More Stories Should Play Around With Non-Earth Settings

Sure, Tatooine has two suns, Arrakis is a giant desert full of sandworms and spice mines, and Doctor Who once visited a planet made of diamonds--but characters don't have to be traveling on spaceships to have adventures in non-Earth settings. Sci-fi has always done a pretty good job imagining strange and fantastic worlds, which always makes me happy, yet at the same time I've realized there's some cool real science that could be used to expand sci-fi and fantasy settings a lot more than is often seen. (And as cool as Star Wars can be, it's worth mentioning how silly it is that most of the places are mono-settings: ice planet, swamp planet, city planet...)

Now, all of the pictures you see here are from the public domain. I want to show you a few other things, too, but I'm going to send you to the original sources (or at least, the links where I found them).

It all started when I stumbled upon this reddit thread discussing plant colors on other (theoretical) planets, based on pigments and the light spectrums of different stars. The images themselves are here, and my are they gorgeous.

This also got me thinking about some science articles I've seen. It's fairly popular to speculate on what celestial objects would look like if they were closer to us:

- Galaxies, nebulae, and black holes closer to Earth
- If other planets were the distance of the moon
- More of the above
- If you replaced the sun with other stars

George Martin's world in A Song of Ice and Fire gets into this territory with the unusually long seasons. The hearsay is that it's related to the planet's orbit, though this article gives some more in-depth theories. In the Writing Excuses anthology Shadows Beneath, Mary Robinette Kowal wrote a fantasy short story about a tidally-locked world, where one continent has constant moon cover and another has never seen the moon before. You can listen to the brainstorming episode that gave birth to the story here.

This kind of thing, in my opinion, could make a lot of speculative fiction stories even more awesome. Imagine an epic fantasy taking place on a moon orbiting a gas giant, a paranormal mystery where in the background all the plants are reddish instead of green, a sociological sci-fi set on a world unusually distant from its sun. Even if nobody has spaceships, and there's no traveling from unusual planet to unusual planet, why can't we simply set the story somewhere besides Earth? Sounds like fun to me.