Hello, dreamers. Another week in what’s become my midsummer rhythm. After completing Filth on Saturday night, I have yet another unfinished short story I’m working on. And of course work continues on Aquarius 1.

With the end of July on the horizon, my research has entered a new phase. After spending the better part of a month reading up first on mass extinctions and then on various marine taxa, I’m now beginning to put it all together. I’m on the verge of constructing an alien biosphere.

With that said, here’s the latest on my new work-in-progress:

Aquarius 1

Last year, when I first got the idea for Aquarius 1, I knew right off the bat I wanted my watery exomoon to feature kelp forests. But that presented a problem: without dry landmass, there would be no mammals. That meant no sea otters. So what organism would be able to control the sea urchin population?

The answer, as it turned out, was that the question was moot. Urchins on Earth nearly went extinct long ago due to predation. Those that survived did so by migrating from the deep ocean to coastal regions. There, they evolved thicker tests (shells) to withstand the crash of waves, which made them more resistant to predation.

An exomoon without dry land wouldn’t have coasts. So, if life there evolved much the way life on our planet did, no urchins.

This illustrates the importance of research, even for science fiction. By tracing the evolutionary history of a single type of marine organism (echinoderms) I found a major point of divergence from our planet’s evolutionary history. And I was reminded of the importance of evolution, and the outsized role it plays in sculpting a planet.

As characters in The Ursa Frontier say, evolution is simply life responding to its environment. I’ve now spent years researching the evolutionary history of life on Earth for my novels. Through that work, I’ve gained a deep appreciation for just how much the nature and history of our planet has influenced its biosphere. Mass extinctions are the most obvious example, typically caused by long periods of intense vulcanism or meteor impacts. But take the urchin again. Sea urchins were once cosmopolitan in Earth’s oceans, with many species inhabiting the benthic zones of the deep ocean. But those early urchins weren’t driven to extinction by volcanoes or space rocks; they were wiped out by other organisms.

Evolution, particularly in marine environments, is an endless game of cat and mouse. Predators thrive by developing new tools and strategies for preying on animals with insufficient defenses. Prey animals must then develop new defensive strategies or face extinction. And if they do go extinct, the predators that subsisted on them must either adapt to survive on something else or follow their prey into oblivion.

One of my long-running mottos while writing hard sci-fi is “The reader doesn’t need to know how everything works, but I do.” More than likely I won’t be writing passages in Aquarius 1 about the characters studying marine worms. But they’re going to be there, and I need to know exactly how they impact their ecosystem.

Thus, when creating an alien biosphere for a novel I have to start small. In The Ursa Frontier that meant starting with plant life: the very bottom of a terrestrial food chain. In marine food chains, invertebrates occupy the bottom rung (well, after plankton). So my work on building Thamiyn’s biosphere starts there. Coral, worms, sea slugs, bivalves and gastropods; all of them have a part to play. So this week I’m focusing on the little things, so I can build upward from there to the really cool stuff.

It’s no small task. But I’ve done it before. I can do it again. – MK