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On our side of town, we had our huge brood of 17-year cycle cicadas emerge in 2004. This year, it was time for those on the eastern side of the city to deal with the loud, massive outpouring of insect sex. I had to take the Jetta over to that side for some work this morning, and on the way home, I must have killed a hundred of them or more with the car on the way home; the highway was littered with cicada carcasses. They're really heavy, slow, and poor flyers.
Which started me thinking about how we never really know a place until we've lived there for years. Someone moving to the eastern side of Cincinnati in late 1991 would have no clue that in 2008, they would be inundated for a month by huge red-eyed insects whose combined racket can reach 100-decibels at times. People in Indiana, Wisconsin, and Iowa are dealing with one of the "hundred-year" floods this spring. At some point, this region will experience another huge release of the New Madrid fault...
You don't know what a place is capable of throwing your way until you've been there a long time.
Which is a writing issue, also, especially in our genre. All those grand stories of First Contact and space exploration -- they often miss the concept of Deep Time: we get a vision of a new and different place... but the truth is that those explorers rarely really know the locale. They know the surface; they know the current. They rarely stay long enough to really know all everything. (That was part of the theme of the story I wrote for Mike Resnick's anthology MEN WRITING SF AS WOMEN back in 2003, "Staying Still.") It's sometimes the same in fantasy: a world is presented, often with intricate worldbuildings, but sometimes the sense of Deep Time isn't addressed: there's sometimes an underlying sense that this world has always been this way and will always be this way...
In another few weeks, the cicadas will have mated, laid their eggs, and died. Their offspring will climb down the trees and shrubs and burrow deep into the earth, where they will stay for another decade and a half (and a little more) before returning. You have to admit that it's a good evolutionary strategy: that long cycle of disappearance (for creatures like us) means that it's highly unlikely that a natural predator can evolve and develop strategies for feeding on them.
So what's a "long cycle" or Deep Time event for your area? What happens where you live that someone who has just moved there won't experience for years and years, long past the time when they feel they 'know' the area?
Which started me thinking about how we never really know a place until we've lived there for years. Someone moving to the eastern side of Cincinnati in late 1991 would have no clue that in 2008, they would be inundated for a month by huge red-eyed insects whose combined racket can reach 100-decibels at times. People in Indiana, Wisconsin, and Iowa are dealing with one of the "hundred-year" floods this spring. At some point, this region will experience another huge release of the New Madrid fault...
You don't know what a place is capable of throwing your way until you've been there a long time.
Which is a writing issue, also, especially in our genre. All those grand stories of First Contact and space exploration -- they often miss the concept of Deep Time: we get a vision of a new and different place... but the truth is that those explorers rarely really know the locale. They know the surface; they know the current. They rarely stay long enough to really know all everything. (That was part of the theme of the story I wrote for Mike Resnick's anthology MEN WRITING SF AS WOMEN back in 2003, "Staying Still.") It's sometimes the same in fantasy: a world is presented, often with intricate worldbuildings, but sometimes the sense of Deep Time isn't addressed: there's sometimes an underlying sense that this world has always been this way and will always be this way...
In another few weeks, the cicadas will have mated, laid their eggs, and died. Their offspring will climb down the trees and shrubs and burrow deep into the earth, where they will stay for another decade and a half (and a little more) before returning. You have to admit that it's a good evolutionary strategy: that long cycle of disappearance (for creatures like us) means that it's highly unlikely that a natural predator can evolve and develop strategies for feeding on them.
So what's a "long cycle" or Deep Time event for your area? What happens where you live that someone who has just moved there won't experience for years and years, long past the time when they feel they 'know' the area?