Something that Langhorne probably did

Langhorne probably introduced a bunch of safeholdian species from the mainland onto the islands and vice versa to discourage people from working out the Theory of Evolution.

Zor

imperatorzor wrote:Langhorne probably introduced a bunch of safeholdian species from the mainland onto the islands and vice versa to discourage people from working out the Theory of Evolution.

Zor

Pure speculation without any support in textev or inything the author has ever posted.

BUT...

what you are suggesting is certainly possible. What we get is what is relavant to the story line which means that there could be all sorts of things happening off stage. So far as I know this discussion hasn't come up before.

Don

n7axw wrote:Pure speculation without any support in textev or inything the author has ever posted.

Well I noticed that there were references to Slash Lizards and Great Dragons living on Charis, Chisholm and the Mainland. You would expect isolated islands to evolve their own families of life. A million years ago you had Terror Birds in South America, Lions and Hyenas in Eurasia and Africa and Marsupial Lions and giant Monitor Lizards in Australia.

It's still speculation admittedly.

Zor

imperatorzor wrote:Well I noticed that there were references to Slash Lizards and Great Dragons living on Charis, Chisholm and the Mainland. You would expect isolated islands to evolve their own families of life. A million years ago you had Terror Birds in South America, Lions and Hyenas in Eurasia and Africa and Marsupial Lions and giant Monitor Lizards in Australia.

It's still speculation admittedly.

It's also possible - and I suspect a bit more likely - that they all evolved in one place and spread, or a proto-ancestor did so, and that Havenite Great Dragons are not quite the same species as Charisian Great Dragons. Similar evolutionary pressures (and ecological niches) seem to have produced similar species to take advantage of them here on Earth; why not assume that the same is true on Safehold?

We know that Hsing-Wu's Passage freezes over in the winter; that could provide a migration path for Havenite arctic-hardy species to migrate to Trellheim; if the Half-Moon Passage or the Ice Floe Strait also freezes over, that could provide a similar route from (western) Trellheim to Chisholm and/or Raven's Land.

(This sort of discussion is why I'd like a full-coverage map of Safehold that could be wrapped accurately onto a globe, so that you can see real distances - using the map as of MT&T, I have no doubt that the distance along the equator from a point under the 'e' in 'Corisande' in "League of Corisande" to a point under the 'M' in "Gulf of Mathyas" is far greater than the distance from the 'a' in "Ice Sea" to the 'P' in "Passage of Storms" - but without knowing the actual diameter of Safehold, and the actual latitude of the northern labels I used, knowing what the distance is is impossible. Certainly, it's possible to estimate some distances with order-of-magnitude accuracy if we're given some known distances at/near the equator, but there's going to be significant uncertainty in using those to estimate other distances, simply because we don't have that complete map.)

FreeTrav wrote:

imperatorzor wrote:Well I noticed that there were references to Slash Lizards and Great Dragons living on Charis, Chisholm and the Mainland. You would expect isolated islands to evolve their own families of life. A million years ago you had Terror Birds in South America, Lions and Hyenas in Eurasia and Africa and Marsupial Lions and giant Monitor Lizards in Australia.

It's still speculation admittedly.

It's also possible - and I suspect a bit more likely - that they all evolved in one place and spread, or a proto-ancestor did so, and that Havenite Great Dragons are not quite the same species as Charisian Great Dragons. Similar evolutionary pressures (and ecological niches) seem to have produced similar species to take advantage of them here on Earth; why not assume that the same is true on Safehold?

We know that Hsing-Wu's Passage freezes over in the winter; that could provide a migration path for Havenite arctic-hardy species to migrate to Trellheim; if the Half-Moon Passage or the Ice Floe Strait also freezes over, that could provide a similar route from (western) Trellheim to Chisholm and/or Raven's Land.

(This sort of discussion is why I'd like a full-coverage map of Safehold that could be wrapped accurately onto a globe, so that you can see real distances - using the map as of MT&T, I have no doubt that the distance along the equator from a point under the 'e' in 'Corisande' in "League of Corisande" to a point under the 'M' in "Gulf of Mathyas" is far greater than the distance from the 'a' in "Ice Sea" to the 'P' in "Passage of Storms" - but without knowing the actual diameter of Safehold, and the actual latitude of the northern labels I used, knowing what the distance is is impossible. Certainly, it's possible to estimate some distances with order-of-magnitude accuracy if we're given some known distances at/near the equator, but there's going to be significant uncertainty in using those to estimate other distances, simply because we don't have that complete map.)

For purposes of visualization, I would like a full globe of Safehold.

Don

imperatorzor wrote:Langhorne probably introduced a bunch of safeholdian species from the mainland onto the islands and vice versa to discourage people from working out the Theory of Evolution.

I really doubt that - for a lot of reasons. It would have been a lot easier and more like anything else to simply declare that god placed similiar but not identical animals to places where they were intended to go.

Langhorne wasn't at Safehold during the terraformin process, and that process is complex enough (especially with introducing terran species into the safeholdian ecosystems) that you don't mix animals of different parts without good reason.
There is textev that even "today" special procedures are needed as described in the writ to make new lands liveable - Merlin called several of the books from the writ "handbooks for terraforming".

Mixing up the carefully created terraformed balance after his arrival for something like explaining evolution if there are a lot of other possible explanations to give would have been idiotic.

I regret the fact that when I started mapping Safehold I couldn't find a software package which would let me both generate an entirely unique world and measure its distances in accurate projection. The software I use will let me display a globe that shows how the projection would work, but I can't scale from it. Because of that, I've accepted "flat," geographically impossible distances in order to measure them consistently. That is, it lets me reproduce distances which are the same from measurement to measurement even though they are not accurate measures of the "actual distances. This was a necessary evil, since I would rapidly have gone insane trying to move military units (or anything else) on a planetary scale without it.

The software I use also doesn't display the polar ice caps/regions accurately, and this means that settlement in Safehold has crept a bit farther north and south than it really ought to be able to do on a planet with Safehold's climate. Those populations are very, very sparse and very much "arctic" in construction and yearly calendar of events, however.

FreeTrav wrote:

imperatorzor wrote:Well I noticed that there were references to Slash Lizards and Great Dragons living on Charis, Chisholm and the Mainland. You would expect isolated islands to evolve their own families of life. A million years ago you had Terror Birds in South America, Lions and Hyenas in Eurasia and Africa and Marsupial Lions and giant Monitor Lizards in Australia.

It's still speculation admittedly.

It's also possible - and I suspect a bit more likely - that they all evolved in one place and spread, or a proto-ancestor did so, and that Havenite Great Dragons are not quite the same species as Charisian Great Dragons. Similar evolutionary pressures (and ecological niches) seem to have produced similar species to take advantage of them here on Earth; why not assume that the same is true on Safehold?

We know that Hsing-Wu's Passage freezes over in the winter; that could provide a migration path for Havenite arctic-hardy species to migrate to Trellheim; if the Half-Moon Passage or the Ice Floe Strait also freezes over, that could provide a similar route from (western) Trellheim to Chisholm and/or Raven's Land.

(This sort of discussion is why I'd like a full-coverage map of Safehold that could be wrapped accurately onto a globe, so that you can see real distances - using the map as of MT&T, I have no doubt that the distance along the equator from a point under the 'e' in 'Corisande' in "League of Corisande" to a point under the 'M' in "Gulf of Mathyas" is far greater than the distance from the 'a' in "Ice Sea" to the 'P' in "Passage of Storms" - but without knowing the actual diameter of Safehold, and the actual latitude of the northern labels I used, knowing what the distance is is impossible. Certainly, it's possible to estimate some distances with order-of-magnitude accuracy if we're given some known distances at/near the equator, but there's going to be significant uncertainty in using those to estimate other distances, simply because we don't have that complete map.)

runsforcelery wrote:I regret the fact that when I started mapping Safehold I couldn't find a software package which would let me both generate an entirely unique world and measure its distances in accurate projection. The software I use will let me display a globe that shows how the projection would work, but I can't scale from it. Because of that, I've accepted "flat," geographically impossible distances in order to measure them consistently. That is, it lets me reproduce distances which are the same from measurement to measurement even though they are not accurate measures of the "actual distances. This was a necessary evil, since I would rapidly have gone insane trying to move military units (or anything else) on a planetary scale without it.

The software I use also doesn't display the polar ice caps/regions accurately, and this means that settlement in Safehold has crept a bit farther north and south than it really ought to be able to do on a planet with Safehold's climate. Those populations are very, very sparse and very much "arctic" in construction and yearly calendar of events, however.

And perfect accuracy isn't actually necessary; you're telling the story quite well without it. It hasn't even been jarring when you happen to use an impossible number somewhere, because by and large, you're NOT moving stuff on a planetary scale where the exact distance numbers would matter. More important to your story has been time, and telling us that it takes x days to get to Zion from Siddar City by ship through Hsing-Wu's passage, and y days to get from Tellesberg to Cherayth gives us a better idea of what Merlin, Cayleb, Stohnar, Green Valley, Lock Island, et alia have to deal with in coordinating operations and communications than would simply telling us that it's a sea journey of 10,000 miles for y and 3500 miles for x.

I'm just a gearheady type that likes to be able to have the accuracy if I want it. You're an Author, and your story has its needs, including transport moving at the speed of plot. And that only gets annoying when you (not the superb David Weber, just the generic less-than-superb Author) establish that a is possible (and the solution to a dilemma) in one place, and then totally ignore it in a different situation later on where it would have made the situation a complete non-problem (Classic Star Trek was notorious for this).

imperatorzor wrote:Langhorne probably introduced a bunch of safeholdian species from the mainland onto the islands and vice versa to discourage people from working out the Theory of Evolution.

Zor

Eh, the large number of Earth species introduced is going to make things pretty confusing for any proto-evolutionary biologist or biochemist.

runsforcelery wrote:I regret the fact that when I started mapping Safehold I couldn't find a software package which would let me both generate an entirely unique world and measure its distances in accurate projection. The software I use will let me display a globe that shows how the projection would work, but I can't scale from it. Because of that, I've accepted "flat," geographically impossible distances in order to measure them consistently. That is, it lets me reproduce distances which are the same from measurement to measurement even though they are not accurate measures of the "actual distances. This was a necessary evil, since I would rapidly have gone insane trying to move military units (or anything else) on a planetary scale without it.

The software I use also doesn't display the polar ice caps/regions accurately, and this means that settlement in Safehold has crept a bit farther north and south than it really ought to be able to do on a planet with Safehold's climate. Those populations are very, very sparse and very much "arctic" in construction and yearly calendar of events, however.
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Next time you design a world...I recommend MapInfo. Its a professional GIS package that would make this a bit easier. There is a free Basic version.