(TFT) So what the heck is Cidri anyway?

["Charles Gadda" <cgadda@earthlink.net>]

Well, for starters, here is what ITL says on the subject:

     "And in their power, they found Cidri. How? We don't know. Where? Good
question. It orbits the Sun where Earth would be- if there was an Earth in
that universe. No one today knows for sure even WHAT Cidri is. Certainly it
is no ordinary planet. Cidri is BIG. No complete map of its surface is
known. The standard work, compiled two hundred years ago by the Imperial
College of Cartographers at Predimuskity, shows 48 continents (defined as
land masses of over 5,000,000 square km.); five of these are in excess of
60,000,000 square km. Almost half the known surface of Cidri is covered with
water; most of its seas are dotted with islands. Yet even the great Book of
Maps lists nine hundred and eleven locations which cannot be found within
the known area - including the mountain city of Paska-Dal which (by Gate)
has carried on commerce with gem merchants everywhere for at least four
hundred years.
     Yet find it the Mnoren did - a whole enormous world. And, having found
it, they peopled it. Farmers, technicians, servants, guards, slaves,
stowaways... plants for gardens, jungles, and fields... animals for
companions, food, hunting, or to balance the thousands of ecologies
interweaving across the planet. . . creatures great and small from every one
of the worlds they knew.
For hundreds of years they enjoyed their world. Few traveled elsewhere -
what need, when Cidri held all? The other worlds of probability were once
again left to their own peoples. A few thousand of the rulers (for their
numbers had never been great) lived in glittering mansions scattered through
Cidri. The broad continents, with their diverse people and cultures, were
their playgrounds..."

The Fantasy Master's Guild newsletter has the following tantalizing
reference:

    "CIDRI MAPPING SERVICE: For a modest fee FMs could register their
campaign(s) on the Cidri Map. Cidri is very large, the working definition is
a Dyson sphere. A computer program would keep track of co-ordinates for each
campaign.
    FMs would register an area larger than most are now using to allow them
plenty of expansion room. FMs would provide a rough map of their area with
major place names and a very brief area history. A list of registered areas
would be published in the Newsletter."

A Dyson Sphere. That's a pretty interesting concept. But I do not think they
thought through the implications of that offhand remark. Consider:

1) A Dyson Sphere is not merely "very large"... it is incomprehensibly vast.
A true Dyson Sphere (as opposed to a shell or swarm) would have a surface
area 600 ***MILLION*** times that of Earth's. To put this in perspective,
the listed number of continents in ITL with the assumed 1:1 water to land
ratio implies a surface area of very approximately 3 billion square km;
Earth is about 0.5 billion square km, thus what is known of Cidri (which is
vast enough) is a mere 6 times the size of Earth. I think a Dyson Sphere is
more than a little overkill.

2) There would be no "night" in a Dyson Sphere; it would always be day.
Also, no moon, or stars, or anything else. That would be a bit odd. No
change in seasons, either.

3) Not clear how gravity would work.

4) Here and there, particularly in Land Beyond the Mountains, reference is
made to the Mnoren spending a lot of effort mining certain parts of Cidri.
*WHY???* If this is truly a ***DYSON SPHERE***, a mind-bogglingly vast
project that would require every last bit of material from likely not just
one, but _multiple_ solar systems, for what Earthly reason should they ever,
in a TRILLION YEARS, need to mine ***ANYTHING***??? Don't you think the
builders would have had sufficient sense to place the needed minerals in
easy to access storage warehouses above ground, rather than buried under
tons of rock?

5) Finally, a Dyson Sphere is, well, a bit too SciFi for me. I don't mind
that up to a certain point, but when you take it to this extreme you might
as well drop swords & sorcery and hand out the phasers and photons and play
Star Trek. I want a *fusion* of hi-tech and actual sorcery, not something
that is so one-sidedly technological. On a more practical note, something
with this powerful an emphasis on technology would almost certainly have a
lot of technological artifacts lying about here there and everywhere. The
idea of a low tech Cidri does not hold up well under those circumstances.

This is obviously another one of those cases where the writers bandy about
high-techno-babble without even the slightest inkling of the implications.
Plainly, a Dyson Sphere is an untenable hypothesis for Cidri - it really
just makes no sense, and creates far more problems than it solves.

Here is my take on it: the Mnoren discovered a planet in some parallel
universe or another that is, indeed, the same distance from the sun as our
Earth. But it was significantly larger - I would suggest something between
10-100 times as big, in terms of surface area (implying a diameter range of
40,000 km to 125,000 km - Earth is a "mere" 12,756.3 km). As an aside, I
would keep it on the smaller end of the scale - the bigger you go the harder
it is to explain how Cidri could be earthlike in terms of gravity, length of
day, etc. Further, it has vast (though not inexhaustible) mineral
resources - indeed, the Mnorens (who, obviously, lack an EPA) managed to
mine out and heavily pollute some areas (c.f. Soukhor).

Interestingly enough, LBTM makes mention of "pre-Mnorens", which suggests
that Cidri possessed an indigenous population of some sort prior to the
arrival of the Mnorens. Further, this mysterious people possessed some
degree of technology, as they had blasted "rough hewn steps" into the face
of a mountainside to form a pass. I'm not really sure what to make of this;
certainly there is no mention in ITL of any "pre-Mnorens" and it's obvious
that SJ and the writers of LBTM were kind of going their own separate ways.
I have no idea what "pre-Mnoren" are, nor how to explain their existence.
Speculations invited on this point.

Regardless, some degree of Terra forming, through the use of some advanced
technology or magic (or both) to regulate the gravity level, length of day,
and so forth to make it as Earth-like as possible, seems to have occurred.
Indeed, the description in ITL implies this, when it states that the Mnoren
brought "...plants for gardens, jungles, and fields... animals for
companions, food, hunting, or to balance the thousands of ecologies
interweaving across the planet. . ." Though Cidri appears to have been
inhabited already, it was the Mnoren, through the use of high technology and
powerful magic were able to make Cidri bloom, though it probably took at
least a few decades, or maybe even a century or two.

One implication of a planet Cidri's size is that the general climate is not
likely to vary as much over distance as on Earth. For example, if I drive
from the Gulf of Mexico in Texas to Lake Superior in Minnesota in the winter
I can see some pretty sharp differences in climate; but on Cidri, the same
distance would not likely evoke any meaningful change, as degree-wise you
will not be going so far "north" in terms of latitude.
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