Novellists have the dubious requirement of knowing everything about which they write. It becomes painfully obvious when they don't. You can't write a smarter character than you are yourself, for instance, because you literally cannot think like they do. My divorce taught me that I literally cannot understand women, so I've opted not to write from their perspective again if I can possibly help it. I suspect my male readers will feel kinship over this when I finally get around to publishing novels again, and women will feel a sense of relief for not being mischaracterized, when they aren't outraged that I refuse to try. Probably.
I spent years researching the last ice age, and the critters that lived during it, because I learned while getting my geology degree that ice ages only take breaks, they don't really end until something really substantial, like supervolcanoes erupting or comets hit the earth, or the sun suddenly increases its output during just the right phase of the Milancovic cycle, none of which involves burning coal or petroleum. Funny, right? So anyway, I learned that the glaciers will come back and there is sufficient evidence to suggest that it can happen in only 40 years, during half a normal person's lifetime. The Russians claim only 20 years, and Wrangell Island, where it was found, is their territory so they have primacy on the evidence, but also reason for further funding despite the cheapness of Vodka. Cigars and Coeds are still requirements for proper research. And Russian Tobacco is famously awful. I also learned that Eastern Siberia, oddly enough, did not get glaciers. The river valleys that braid and flood north of the Sea of Okhotsk, west of Kamchatka, did not freeze solid. They got snow, but the snow would also melt every spring. So it was relatively mild to live there and its a major settlement area of prehistoric man. Most of the eventual immigrants that settled North, Central, and South America came from there originally.
I also learned about the huge predators, the places that didn't get glaciers along the coastlines, the banana belt that runs down the back of the Rockies in which both animals and people moved to land in the plains, and keep in mind that it was wetter and more treed then, but also that soil was still recovering from previous glacial advances, and there were giant animals running around, including 400 pound beavers. 900 pound solid shelled, vicious relatives of the Moa who spent most of their time in South America but eventually got up here, lions with forebrains as big as our own that may have been sapient, super-vicious sabercats which were like a combination of a Mike Tyson proportioned fighter that had its hands and feet tipped by ripping claws like something from a horror movie, only this actually existed and may be the origin of why "SHH!" is universal for our entire species. It probably ate many of us. There were also dire wolves, an actual species not just a Hobbit monster, which were 4-5 feet at the shoulder and weighed 200 pounds, and could run and run. There were ground sloths that weighed 5000 pounds and were probably fast, not slow. Would we call them giant ground fasts? We also had hippos and camels came from here and antelope and the cheetahs that ate them, and lots of critters slightly smaller than you find in Africa but largely the same otherwise. Millions of pelicans still winter up in Three Forks Montana, 1000 miles from the ocean, because that's where they go. Where they've always gone. America is a really weird continent, geologically and geographically.
We also had really weird weather during the ice age. We would get serious torrential rains, of 125 inches a year in San Francisco and Oakland, and when man finally came there, the very tall redwoods on the hills above Oakland were visible out to sea before you could see San Francisco itself, merely a low peninsula then. Picture that.
I learned all this because I was researching for a novel I wanted to write about the glaciers coming back, and asinine fools with DNA coding technology decide to bring back the ice age mammals and loose them on the rest of us to be eaten and trampled, mostly because they can and know better than to leave them extinct so we have something to eat. Did I mention I have a low opinion of people? Life offers many opportunities to observe just how horrible people are. Any time you think you'd seen the worst possible thing, someone new does something worse. Small wonder apocalypse novels remain a popular genre of scifi, because all the bad people die off, or most of them anyway.
Well, I had better get back to my obscure Terry Pratchett research. Any author who sells this many million books is worth study. See what I can emulate for similar results.
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