The World Building Blogfest: Geography and Climate

A quick note.  Anyone who wants to read my post for the Lunar Lovin' Hop, click HERE.  Anyone looking for my post for the Re-Introduce Yourself Blogfest can find it HERE.

The World Building Blogfest is a week-long blogging event dedicated to the complicated process of creating a world in your fictional writing.  This is an activity that requires a lot of forethought, so it's good that we can all share some of world building with one another.  Check out Sharon Bayliss to learn more about this awesome blogfest!

Today is dedicated to the geography and climate.  This aspect is important.  As a science fiction writer, I frequently have to build an entire world from scratch, and the geography and climate are crucial pieces of the puzzle.

For this blogfest, I'm pulling out a series that I'm not currently working on, but plan to resume work on sometime this year.  If anything, this blogfest will help get the wheels turning in my head for that.

My Terra Minor series is set on a colony world.  Humans and a race called the Kentari share this world.  I'm going to share excerpts from a prologue that I'm still not sure if I'm going to keep or not.  Either way, it summarizes the geography of the world while establishing the physical distribution of the world's inhabitants.

         Dwindling resources and overcrowding on Earth and the Mars colony drove Terrans to seek new worlds.  Terra Minor was discovered in 2262, and the first sensor sweep showed a world almost perfect for human habitation.

Terra Minor had an Earth-like atmosphere, though with a soft violet hue and markedly higher oxygen content.  The planet orbited a double star system, and was itself orbited by three moons.  The gravity was 95 percent of Earth-normal, and Terra Minor orbited its suns every 397 of its 25 hour days.  Changes in season were subtle.  The average high temperature on the main continent was approximately 32ºC (90ºF) during the summer and 25ºC (77ºF) during the winter.  Though significantly warmer on average than many regions on Earth, the temperature at least tended to be steady, enabling people to become comfortable quickly.  Volatility existed primarily in the storms that brewed over the warm oceans, but the truly damaging storms occurred only once every few years, and the worst of them typically remained in the equatorial regions.

However, there was one obstacle that stood to prevent colonization.  The world in question was already inhabited.

         Over six million members of the Kentari race resided there.  This world wasn’t the cradle of their civilization, though they’d called this world home for several centuries.  Their settlements spread across two of the three continents that sprawled across the planet’s watery surface.  The largest continent contained the bulk of the “indigenous” population with a little over 5.5 million inhabitants.  The remaining Kentari lived on the smallest continent, which also housed the highest ranking members of their government.  The third continent was largely an uninhabitable desert due to its location on the equator, but solitary Kentari often sought enlightenment there.