Since I recently caught up on a decade of a podcast I like, I needed to find something new to listen to on my commutes. Over on Bluesky someone mentioned Worldbuilding for Masochists, which as someone who finds worldbuilding fun, I started on yesterday. since each episode is about an hour, I can get in about three a day while I'm driving to and from work.
I am enjoying it immensely but something in the second episode stuck in my craw. I write fantasy mostly and my understanding is the three hosts are also fantasy writers. So I sort of turned my nose up at the idea that your world cosmology has to be based 100% in our modern known sciences. Yes, a lot of laymen know that the star a planet orbits dictates its day-night cycles and seasons, and that moons and tides are interlinked. But when it comes down to it, I don't think general readers are going to call an author out if their seasons don't much up with some realistic axial tilt or other orbital sciences.
Can I not have the mythology be true? The land is the physical body of some being the characters would think of as a god? Can there not be two suns whose unstable energy exchanges can't be shielded by some other god-like entity? I'm not knocking using real modern science but I also don't want to have to be an astronomer, geologist, and biologist just to write my book.
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