Food wasn’t high on the list of
difficulties to tackle for a series of books about people from the sea,
with at least half the action taking place deep underwater. If I divided
up my world-building time for the Seaborn books more than half of it
would go to undersea combat and the kinds of powers, “bleeds”, magic,
breathing, as well as sorting out their limitations, how they are passed
to children, and other details. Most of the other half was in cultural
development, cities, history, interaction with the surface, social
structure, why a people who are apparently successful have such a low
population—in the millions.
But food proved to be more difficult
than combat. Even if there’s magic involved in making things work in a
fight, it can be applied to the weapon once. Everyone in battle-space
doesn’t need to perform something crazy three times a day in order to
sustain their strength and stop their tummies rumbling. Right off the
bat I imagined—given their technology and powers—you could reduce
friction and drag in the water for edged weapons and bolts from
crossbows, and spearguns, so that battles didn’t look like thousands of
free-falling astronauts spinning and fumbling in slow motion, taking mad
swings at each other. And everyone looking stupid rather than
dangerous or fierce.
Food wasn’t as easy to figure out. On the
surface, Kassandra—the main character—can go to Starbucks or stop in for
sushi and sashimi at Shizuko’s in Hampton. She was raised on the
surface, but when she gets underwater and sees what the seaborn have out
for what appears to be an edible arrangement, she’s disgusted by it.
No potato chips, no bagels, no coffee. Just these little lumps or
wrapped packages of something she has no need to try.
Raw fish,
sliced and presented neatly, was an obvious choice because it didn’t
require cooking and you could eat it with fingers—it worked underwater.
But it was too obvious, too simple, and they can’t live on raw fish
alone. In a typical surface kitchen you turn on the stove, you heat
water, you make some pasta. In another pot you’re making a sauce. You
serve it onto plates and you eat with forks, spoons, knives, chopsticks,
sporks, fingers. Easy. In the deep ocean where the seaborn live I was
looking at extreme temperatures, complete darkness, with most of the
abyss cold, and water around hydrothermal vents reaching 800 F/426 C and
NOT boiling because of the immense pressure. I had plumbing in seaborn
cities to pipe this water and heat anywhere I wanted, but how do you
cook with it? Food wrapped in ceramic containers, leaves? Where do
those come from? Firing and glazing clay sounds difficult underwater.
The seaborn have light—can make it—and so they can grow seaweeds,
hundred-foot tall macrocystis—the large kelp forests you always see in
video off the coast of California. Leaves were in, and they’re entirely
plausible because that’s a common enough method for cooking on the
surface, with food wrapped and steamed inside cabbage leaves, grape
leaves, and others. Fish was clearly a center course—cooked or not,
with many options for vegetable-like dishes.
I didn’t take eating
much further than this in the three books because food didn’t play
enough of a role in the plot, but it surprised me how much trouble it
caused—more than breathing underwater, pressure, darkness, and combat,
all of which could be handled with sufficient technology—or magic.
Looking back, I wish I had given eating—especially the social aspect of
gathering around food and drink—more thought. My logic went something
like dolphins don’t know thirst and they don’t drink anything their
entire lives, so why would the seaborn? I went with a limited approach
to developing their eating conventions and left it at that—with some
jabs by Kassandra and others about how unappealing their food was.
Overall
it was the complexity around something as simple as what do you eat
underwater that got me. The ocean’s a complex environment made up of
many layered environments, and many are radically different meters
apart. And stories set there have to deal with the environment. Even
with something as complex as underwater acoustics, with negative
thermoclines and capacity for changing over long distances I just had to
do my research and let it play. Sound travels almost five times faster
underwater than it does through the air, but apparently there’s no fast
food in the deep. At least I didn’t find any.
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