The Philosophy Behind Great Lakes Earth
The philosophy behind the creation of Great Lakes Earth should not be exclusive to Great Lakes Earth itself. If anything, it’s a series of lessons that all worldbuilders should take to heart. In worldbuilding or speculative evolution, people usually focus on one or two disciplines, science being predominant. But when alternate history involves the whole of history — being more than the cliched and stereotypical 6,000 years of human civilization — you need to rely on more disciplines that don’t necessarily involve science in the specific sense.
1. Conversationalism
Even when science is involved, technicalities can go so far. Indulge in it, and you bore the audience and don’t give them much to imagine. The language needs to be simple and conversational, using the technicalities only sparingly.
This need to write a conversationalist language also involves cleaning up the wording, which is where the timing of Great Lakes Earth is involved. Back home, the Cambrian Explosion happened 542 million years ago. Five-hun-dred-for-ty-two or five-hun-dred-and-for-ty-two — either one is just too wordy, so you’d think that I’d go for five-hun-dred, right? No, because that would scrunch the evolutionary timeline unnaturally tight, which is why I’ve predated the Explosion to six-hun-dred. Back home, the Pleistocene ice ages had been waxing and waning for two-and-a-half million years. Thanks to The Future is Wild, I have cleaned up the wording to five million years. The current abbreviation for the extinction event 66 million years ago is “K-Pg”, which I refuse to say because it doesn’t roll the tongue like “KT” does, so I decided to address it as “MC”, “Mesozoic-Cenozoic”. You need to involve your audience in this, immerse them into the alternate history of Great Lakes Earth.
2. Signifier vs. Signified
In the English language, words themselves have been taken for granted. Taxonomies, in particular, seem set in stone. But as our understanding of biology improves, titles and labels change. Yet this flexibility changes nothing. Changing the recognition of the giant panda from a giant raccoon to an herbivorous bear does not physically change its behavior, or its anatomy, or its environment. Real change is never so arbitrary. So change a label or title and the world does not end.
In the theory of semiotics, the “Sign” consists of two elements — signifier, the form that the sign takes (words); and signified, the concept that the sign represents (solid or physical matter). Back home, we would recognize a small, long-legged running mammal with long ears and call it a “rabbit” or a “hare”. On Great Lakes Earth, the signifier is still “rabbit”, but the signified would just be a more athletic, lowland-thriving variety of the hyrax family.
Let’s put two elephants together, one from back home and one from Great Lakes Earth. At first, they would superficially be identical, but a Great Lakes Earth elephant would, to our eyes, be an elephant only if the similarities between the two exceed the minimum of 75%. The remaining 25% would be minor changes in size, behavior or environmental preferences.
Children tend to see two similar things and see them as one and the same. Most of them would call whales “fish”, rabbits “rodents”, chimpanzees “monkeys” and mollusks “shellfish”, even though whales are actually mammals, rabbits are related to rodents by ancestry only, chimpanzees are merely cousins of monkeys and mollusks aren’t really fish. Maybe, in a different alternate Earth, it would be neat to experiment with the biological rather than the semiotic idea of whales growing fins and gills, of rabbits being able to chew through wood, of men sharing a common ancestor with tree-dwelling, long-tailed monkeys and shellfish being actual fish with affinity to shells. But on Great Lakes Earth, that would be too alien.
In studying alternate Earths, one must beware of putting too much faith on taxonomy, because genetic, ecological or skeletal differences, no matter how small or insignificant, can throw anyone off royally. Sometimes, familiar names are thrown in merely for the sake of translation to people back home. Such things are known simply as “common name distinctions”.
3. “…it’s just words on paper.” Stan Lee, comic book artist
Creating an alternate Earth provides no physical, solid or concrete change to reality. Write a word on paper, or type it on paper, and what happens to your surroundings at the moment? Nothing. You can write whatever you want, but if you want to kick off Alien Space Bats or the Rule of Cool, I’d advise you to practice caution while you are at this.
On a personal note, I use Wikipedia to look up the different groups of plants and animals, and they come in two colors — blue and red. Blue means you can click on the word and it opens up to a different article. Red means you can’t. In writing a mass extinction casualty list, if the name of the group is red, it’s dead. (Yes, I know it rhymes, but it’s the only way to bring the point across.)
4. Evolution is random.
The banner on the top left does not promote Creationism. Instead, it is a warning against the elementary delusion that evolution is fixed and linear. But there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Taxonomic cousins, similar features that evolve independently — those, to name a few, turn the evolutionary timeline into a vast, more complex spider’s web. Natural selection does not have a fixed rate or speed — certain changes in the environment could make one species evolve over a few thousand years, and those same changes could make another species evolve over a few generations.
Like I said in the previous philosophy, one must practice caution. If I get rid of Tiktaalik before fish became amphibians, either a) someone else would take over or b) I would be in big trouble. If I get rid of the cynodonts before radiating into mammals, either a) someone else would take over or b) I would be in big trouble. If I get rid of the dinosaurs before splitting into both ancestral and avian, there is no “a” or “b” — I would be in SERIOUSLY big trouble, nothing else to it. If I pit Homo in the same environment as Allosaurus — well, you get the idea.
5. “Write only what is important and eternal.” Anton Chekhov, author and playwright
In writing the history of Great Lakes Earth, what I write is what you’ll get — no more and no less. So the Cambrian Explosion happened earlier on Great Lakes Earth than back home, and not much else happened until 444.4 million years ago. If something happened in-between, I’d simply mention it. Simple as that. Once again, it’s just words on paper, so you have the freedom to play God. Scribes in ancient history don’t recall daily humdrums because they are routine, not exciting or attention-grabbing, and therefore not worth mulling over.
In writing Great Lakes Earth, each change in environment comes with a casualty list of any plant and animal using the traditional scientific classification. The ranks of Genus or Species won’t be included simply because it overcomplicates the casualty lists.
6. “It is in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.” Charles Dickens, author
The “influence” upon my “present” is the reality that Earth itself is flexible. Continents crash and split. Lakes fill and dry up. Rivers change one way and then the other. Mountains lord and crumble. Sea levels rise and fall. Ice ages come and go.
Earth’s recent geologic past holds the greatest interest. During the ice ages, North America, Africa and Australia had large, freshwater lakes that would greatly influence the continents’ climate and habitats. Timing couldn’t be more convenient, for I have a personal prejudice against deserts, and desertification is one of the progressing environmental crises we are currently suffering. Putting the large lakes of the past onto the continents of the present would seem the ideal choice, if only to connect them via for-us-nonexistant rivers.
For millions of years, Beringia could not make up its mind. One moment, it’s a sea. The next, it’s a bridge. And back again. So I’ve decided that Beringia would be open for PERMANENT business, connecting North America to Asia.
The Siberian Traps were the source of the worst catastrophe in the history of Earth’s biota. What are they now? Nothing. 252 million years of erosion had reduced them to pale shadows of their former selves, a geographic landmark that, in the grand scheme of the planet, just isn’t worth phoning home about. But setting the Siberian Eruptions at a younger date would make them more obvious, more impressive, and less would be lost to erosion.
The Mediterranean Sea used to be a larger, less restricted body called the Tethys. Fortunately, I can open it up again by physically getting rid of some 21st-century political boundaries. (It’s better to start from a 2D map than a 3D map.)
7. “The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.” Carl Sagan, author and scientist
The geological process of fossilization is so brutal that only a lucky percentage of the picture would ever be recovered, and that’s frustrating for paleontologists but an opportunity for imaginative speculators. Let me throw in a couple examples. The giant panda is a bamboo specialist. The black-footed ferret is a prairie dog specialist. Will a bunch of bones tell us that? Can we EVER find out the TRUE total of tyrannosaur species, or entelodont distribution? Bones don’t tell us if they are flexible enough to face change or if they have specific selections of food, habitat and weather preferences. So we have to use our greatest weapon — our imagination — to fill in the gap.
