One thing you learn very quickly here in the
mountains of North Carolina is that the weather can turn on a dime. Wake up in
the morning and it’s nice and sunny; by noon the clouds have come over the
ridgeline and the rain is falling. If you’re really unlucky, by nightfall the
temperatures have dropped and the rain has turned to snow. If you don't know what I mean, take a look at some of Laurie's pics of Winter Storm Goliath that hit New Mexico recently.
This is my first winter here, so I haven’t
experienced all that Mother Nature has to offer, but I’ve learned enough to be
wary. If I were honest, I’d have to say I absorbed that suspicion at my own
mother’s knee. In the days before wide interstate highways, she never went home
to West Virginia for a visit between the months of October and May. Heck, even
after the interstates were built she stayed off the switchbacks leading to her
little mountain hometown in the dead of winter. You just never knew when a
storm would blow in and leave those mountain curves deadly with ice.
I read an article recently that put this in
focus. A woman from the city had moved to rural Montana and was struck by the
way the weather was a constant presence, a force to be reckoned with in a way
she’d never experienced in her urban life. I imagine anyone living in the
Rockies, the Appalachians, Tornado Alley, the Snow Belt, hurricane-prone coasts
or the flood plain of any river knows what she was talking about. In those
places you watch the weather report obsessively, whether you’re a farmer or
fisherman or not. You watch the sky. And if things start looking ugly, you
batten down.
Writers of contemporary or historical romance
are fond of using the weather as a major plot device, or at least part of the
setting. How many lovers have been stranded by snowstorms or caught in
rainstorms and forced to seek shelter alone together? Floods and hurricanes
wreak havoc, too, though they tend to be messy. The long-term effect of drought
can be a plot point for some stories, causing folks to almost lose the ranch,
for example.
In SF and SFR, though, the weather very
rarely plays a part. Oh, sure, you could have an ion storm in space, or a solar
flare or two. Post-apocalyptic stories set on a ruined Earth do pose some
weather-related problems for their characters—most often drought. Cormac
McCarthy’s The Road is an exception;
it rains or snows constantly in the nuclear winter of his book, to the misery
of his characters.
Occasionally characters leave their
spaceships and go “dirtside” on an actual planet, where they are subject to
that planet’s weather. But SFR writers are usually so enamored of the wonders
of space that planetary weather is often the last thing on their minds. If the
visuals are anything to go by (movies and TV shows), all the planets our
characters are visiting are either vast, hot desert wastelands or vast, cold,
desert wastelands. AVATAR is a notable exception. It is beautiful and full of
life, but where is the weather? Couldn’t Jake and Neytiri have benefitted from
a timely rainstorm?
 |
| The mines of Rura Penthe? Or maybe just Alaska. |
Maybe our limited vision of planetary weather
has been formed by the two screen giants of SF—STAR TREK and STAR WARS, both of
which seem overly fond of desert planets. There’s a very good reason for this—deserts
are easy to find and film in here on Earth. In TREK’s case, there were lots of
desert film locations within easy distance of L.A. back in the Classic series
days. I’m sure George Lucas thought the desert locations for Tattooine looked
sufficiently exotic to be on some other planet. Or think of the ice fields of
Rura Penthe, the prison planet Kirk and McCoy are sentenced to in STAR TREK VI—surely
no place on Earth could be that harsh!
Actually Earth has some pretty spectacular
places—and corresponding weather. We really have to put our minds to work to
come up with something more astounding. Methane rain. Phosphorescent sand
storms. Walls of lighting. Or maybe just a nice, sunny day that turns nasty in
the way one does some places on Earth.
The details of setting can be more than just
bulkheads and decking, stale air and food from a replicator. Spaceships can be
very confining and, really, they are only good for getting our characters from
one place to another unless the purpose is to write the SFR equivalent of a
drawing room drama or mystery. Let the story—and the characters—get out and
stretch their legs once in a while. They just might see something no one has
ever seen before.
Cheers,
Donna
