Ok, so I know the difficulty of introducing the planet Earth to a futuristic setting without messing up the geography and stuff. So my question is: is lying enough to compensate my lacks in producing a novel? Because I know that I will mess up with many things. So I will have to research a lot for this but... It's really not that easy when you want your Universe to be the same as in real life.
What do you mean "lie"? I mean, c'mon, it's fiction - it's whatever you want it to be! Just come up with a justifiable and reasonable explanation for whatever you make up, and as long as the readers can believe it, it's fine. You could always explain the "anomalies" in geography as the earth plates having moved now that it's 3000 years later. North pole has disappeared, Iceland has been submerged under water and Africa is half its size, with America having split off into 2 continents (so imagine an extra piece of land floating between the US and Japan). New volcano eruption means a new country has formed (think Australia, except make up a new country). Just have fun with it, really.
All of that would be hard to believe in only 3000 years absent some kind of cataclysmic event. So you'd need to have something going besides a volcano.
Yeh, sure, my point is basically - just get creative with it! Some major disaster for whatever reason that could've changed some of the shape of the earth - or set it far enough into the future so you can move some continents about.
I'm assuming there will still be some amount of human population left in this future Earth... How far into the future are you talking here? Going with Steerpike's mention of 3000 years from now, it would need natural disaster after natural disaster to alter it's face so much... So maybe have one cataclysmic event happen every 500yrs, in different parts of the world, so that by the time your story is supposed to take place, the Earth is as you want it to be, and still have mankind survive all the changes. Otherwise, I don't see the Earth being so drastically changed in as short amount of time as 3,000 years and it still have a sizeable human population. Just look at the last 3000 years of our history. We haven't changed much, and neither has the planet (resource depletion aside). I'm speaking in the Physical sense. We were walking upright, talking, had belief systems, some form of government, and medicine. And other than the state of California sinking a few feet into the ocean, I don't think the planet has undergone many changes since 1000bc either. But if you're thinking so much further in the future than 3000 years, I don't see how you'd have to 'fake' much to make it believable that the Earth as we know now, isn't the same at all in your futuristic setting.
Would an asteroid impact provide the necessary changes? That could happen overnight. However, to get a significant restructuring of the continents on a global scale would take millions of years... even with an asteroid impact or two happening during that time. Maybe the story could take place on an Earth-like planet, but not actually on Earth.
There are a couple of cool speculative science books out there...I have some on my wishlist: "After Man: A Zoology of the Future" by Dougal Dixon, "The World Without Us" by Alan Weisman. The History Channel has a series called "Life After People." Even if people are around in your story, these sources may give you some ideas how to create your Earth if the human population is no longer at the top of the food chain. And I'm sure you could find a book in your nearest library about earth history and some info about the future geological positions...but I do agree with Mckk: you can just make up a bunch of stuff and support with quasi-scientific explanation. The more creative, the better!
You'll need to be more specific. If you are taking about knowing where places are on the Earth you should research, continental drift takes millions of years to significantly change the geography so it depends on how far in the future your story is.
Bingo. Unless you're talking about a particular event/topic/group it's not science fiction. The future is a fact of nature, just like past and present. The fiction part of it is the part that you make up. The planet Earth, the rock that is, is almost guaranteed to be here for another few billion years. There are very few things that can move or destroy a giant stone with a mass of six and a half thousand billion billion some odd something tons. Even an asteroid impact would not completely destroy Earth. The impact hypothesis for the Moon origins posits that a Mars sized body hit the Earth with enough force to fuse the two cores together, and yet Earth is still here (given a few billion years to let the debris settle of course). As for life, however, hah hah---life is very fragile, and 99% of all things that have ever lived on this planet are extinct. There is no guarantee that humans will last beyond another millenia. We are only a few hundred thousand years old, but some species have had even less than that. Depending on how far in the future you make this tale at least consider the possibility that humans will not be in it.
part of a writer's 'job' is to do the requisite research for a written work... so, instead of asking if it's ok to 'lie' to compensate for your lack of knowledge, you should be studying up on all the things you need to learn, so you can do a believable job of creating that future version of earth...
Hi, Geologic events are slow, so in reality a million years shouldn't significantly alter the shapes of the continents. However, there is one other factor to consider, us. Already we've caused significant global warming, this if it continues at its present rate, should cause the melting of the polar ice caps, and significantly raise sea levels. This in turn will drastically reshape the georgraphy of the world as low lying areas are flooded. It isn't hard to imagine that men will also resist this, perhaps by building dykes and sea walls as in the case of the Netherlands. (There, if you check the old maps by the way, is a significant change in the geography of at least a part of the world.) Who knows what else we may do? We could raise large pieces of land as land becomes scarce - Quatar is busy building islands out into the gulf I believe, its not hard to imagine this trend continuing. Serious earthquakes can raise and lower sections of land as well, and quite quickly. Wellington's Mirimar region was lifted by a quake a century or so ago. Feel free to 'lie' as you see fit. Cheers.
