Consider Torrance. It is a doubly fictional world, a world in a series of fictional books by a fictional author. (See Fictionalization.) It is supposed to orbit Mira, because it is following the pattern of the planetary romance A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay, so I gave it to a famous star. Mira is a variable red giant, so I didn’t think an Earth-like planet was at all likely there, but I began to wonder about it, and decided to see what could be done to make Torrance more plausible.
Mira, Omicron Ceti, is a variable red giant (Mira A) with a white dwarf companion (Mira B), about 300 ly away. The orbit of Mira B around Mira A is only approximately known, at about 70 AU, with a period of 500 years. Mira A has about the same mass as the Sun, 1.18 solar masses; Mira B is about 0.7 solar masses. Mira’s luminosity is about 9000 times the Sun’s and it is about 380 times larger. Mira B does not appear to add significantly to the net luminosity.
Mira A has an 11-month “thermal year” (period) in which it increases to a maximum luminosity over 100 days, then decreases to a minimum over 200 days. The variation in brightness is very large, though less so in the infrared. Mira B has an accretion disc from collecting material from the solar wind of Mira A, and may have protoplanets. The whole system is moving rapidly through local space.
To have an Earth-like temperature, Torrance must be 95 AU from Mira. This gives it a period, a year, of 674.7 Earth years. This means that the seasonal changes of stars in the night sky are so slow as to be negligible. Mira B (“Miracula”) changes position in the sky even more slowly than the stars. Not only does it take nearly 500 years to go around Mira A, it moves in the same sense as Torrance, so the planet chases it around Mira A. Miracula is never closer to Torrance than 25 AU, a distance between the orbital radii of Uranus and Neptune, but it is still 0.7 solar masses, so its gravitational effect on Torrance must be appreciable. I stipulate that, whatever the exact orbits of Miracula and Torrance are, they put the bodies in a 3:4 resonance (a very slow one), which has the effect of stabilizing Torrance’s orbit. This implies a period for Miracula of 506 yeas.
The apparent size of Mira in the sky of Torrance is about four times the size of the Sun in our sky. It is distinctly orange in color. Miracula is an actinic blue-white spark. I stipulate that Torrance has an axis nearly perpendicular to its plane of orbit, so there is effectively no seasonal variation (from that source). As a result, the visible astronomy of Torrance is unchanged decade after decade.
The day is 32 hours long.
The eleven-month “thermal year” caused by Mira’s variation in luminosity is much more significant to life on Torrance than the astronomical year, and of course it happens all over the planet at once, not in alternating hemispheres as on Earth.
The repetitive sameness of the sky is slightly broken by three moons, all tiny.
Torrance is what is left of an ice giant, similar to Neptune. When Miracula and then Mira turned red giant, the gases and ices evaporated, leaving the core. The same process destroyed some ice moons and reduced the three surviving moons to small, rocky bodies. Remaining ice provided the air and water for present-day Torrance. And, since Torrance is a core released from pressure, its surface is metal-rich, and it retains a good amount of internal heat, which powers plate tectonics.
I want a largely desert world, but I also need a heat-sink to make the planet’s temperature equable despite the heat changes of the thermal year. So Torrance is presently dominated by a supercontinent covering 40% of the surface, while the rest is covered by a single ocean. Neither pole is landlocked, which helps keep temperatures more even.
There are some islands off the coast of the supercontinent, but none larger than Britain. Climate on these and on the coasts is actually fairly temperate. The distance from the coast to the interior would ensure a largely desert continent in any case, but there is a mountain range down the west coast, exacerbating the situation. (You’re welcome.)
The red giant phase of a star’s life is brief and changeable. Torrance has had no time to develop its own biosphere, so I stipulate that it was terraformed by someone. There are two alternatives: the terraformers were us, in the remote future; or they were aliens in the remote past. In either case, most, but not all, of the life is adapted Earth life, particularly the people.
To facilitate possible contact between the modern world and Torrance, I stipulate that the terraforming and colonization of Torrance was done by ancient aliens. They obviously took a free hand with the gene-tooling. I haven’t made up any specifics yet, but for an idea, see the biota of the terraformed Venus in my Vaster setting.
Just as Tormance and Barsoom had a colorful (literally) variety of humanoid races, so has Torrance. Underneath the tribal features, they are all or mostly Medterranean-like: moderately brown skin, black hair in a variety of textures, eyes most often brown.
On top of the base form, different appearances and anatomies can be acquired by being adopted by the tribe, the adoption ritual conferring the new features.
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