A Photoshop speed-paint of a vista on Darkover, the land of the red sun. Why not? Photoshop can do stuff easily that I struggled with in acrylic, namely how to get those red light highlights. Marion Z. Bradley wasn't very scientific so she never quite explained how a life-bearing planet could orbit a red giant star. Presumably a red giant would have already erased all life from the surface of its planets. But you never know, it's a big universe and there are a lot of planets out there. What do you mean, Darkover isn't in this universe or any other? I illustrate it, so it must exist. What, you say "bad philosophy?" Oh, bummer.
2 comments:
Seems to me you could probably get a habitable planet near a read giant if only it were close enough. Of course, it does tend to be the inner planets that actually have solid surfaces, and the red giant might have eaten up all of its inner planets as it expanded. But maybe it captured a moon from a Jupiter-like world... You'd think that being a physics person, I would know. But I'm a lazy physics person. [googles] Here are some people talking about it.
Anyway it makes for beautiful images...
Another idea I had about Darkover would be that perhaps it is a (possibly) displaced rocky planet which is in very close orbit around a red dwarf. The "month" on Darkover is about 40 Earth days in length but perhaps that is an entire ORBIT rather than a lunar cycle. Darkover had four moons so the cycle would be hard to compute anyway. Bradley hints in some of her books that the native Darkovan "aliens" who are very long-lived once had a great civilization on the planet when the sun was brighter, but they are now the last remnants of the population and are dying out. This would also suggest that Darkover's star is variable over a long period of time, enough to see a civilization decline.
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