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Worldbuilding Blogfest #1: Geography & Climate
It’s going to be interesting trying to get these posted daily, because we haven’t had Internet at home since last Monday, and the nearest coffee shop is a 12-mile drive. Still, the Worldbuilding Blogfest starts on Monday, and I have my posts all roughed out. I’m posting this one a bit early, due to the aforementioned connection issues. Technically it’s due to go up Monday, but, uh, it’s Monday in some parts of the world? Ahem.
I thought about which world to develop for this — it’s not like I don’t have enough of ‘em — but I decided to work on Karamanda, because it really does need a lot of developing, so this will be a good opportunity to work on it. Karamanda is the setting of a short story that some of you beta-read for me in an earlier draft, titled “The Angel Killers” at the time. (It’s now called “Angelcutters” and I’ve tried shopping the finished version around, but can’t sell it. I’ve thought about trying Karamanda as an experiment in crowdfunding, since I would like to write more stories in the world, but other projects keep taking priority.)
Anyway, feel free to comment on any of these entries, critique what I’ve posted, or ask more questions. This is mostly brainstorming to figure things out, so input is welcome! Even if I take awhile to respond to things until we get reliable Internet again.
The Karamanda stories are, basically, hard-boiled P.I. stories set in a city in which everyone has wings. Here’s what’s coming up:
Day 1: Geography & Climate
Day 2: History & Politics
Day 3: Religion and/or Magic
Day 4: Food, Drink, Holidays & Culture
Day 5: Worldbuilding Excerpt
You can also see a list of participants and visit their blogs at the Worldbuilding Blogfest site and more details on each day’s topic here.
Karamanda: Geography & Climate (plus a brief Karamanda overview)
Karamanda is a city in the mountains, in which all the residents have wings. (I originally called it Marakanda, but as that is a real historical city on Earth and this is in no way based on it, I decided to swap some letters around.) On this world, there are no regular humans, but there are a number of different nonhuman species. The Karamandans are one of the most humanlike; they basically resemble humans except for wings and a few other minor differences which vary between the two types of residents; see the next paragraph. There is a very small minority population of other species in the city, but not very many of them, since the city is designed for flying people and the Karamandans are one of the only flying species. The “footbound” — Karamandan slang for wingless immigrants and residents who have lost the use of their wings for one reason or another — live for the most part in slums at the bottom of the city.
Technically, there are two different species of Karamandans who cannot produce viable offspring with each other. However, they don’t realize that they’re actually separate species, since both are basically built along similar lines; they simply think of the two types as composing two of Karamanda’s three social castes (with the footbound and immigrants being the third). The vast bulk of the city’s residents are the caste known as mezzano. They have gray or brown hawklike wings, dark hair and eyes, and look essentially human except for elongated toes for perching and a much larger ribcage and breastbone area than humans have, to anchor the flight muscles. The much smaller caste known as peregrines or Angels rule the city. They have white wings, all-black eyes (i.e. no whites to the eyes), a third eyelid, and a different facial structure from the mezzano. I’ll get into the city’s power structure in the History & Politics entry.
Okay – geography! Karamanda is a vertical city made of towers joined by support buttresses, a complicated and elaborate structure built of stone and concrete that sprawls all over the top of a single peak in a range of high, jagged mountains — think the Andes, or the Alaska Range end of the Rocky Mountains. These mountains (at least, the Karamanda part of them) are not as brutally high as the Andes, however — perhaps 10,000 to 12,000 feet, but with a great deal of vertical rise (that is, they start from pretty near sea level, as opposed to being on a plateau as the Himalayas are). They are located farther south than the Rockies, so they are cool in their heights, and quite hot closer to sea level.
Below the city itself, terraced farmland descends into the fertile valleys below. Some farm workers commute to and from the city; others live in villages lower down on the mountainside. There is a very strong correlation between one’s dwelling height and one’s social position, with the most powerful and wealthy, i.e. the Angels, living at the very top of the city.
A network of cargo trams connects Karamanda to the outside world; rows of tram towers march down the mountain into the valley, up the other side, and out to the world beyond. (I haven’t figured out how the trams are powered yet. At this point I figure their level of technology is somewhere around the early-to-mid second millennium A.D., but they don’t have gunpowder or widespread mechanization yet. I may change my mind about this.)
The weather at the top of the mountain is cool with a snowy winter. The Karamandan physiology is cold-tolerant; they are fairly compact with a layer of fat under the skin, and their bodies are partly feathered as well as their wings. (The Angels handle the cold less effectively than the mezzano; they’re originally from a somewhat warmer climate.) As one descends into the valley, it gets much warmer and more humid. I’ll figure out just what exactly grows down there in a future post. 
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Oh, and that is a WONDERFUL idea that they started out as flying fishermen, with spears and nets, and then became more urban (but of course there are still villages of fishers on the sea cliffs).
eeeee I love this! :D That's such a wonderful mental picture -- the brilliant blue ocean and white cliffs, and winged people flying around with spears ... hmmm, now that they're more oceanic, I wonder if I should give them brighter colors? I had wanted them to have hawk-type wings, but now I'm starting to be wooed by the idea of maybe giving them brighter colors or more interesting wing patterns. I could have different subgroups on different islands. (Heh, it's also a COMPLETELY different atmosphere than the story I wrote, which has a very dark, brooding, gloomy sort of feeling, in a cold rainy city where there's a lot of fog and mud and gloom. Bright Mediterranean cliffsides are basically the opposite of that. But I like this enough that I don't care if I have to rewrite a bunch of stuff. It'll probably be better for it!)
Perhaps I will sit down with some paper this afternoon and make a map of the islands, and figure out where all their city-states are ...
About the glass thing, I think that I had misunderstood you a little (sorry!), and I do see what you're saying, but I still don't really see the fragility issue being that much of a problem. They would perhaps have to be a little more careful than we are with small items on shelves, but once someone is an adult, they would know to keep their wings folded indoors. I do like the idea of their style of glassware being more solid and chunky rather than going for delicate and fragile, though. (Perhaps the really fragile items are incredibly expensive!)
and establish trade with the footbound farmers to very good conditions,
Actually, I hadn't meant that the farmers were footbound (I was probably very unclear about this, though). It's a low-status occupation, because one spends most of one's time on foot, but they're still regular flyers. The footbound are a relatively quite small proportion of the population, the people whose wings were injured or congenitally deformed or otherwise are incapable of flying properly (as well as immigrants). Now that I'm thinking it through, though, I'm thinking about doing away with the footbound stigma, at least to the extent that I had been thinking about before -- even though it kinda means that my plot doesn't work anymore -- because it really doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It feels unnecessarily dystopic; it basically amounts to throwing out the disabled to fend for themselves in the slums at the bottom of the city, and that doesn't feel like a very human thing to do. It might happen -- in fact, it probably does happen sometimes -- but having it happen on a societal level doesn't make a whole lot of sense.