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http://ift.tt/2BAicuCSo I need more worldbuilding refinement for this solarpunk mammoth story. Specifically, I need to figure out the flavor of Actual Fucking Magic I’m using for communications technology. So if anyone is interested in helping me work this out… I tried talking it out with Dude and he was spectacularly unhelpful. Sometimes we have great speculative/technological conversations (over dinner, he explained how languages compile into the Java environment), but when it comes to fictional stuff, I have trouble getting him engaged. So.
I linked earlier to the concept of solarpunk, which I’m sort of only semi-adhering to. It’s a high/low tech futuristic thing, with minimal fossil fuel kinda deals, but a lot of solar and geothermal kind of technologies. (Probably wind, too.)
The worldbuilding element I’m throwing in is that there’s a lot of interference from solar flares and fluctuations in the earth’s magnetosphere, which is an ongoing and well-known problem. So–
everyone has, like, ham radios, and there are antennas all around, pretty well-maintained.
Society’s stratified into three main groups, locally to our story anyway– there’s a city or two, pretty densely-populated, filled with academics and manufacturing stuff, with probably a secondary city with a port a short distance away, which gets much more distant traffic from boats and the like, and is a regional food source of fish and such. That’s not plot-significant that I know of, but it does exist. These larger population centers are not self-sustaining; they rely on trade for food.
The food is largely produced by a settled agrarian population, which lives along well-maintained roadways that go out into the countryside, particularly along a couple of river-bottom areas. They farm enough to generate a surplus that supports the cities, and they trade for manufactured goods and possibly pay some sort of tithe to the academic structure there in return for repair expertise for their higher-tech goods. There are probably also factories along the rivers, using water power, to manufacture things like textiles, and to mill grains, and possibly even heavier manufacturing.
The third group are the pastoralists, who migrate seasonally, and manage large herds. They live more like hunter-gatherers, but some of them move to the agrarian regions, or even the city, during the winters, and overwinter there. They rely on trade for a lot of their food. Sometimes they sell part of their herd in the late autumn, in return for the supplies they need for overwintering; they sell the animals alive, and then they’re driven in to the city for slaughter and distribution of the meat and hides and so on. But this varies from group to group. Some are more self-sustaining and rely more on only things they can provide.
But they all have a radio. And, because the sunspots issue is frequent enough to be a known issue, they also all keep flocks of pigeons that home to the various radio antennae, so they can all send limited numbers of messages to one another. (This has a limitation that pigeons can only be pretty laboriously trained to have more than one home roost, so most of them would be straight-up A->B pigeons, so every once in a while you’d have to send someone back from B to A with a cage full of pigeons, since the silly things only fly the one direction. But since this is a society where people do travel pretty often, it wouldn’t be difficult to arrange that sort of thing as a routine. They probably have a postal system too.)
Back to the pastoralists: some of them are custodians of herds of mammoths. The mammoths, genetically reverse-engineered many generations ago, are generally considered sentient, and have a more or less symbiotic relationship with the specific humans. In the winter, the mammoths come down out of the mountains where they’ve spent the summer, and gather together into larger groups in sheltered valleys to overwinter. At the end of winter is when most of them drop their calves. And after the calves are born, in the spring they bring them in for a festival with the human herders, where the humans bring out their new young for introductions. As part of this festival, the humans pull the mammoths’ shedding winter coats, which they can collect and use or sell. (Similar to rooing a primitive sheep like a Soay.) In return, the humans give the mammoths vet care and food and whatever the mammoths would want, I’d have to worldbuild that a little more.
Now, here comes the thing I am struggling with.
When they genetically-reverse-engineered the mammoths, they figured they should be able to talk to them. Elephants clearly have a form of language, and most importantly demonstrate that they have the cognitive ability and memory to learn complex things. So, for the mammoths, the engineers built in a capability to use a kind of translator, so that they could make some kind of communication that was intelligible for humans.
But, what??
They wear radio collars so that the humans can find them. It’s a deep honor, for the humans, to have the access codes to the radio collars. A big part of the introduction of the young to one another is the fitting of new radio collars. Possibly, the humans have radio transmitters as well, which the mammoths can use to find them; I haven’t worked it out. There may be a mechanism for the mammoths to send communications over a distance, using these radio collars.
But, most importantly, these collars have the communicators in them, somehow.
But what?
It can’t be text-based; a mammoth’s vision, elephant-like, would not be super acute. I don’t think they’d be able to see well enough to read. (I’m having trouble finding sources.) It could be audio-based, wherein the animal is trained from early youth in how to make the right sequence of noises for the translator to spit out a limited series of words at the other end, or maybe display a text readout for a human to read. But I had wanted it to be a thing the mammoths could use with one another for emphasis, too, that they’d be really used to using this thing even when there weren’t humans around. (I really want to emphasize that they’re autonomous and use these things of their free will, and derive real benefit from it.) However I don’t want the noise it makes to be super annoying, so. Elephants communicate using a variety of methods (the link up there where I mentioned their language goes over this exhaustively, it’s phenomenal)– vocal/audio, seismological (vocal rumbles and stomping), gestural (posture, movement), and chemical (they have very keen senses of smell, and use their own body odors and secreted hormones/chemicals in ways humans barely understand). But, clearly, the translator is going to be something that only will work for their deliberate communications that they want translated, so it can use just one mechanism, either gestural or vocal I think.
Now, I have room in the world-building to get pretty fucking weird with this. Since they’re genetically engineered and this is, after all, a high-tech society with generations of refinements. I could have it so that they’ve been genetically engineered to have capability to link-up with a brain-wave-reading machine, or something. Psychic mammoths. But that seems sort of far-fetched.
Because here’s the plot thing: the sunspots are affecting the communicators, so the mammoths are aware that there’s a problem. Not only can the humans not get pings off their radio collars, they can’t in return communicate either close-in or at a distance. Now, their own society can get along okay without this, but they do rely on the humans, and they don’t like not being able to reliably communicate. (Perhaps some of the herds are in areas that have less law and order, in which humans might injure or even hunt mammoths; having working communicators is better protection against poachers, and can be crucial in negotiations– if they want to appeal to human authorities in those regions, a working communicator is essential. The herders generally can read mammoth body language and understand their culture, but the agrarian or urban populations of humans generally have no idea and sort of vaguely consider the mammoths animals, even in areas where the mammoths’ migrations take them through. [by the way this kills my thought that the communicators could be two-part where you need a receiver to get the translation; that won’t help with non-herder humans.]
So that’s the plot of the book, mostly; a herder goes to appeal to the city’s academics for help in fixing the communicators during an exceptionally long period of solar activity.
I just need more ideas for how those communicators could work.
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