Worldbuilding cooked
I’m 60,000+ words into a new novel, Dyer’s Daughter. Set far in the future with illegal human genetic experiments on a terraformed world that was eventually abandoned, the people reverting technologically, their past lost. Originally the planet was low in surface minerals so the terraforming involved adding deposits from meteorites processed at the geosynchronous space station where the terraforming crew was based. Thousands of years later, the added minerals are depleted, with catastrophic consequences.
It’s a cool premise that holds a mirror to our own environmental doomsday clock. However, I know nothing about the subject. I love worldbuilding, but have always left the science behind it a bit fuzzy (a lot fuzzy?). This however was too specific. Enter StackExchange’s worldbuilding: Worldbuilding Stack Exchange
Some quick searches and I had everything I needed on low surface mineral planets to support my premise and make what happens in the story plausible for the reader. Easier was the geosynchronous space station, aka stationary moon. Soon I had the cone of visibility from the surface and the distances involved given the world was earth-like, all in detail. I knew where a city had to be for the moon to be near the horizon, where it had to be for the moon to be overhead, and how far apart the cities were.
