Canvas

I wanted a large world! One where I could try any sort of culture/government/society and see how it affected its neighbors and its larger trading neighborhood (yes I have studied economics). But I wanted to be able to experiment and yet have many other “regions” far enough away that they would be unaffected by my experiment, so that I could try other experiments. In short I needed a world with a large surface area but with a natural explanation for having pockets of kingdoms that are culturally isolated from each other.

At this point I want to take a side diversion to a novel I read many years ago (probably in the early 80’s). I don’t remember its name or the author, but it was science fiction and set on a world very different from earth. The whole known world for the native inhabitants was a great river valley winding down from the crustal surface of the planet to the bottom of a large impact crater. The surface of the world was covered in ice, too cold for a gaseous atmosphere. However the deeper down the river valley the deeper into the crust the warmer it got, the thicker the atmosphere and the more habitable the land became.

I decided to make Argand in a similar manner. Imagine a planet many times the diameter of earth. The surface too cold for an atmosphere, but pepper it with craters and massive river valleys winding to the crater floors. Overt time the craters would fill with water and become the seas and oceans of the world. I could group craters together to create open areas of habitable land. Alternatively I could have isolated craters with only a thin rim of habitability between the impossibly high mountains of the crater walls and the sea of water that has collected in the bottom.

Almost perfect for what I wanted in a world. However to have a super large earth means having higher gravity, but I wanted a roughly earth normal gravity, so I had to make the planet hollow, or at least a lot more porous than earth. This presents a bit of a problem for physics because in the real world rocks, even strong igneous rocks cannot resist gravity and the extreme pressure deep in the earth, they collapse and fill in any cavities in “geological” short time frames. So I imagined that rock is generally stronger on Argand than on Earth, coupled with innate planetary magic’s linked to its geothermal cycles that keep the large caverns and porous nature of the planet intact.

I have a strong feeling that Argand would not stand up to the scrutiny of a physicist or a geologist. However the ideas had enough “internal logic” to hang together for me. So Argand was born in a hail of meteors and the slow trickle of water over eons of time.