This week: Plants Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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Plant and your spouse plants with you; weed and you weed alone.
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau
There have only been about a half dozen genuinely important events in the four-billion-year saga of life on Earth: single-celled life, multicelled life, differentiation into plants and animals, movement of animals from water to land, and the advent of mammals and consciousness.
-Elon Musk
I think I just want to garden - or kill some plants, in my case.
-Cate Blanchett |
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Here in the Northern Hemisphere, we're firmly in the middle of astronomical spring. Flowers have bloomed and faded, and trees are in full leaf.
If your only exposure to fantasy and/or science fiction is movies and TV shows, you might have noticed that vegetation tends to look a lot like places such as Georgia, New Zealand or British Columbia. There are exceptions, of course, like Cameron's Avatar, but for the most part, flora is setting, backdrop. Even Tolkien's Ents, and similar tree-like anthropomorphic species from world folklore, exist amidst a milieu of otherwise ordinary forests. Some properties, like Star Wars, do a great job with animal species, but plants often get shortchanged.
Granted, there's a great deal of vegetative diversity right here on Earth in this time period: the lush, broad-leafed rainforests, the striking baobabs of Africa, the spreading cypress roots of subtropical marshland, the coniferous woods of the northern regions -- and that's just trees. Many of these locales seem exotic to those who aren't used to them
In writing, of course, we're not limited by budget, and many writers take advantage of this to create truly strange life-forms -- but even then, the creativity often stops at animals (or animal-like life).
Our world contains two major kingdoms of life (along with a few minor ones): animals and plants. The big difference is that, in general, plant cells tend to have chlorophyll, which enables the plant to create its own energy from sunlight. As with anything in biology, there are exceptions, and as writers we can make even more.
Venus flytraps, for example, famously supplement their sunlight-derived nutrition with tasty bugs, which are trapped and digested by the plant's specialized organs. If they (and other, similarly carnivorous, plants) didn't exist, they'd have to be invented for fantasy fiction. As it is, the carnivorous plant is one of the few common vegetative staples of otherworldly fiction.
But why stop there? Perhaps there are other energy-engines besides chlorophyll that could power a plant, and some might even be more efficient, providing more energy to a specimen. More energy can result in more options for plants, such as faster growth or even mobility. This could also result in other distinctive colors besides green, lending fantasy descriptions an exotic tint.
Plants can be beneficial, or poisonous, or both; they can be rare or common or invasive. Some are wild; others are cultivated, bred for human purposes. We use them for food, medicine, and shelter. And as Fantasy writers, we can use them to add depth to our worlds. |
Some all-natural selections for this week's reading:
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Last time, in "All of Time and Space" , I talked about the TV show Doctor Who.
Everyone must already be a fan, judging by the lack of responses.
So that's it for me for May - see you next month! Until then,
DREAM ON!!! |
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Fantasy: May 06, 2020 Issue [#10157]
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