Sunday, June 2, 2013

What If Sea Levels Rose 1600 Feet? Building Ennara's World


Good morning, fellow Goddess Fish partyers! I’m here to introduce my debut novel, Ennara and the Fallen Druid, and to talk about what inspired me to write about Ennara and her world. I am enjoying spending the day with you and reading about all of the touring authors’ books!

What would our world look like if all of the ice in the polar caps melted?

This is the question I pondered as I started building the world of Lan. I turned to that great resource that so many authors use, the internet, to see what map projections looked like. To be sure, predictions of sixty-meter rises of sea levels looked devastating. But then I found a site that went far beyond what Earth would look like if its polar caps melted—it showed what the world would look like with a 500 meter (1640-foot) rise in sea level. Now that changed the world completely.

Take a look at my map of Estlan, then hop over to the flood map site. The page will read “Status:  This is what the world would look like if sea level rose _500_  meters”. Scroll out. Look familiar?

The world of Lan is set far in humanity’s future, so far, in fact, that our current cultures and histories are lost to the sands of time. In a scientifically and water-parched near future, the people of Earth harness a comet to extract freshwater and minerals. Then the worst that could happen does: the comet breaks apart and slams into the planet, flooding all but Earth’s mountain ranges and high plateaus and leaving the few humans left struggling to survive, protect what little land remains, and rebuild.


In the time of Ennara, this is all long ago. (But yet to be written, after the Ennara series is complete!) The world of Lan is named after its most precious commodity: land. Here, some humans have rebuilt to a pseudo-medieval society. They’ve managed to keep some knowledge of technologies beyond the historical medieval world, but have lost much of it due to a simple lack of resources for practicing science and advanced technology. During this rebuilding, others have gone deeper into the wild, changing themselves in the process. Please check back later for more about the races of Lan.

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Angela Myron is the author of the middle grade fantasy series Ennara and a stack of technical manuals on everything from nonlinear editing to data encryption. She lives in Whittier, California, with her husband and their twins.

Learn about Angela Myron's stories at:

Add Ennara and the Fallen Druid to your Goodreads shelf and pick it up on June 14th.

4 comments:

Debby said...

Sea level is currently on the rise. How great to use that for a story.
debby236 at gmail dot com

Anonymous said...

Thanks Debby! I thought it was a compelling premise for world building.

JENNIFER WILCK said...

Fascinating world-building!

Anonymous said...

Thanks Jennifer!