Writing in Binary
How I had to incorporate kilometers-wide intertidal marshes, earthquakes, and tsunamis into my worldbuilding.
Note: This is a post based on something I wrote on my old blog in 2018.
I have worked from maps for science fiction stories since I was in my mid-teens. On the early Internet, when I started exploring worldbuilding tutorials, that is what they recommended. This post discusses how my thinking has evolved as I have gained more knowledge and experience over time, with the case example of the binary planet system where most of my work takes place — even though the novellas I’ve published so far do not take place on these planets.
In the small town where my family lived, even with the Scholastic Book Fair that granted me access to Animorphs, the speculative fiction was slim. The public librarian who had curated the one-room collection had been vehemently anti-specfic because she considered it Satanic, and the woman who succeeded her had her work cut out for her rebalancing the collection.1 There were three shelves on one bookcase with everything in fantasy, scifi, and horror for a long time. What this meant on a practical level is that Tolkien, Le Guin, and other famous authors were my only samples until we purchased library access to the big city library (a big city in rural Midwestern America at the time was 40,000 people) across the river. Tolkien did conlangs and had maps and solid worldbuilding. Le Guin put effort into all of that, too. And so did the people who were first giving worldbuilding advice online.2
Almost immediately after I started brainstorming about these worlds, my worldbuilding had a binary planetary system in it, Ameisa-Laseå. I remember taking a speculative fiction class from Professor Bill Oram at Smith College where we read Gene Wolfe’s Fifth Head of Cerberus, and the thing I loved the most about that was getting to read about a binary planet system from an author with significantly more worldbuilding experience than I had. That was back before I had figured out things like tidal dynamics and the structure of dry and wet bands of climate by latitude, but I have already mentioned in another post that I minored in astronomy in part so I could get my worldbuilding solid, with only a few fantastical carve-outs. Ameisa and Laseå are in a 2:3 rotation — Ameisa rotates twice for every three times Laseå rotates. Based on orbital dynamics, it’s highly probable that they should actually be tidally locked. Maybe it’s a point of scientific weakness that they are not, or maybe they are gems-in-the-dust planets that formed a stable 2:3 (maybe the small moon orbiting both of them is involved in that), but I am committed to that ratio.

Laseå and Ameisa influence each other tidally a lot more than Earth and the Moon do despite being farther apart — they pull on the oceans, the rocks, and everything else. Ameisa is slightly larger than Earth at 1.1M🜨, and Laseå is slightly smaller, at 0.9M🜨. The mantles of the sister worlds are very active — lots of volcanism and earthquakes — and it also means that the tides are enormous. In fact, Ameisa and Laseå are the most diverse in terms of ethnicities and languages both for how long they have had humans on them and for how much the geography isolates people during collapse epochs when the logistics of intercontinental trade and human travel require navigating immense tidal marshes or a highly variable water level on the many continents that terminate in cliffs. There are regions of both planets where nobody lives because they are so active with volcanism and earthquakes that those regions are pummeled almost constantly by tsunamis, such as the Shēdak’s eastern coast, or where human habitation is zoned to only a few areas, such as in Qawākam. (I also looked at innovators and engineers on Earth who were designing tsunami-proof buildings for those societies that do live at the edge of major tsunami zones.) One of Ameisa’s major collapse epochs was caused by a supervolcanic eruption. “Longing for Water” describes an area of Laseå that is the only place where the high and low tide water marks allow for a city to be close to the ocean.
At the same time, for most historical periods, these planets are paradises. They have fairly stable temperatures, with predictable seasons. The fruit baron families in the Canyons of Narahja on Ameisa, while they have encouraged edible trees and vines to grow, have their status more for their familial knowledge and logistical control over a highly productive and generous human-curated natural ecosystem than for grueling, active cultivation. Fruit baron families are highly respected in their communities because they bring prosperity and trade goods during the staggered harvest seasons. The vast intertidal marshes are home to tidally-growing grains — the bread basket of millions and millions of people.
Most of what I figured out about geology has come from my professional career. As a science librarian, one particularly fruitful point of outreach is going to department colloquia whenever I can. From a professional standpoint, it demonstrates interest in what researchers care about, and they appreciate the effort. On a personal writing hobby level, doing this has given me broad exposure to a variety of geoscience topics while at the same time taking the temperature of other scientists’ reactions and the types of questions they ask, an opportunity that most of the public does not have. This is where I learned about the aforementioned bands of wet and dry zones in rotating planets in the mid-2010s.3 There is very little desert on Ameisa, even in the zones that are typically dry. On the map below, Bisa, Marzū, and Qapwā are equatorial desert due to an ecological catastrophe. Exposure to planetary scientists has taught me about the types of terrain common on planets. On Ameisa, for example, the region called the Canyons is actually chaos terrain, and it’s the oldest rock on the planet — the chaos terrain extends even beyond the shores of Narahja to the islands of Nasja, which are the peaks and plateaus of the terrain as it tapers off towards the other continents.
Meditations on binary planet system dynamics led to Kalqaiki, now uninhabited for millennia. (Context: My timeline in Aeon Timeline goes on for ~35,000 years.) At one point in the distant past, a bunch of rich people found this island range and decided to turn it into a recreational/resort playground. It was Ameisa’s first post-settlement spacefaring renaissance, the wealthy were egregiously out of touch with the masses, and they left a lot of infrastructure on the island range to deal with the inconvenient earthquakes and tsunamis.
The people who lived on Kalqaiki for generations after the sunset of that civilization were the descendants of the voluntary and indentured staff who set up their lives on these islands. Kalqaiki was also the only place on Ameisa with a plant that could be ground to make legit blue pigments.4 It grows in the intertidal marshes there, and for a long time, the plant was not grown anywhere else.

The map above is rough — a story doodle of the islands. Kalq- is a prefix that loosely translates to all in the conlang, which I added to the map after doing a bit of linguistic work on the three languages spoken on the islands. The conlang includes a phrasebook section with sentences like:
Ude nimdarmo ði xixto dið nuaxe. The earthquake forecast today is bad. Lit., Forecast with respect to earthquakes at today bad.
To amu zi, muðpaiðo sis etpu ðai? Is a tsunami coming? Lit., Yes or no, directionally here me-wards comes tsunami?
Emo nuaxe dið mebo? What is the strength of the earthquake?
Podel pilo tal nimnuaxe. The earthquake is a 9.4.
For writing planetary systems, whether it’s Ameisa-Laseå and their binary configuration or Mntaka-Atara at Trojan Lagrange points, I try to go into the science with enough precision to get a good enough grasp of how basic things like geology and geography impact the daily lives of the people living there — not to write natural disaster fiction (most of the time). One can go to talks (or watch them on YouTube — a lot of universities put their colloquia up there during the COVID-19 lockdown!), read or listen to some books, or even look at preprints on the arXiv or open-access planetary sciences publications (especially what we know about exoplanets) to see how scientists think about these very different worlds. And then the maps, conlangs, and stories will just get even more fun and immersive.
At school, most of the books for kids my age were too easy to read, so I stuck to ghost stories because they were entertaining. I love ghosts! This was before YA really took off as a thing, so I went right from kids’ fiction to adult fiction. I still don’t read YA very often because I am picky about the fiction I read, and it’s not often that a YA piece passes all of my nope criteria.
I didn’t learn that most writers do not make this much effort when creating anymore until I made an effort in the late 2010s to join writing Twitter conversations, which were an ill fit for me because it’s about when I realized that I’m a worldbuilder who happens to write niche artisanal stories. I saw a well-known author who has won awards push back against even the basics of writing a naming conlang (a conlang which is undeveloped and which has the sole purpose of giving personal and place-names a unified cultural feel, usually made by selecting sounds and syllable creation rules) in favor of writing names based on vibes and reader expectations. Commercial writers work very differently, in other words.
One of the reasons global warming on Earth is causing changes in rain patterns is that the equator is wet, an area beyond the equator in both directions is dry, and then it becomes wet on towards the temperate zones and the poles. The equatorial wet zone and the dry bands that follow them in the northern and southern hemispheres grow wider as a planet warms, according to many scientists who study such things. I live at the bottom of the wet zone in New England in the 4°C warming scenario, although much of New England will have low habitability due to coastal storms.
There is no word for blue in most of my conlangs; I almost always use the word opaque or some variant because blue eyes, the sky, and the sea are all illusions of color. For darker blues, much of the time I write the words purple or indigo, we’re actually talking about dark blue shades and/or navy — color words occupy a different semantic space in my work than they do in traditional English usage. Of course, purple and indigo just as often mean colors we assign to the semantic space of purple and indigo, too.