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This week: Water Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.
-Isak Dinesen
Study how water flows in a valley stream, smoothly and freely between the rocks. Also learn from holy books and wise people. Everything - even mountains, rivers, plants and trees - should be your teacher.
-Morihei Ueshiba
My escape is to just get in a boat and disappear on the water.
-Carl Hiaasen
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We need it more than food, but less than air; it's the origin of all known life, but approached carelessly, it will kill you.
Water is something that most of us tend to take for granted, but without it, we wouldn't be here. All life on Earth was aquatic until fairly recently (geologically speaking, of course), and even now the seas and rivers teem with living things. Even as land-dwelling humans, the bulk of our body mass is water.
Part of what makes life possible is that Earth's troposphere exists near what chemists call the triple point of water - that particular combination of temperature and pressure that allows water to exist in all three classical states: solid, liquid, and gas (the actual triple point is 0.01C and 4.58mmHg, for you geeks out there who didn't already know that). Presumably, any life we'd hypothetically find elsewhere in the universe would exist in similar conditions, though the range is quite broad.
Now, we can't rule out that life elsewhere might have arisen around some other substance's triple point - methane is one candidate, and Saturn's moon Titan's atmosphere would be a good candidate for such a thing.
But water possesses some properties that make it uniquely suitable as a basis for, and medium of, life. I won't get too technical here, but one such property involves the way water acts when it freezes. Most substances solidify into something more dense. Imagine a lake of methane, for example, on Titan. Weather gets cold (for methane, this is *really* cold by our standards), and the surface of the lake freezes. What happens? The solid methane becomes more dense than the liquid form, and eventually settles to the bottom.
Not so with water. Put simply, ice floats; it doesn't sink in the liquid from which it formed. This is important to life because, as I mentioned above, life started in water. Once ice forms on a lake's surface, it acts as a kind of thermal barrier, keeping the underlying water liquid.
So - and this is all speculation here, but speculation is what we do - chances are when we find extraterrestrial life (be it microbes or little green women), it'll be based on water.
That's the science part, or rather, the introduction to the science. You can find more on the internet if you're interested. As writers, though, we're interested in more than just the science.
Water, as I said, is both life and death. As essential as it is, we can drown in it fairly quickly, and water at high enough pressure can kill, as well. Water shapes the world, eroding mountains and filling river valleys with dirt from those mountains. We relate to water differently depending on its form; a river evokes different associations than a lake, an ocean, a glacier, a cloud, or rain.
We can use these associations in our stories. Traditionally, for examples, vampires couldn't cross running water. Partly, from a storytelling perspective, this is because running water symbolizes life, and the undead do not mix well with life.
A river is a road, and can symbolize trade and transportation.
An ocean, meanwhile, is a barrier for much of land-based life. A great deal of human history involves our curiosity in finding out what lies beyond an ocean. It therefore represents curiosity and possibility.
Rain is so obviously symbolic that it's become a cliché in stories and movies. The "burial in the rain" trope is probably overused, but that's because the symbolism is rather powerful. Rain in its more extreme forms represents danger; storms can be deadly, but they also have an aspect of renewal and rebirth.
Even the simplest aspect of water, drinking, can be loaded with symbolism. Heinlein used this to great effect in Stranger in a Strange Land.
Our takeaway from this is meant to be that chances are, you're writing about things that need and use water, and if so, be aware of how water appears in your story and what it means. |
Pour yourself a cold glass of water and enjoy this week's picks:
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Fantasy: August 31, 2016 Issue [#7832]
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