impression, sometimes never explained by the author (I’m looking at you, Edgar Rice Burroughs) of a landscape inhabited exclusively by vicious carnivores.

Um. Hello? Who are all the eight-legged lions eating when our hero and heroine aren’t traipsing by in chain-mail lingerie?

Violating the laws of ecology always bothers me in stories. Yes, it’s fantasy, you can make your own rules, but, for the love of crabgrass, at least take recommendations from ecology. It’s really fun to have monsters try to eat your characters, so we wouldn’t want to cut that part. (Chain-mail lingerie is another must-keep, I don’t care what the weather is.) We just need to include some herbivores for the carnivores to eat, and some herbs for the herbivores to eat.

With that in mind, I began ruminating on the dragons in my story. What do they eat? Lots of things, it turns out. Cows, horses, pigs, manatees, humans. Meat. But it would take a lot of such snacks to fill a dragon, and there are a lot of dragons in my story. (Not necessarily featured as characters, but milling about in the background, doing dragonish things — fighting, gambling, selling overpriced trinkets, charging too much interest on loans and eating anyone who doesn’t pay up.) I decided that they really needed some herbivores, and the herbivores ought to be even bigger (but much dumber) than the dragons.

Enter the leviathan!

Okay, so there are leviathans swimming around getting eaten by dragons. But what do leviathans eat? You might think, “krill” but you would be wrong, because krill are boring compared to….

…Green Ooze!

Yes, I could have just said “algae bloom” but that doesn’t sound like something from a fantasy novel, does it?

Here’s my helpful diagram:

The thing that looks like a purple gecko is supposed to be a majestic dragon. Work with me here. Anyway, the majestic dragon eats the leviathan. (The blue is supposed to be the ocean, not a flotation device.) The leviathan eats the Green Ooze.

Oh, but wait, Tara. You have an arrow from the Green Ooze pointing to the dragon. That’s right. Because, under certain circumstances — say, just when our hero and heroine sail by in a pirate ship — the Green Ooze gets all excited by the opportunity and changes, the way some molds do. It becomes Carnivorous Green Ooze! And tries to eat them!

(Cue music: It’s the Circle of Life.)

I find this kinda thing entirely too amusing. I know. Sad.

P.S. Check out Thuvia, Hot Babe of Mars. She will get her eight-legged lion to kick your ass and steal your toupee.

Mood Swings USA

Ok, this is just weird.

This is what 300 million tweets look like when analyzed by mood and number of tweets.

Researchers at Harvard and Northeastern University analysed
300 million tweets sent between September 2006 and August
2009, then produced a ‘cartogram’, a map where areas
represent values (in this case the number of tweets) rather
than the land area.

Put the video on loop, stick it next to your lava lamp, and grok the freak, baby, grok the freak.

And don’t forget to tweet this.

A Million Ebooks

BusinessWire reports that The Girl With The Dragon Tatoo is the first novel to sell a million Kindle ebooks.

Given the lovingly detailed descriptions of early-2000s computers and technology the late Stieg Larsson peppered into The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, we’re pretty sure he’d love to know that he’s just become the first author to sell over a million Amazon Kindle e-books — and we can only imagine what kind of trouble Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander would have gotten into with a Droid X or an iPad. Considering the dominance of Amazon’s platform and company’s recent announcement that Kindle titles are now outselling hardcovers we’d guess that also makes him the first author to sell a million e-books period, which is fairly notable — and with the upcoming Hollywood adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, we’d guess these numbers aren’t going to slow down any time soon. Too bad we don’t know the breakdown of where these million books went — we’d love to know if Kindle devices are as popular as the Kindle apps on various other platforms.

I wonder what royalties Stieg Larsson gets on each ebook? I know most epublishers offer 30-50%, but I think it’s much less with Kindle ebooks. On the ebooks I’m familiar with, a million books would equal a million bucks. Or slightly more.