Notes

This story was tough to “storify”. To really give it a tense and interesting plot, instead of just being a bloated biology lesson.

The goal was to explain one crucial step: animals start eating plants, allowing them to eat way more food with more ease, and thus become more large and complex. This is what this entire cycle is about. How life grew more and more efficient in consuming food, allowing living creatures to grow in complexity and skill too.

And then the story ends with one major event: the “Cambrian Explosion”. This was a period, many millions of years ago, in which the numbers and diversity of life under water suddenly exploded. Suddenly the oceans were filled and many different species of fish appeared. Researchers think a sudden increase in the amount of oxygen in the oceans played an important part.

Yeah, try putting that into a short, tense story ;)

Characteristics of Life

Eventually I decided to give Bella that little “book” in which she experiments with these “characteristics of life”. (Not the most mysterious plot, I admit. But readers like it when a story has a clear purpose and each chapter takes one step forward to reach it.)

These characteristics are (somewhat simplified and named more simply) …

• Breathing ( = the creature has to continually take oxygen from the environment and gives back carbondioxide by breathing out)
• Sensitivity ( = the creature can sense their environment and thus react to it)
• Movement ( = the creature can change or move in some way)
• Eating ( = the creature can take in nutrients and use them to grow and gain energy)
• Excretion ( = the creature can “excrete” material it doesn’t need anymore; e.g. peeing or sweating)
• Growth ( = the creature can grow larger and bigger over time)
• Procreation ( = the creature can bear children)

On the one hand, this is a good basis. Biology is about the part of nature that lives, so I wanted to discuss what life even means early on.

On the other hand, this definition only fits what humans know. If marshmen existed, they might not fit these characteristics in aaaany way. Because we only know life as it evolved on earth. Maybe marshmen don’t need to breathe, or to grow, or to eat. We consist of billions of cells—marshmen might be build from something different.

That’s why I wanted to end this story with this realization.

Things that are wrong

In reality, gods obviously had nothing to do with this development. It was, as always, evolution.

After millions of years, an animal evolved who could consume plants, by pure accident. (By absorbing the plant and using its particles. Animals had no clear mouth or teeth yet.) This animal turned out to have a big advantage over the rest! They could get more food, faster. So they bore more children and lived longer. This continued, time and time again, until all animals had these genes and could eat plants.

In the same way, it’s unlikely that animals—at this point—could sense as well as in this story. (And they can’t even do it well here!) In this story, they automatically flee from heat and fire. This is recognizable to people, like our reflex to pull our hand away from a hot pan.

In reality, animals at this point could only sense vaguely what happened in their environment, like temperature or light. And even if they sensed it, it would take a million years before a creature evolved—accidentally—to also respond to it.

About the timeline

When I sketched my first idea for the Saga of Life (when I was still a little kid), I had given … random years to each time period. I had no experience with writing or building worlds, so I did whatever. Not a great plan!

When I—as professional writer—aimed to properly kick off the Saga of Life, I decided to change this to a fully realistic timeline. For example, Earth formed around 4.5 billion years ago. Well, then, Somnia must be exactly as old!

But this also wasn’t a great plan. Such time scales are impossible to imagine for mere humans. Whenever I spoke about this project, whenever I tried to write tense and well-paced stories, I noticed people just could not fathom it. It’s “millions of years in which barely nothing happened”, but also “millions of years in which the most crucial things happened that made life as it is now possible”. Yeah, well, try writing an interesting story in 15,000 words that spans a million years of mostly nothing.

Eventually, I decided to do the same thing I did with the world map. I grabbed the real timeline of earth and I shrank it.

Everything until roughly the year 0 (AD) was divided by 1000. Dinosaurs didn’t go extinct 66 million years ago, but 66,000 years ago. This way I can still communicate the time scale of it all—and let gods try to find life for millions of years—without having it get in the way.

This also fit the story of the godchildren. They wanted too fast. As Hanah said: they could have walked around Somnia for billions of years before life arrived! But no, they wanted too quickly, and so they’re fast forwarding evolution. It’s an important message I want to spread throughout the Saga of Life.

What is 0 AD on Somnia? Also the birth of Christ? No. The year 0 on Somnia is based on a different, made-up, crucial event. This will become clear once more cycli appear …

However, I picked the year such that, from that moment on, the years roughly line up with history. The year 1919 (after that important event) is roughly the same as the year 1919 on earth.

It’s a simple fact: events and history only speed up over time. In one year today, we’re writing more history than in one year a thousand years ago. And so I wanted more “modern” stories (about the past thousands of years) to fit as neatly as possible in the timeline.

The Heavenly Objects

At first, I only wanted to have one or two objects come out of the gate. Objects of which I knew the story needed them.

But the more I wrote, the more I realized it was a great main thread. Each chapter a new object, from eldest god to youngest, and most have direct meaning in the story. Not only that, it was (accidentally) a great solution to the big issue with magic: “How do you make it physical and tangible to readers that a magical creature has certain powers?”

I can say “abracadabra, Ardex now creates a hurricane of fire”, which may sound cool in the moment, but comes out of nowhere and is hard to predict or imagine. By giving the gods objects (from long ago, from a special origin, with sentimental value) which they need for certain powers, it becomes more predictable and tangible.

Some objects are quite simple and completely covered in this story. Others I decided to use in later stories (which were uncertain at the time), such as the next story …

Also interesting: the name Hespryhound (from Feria) comes from the shared ancestor of both fox and dog named the Proheperocyon. (You can imagine why I didn’t pick the actual name.)