Being at the Purbeck Literary Festival this week got me out to a beautiful venue on a beautiful sunny spring day. We were at Durlston Country Park, a stunning cliff-top setting where we were surrounded by sky and water. The vast expanse of openness couldn't fail to lift the spirits.
The sky I was looking out on was standard Earth blue but it's got me wondering what variations we'll have in our SF stories. I guess it depends on whether we want to people the planet with humans or not how wild we want our skies to get. If we want the atmosphere to be one humans can breathe then that limits its chemical composition to one familiar to us. But perhaps instead of being the familiar blue it might be more jade green, or have a reddish tint to the blue.
The night sky of our planet might be very different from Earth's. Is the planet so far from the galactic centre that you can't see the misty veil of the Milky Way overhead? Or are we in a different galaxy altogether where the stars are totally unfamiliar? What about moons? None, one, two, or multiple moons like our gas giant planets? How many suns? The planet might be in a binary system. That would really confuse human diurnal rhythms. And the shadows would be confusing and unsettling too.
What lives in our alien sky? Birds? Are they dangerous predators, even to humans? Can we see alien flying machines out of our window? Is there a purple-clouded storm on the horizon? Or a plague of deadly insects? Or do your aliens live in sky cities that float permanently through the clouds?
I haven't even started on space stations, satellites, or surveillance systems. Skies are big places, places for big dreams.
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