World building is great. We like world building. Coherent science fiction futures extrapolated from the bleeding edge of today are excellent. Likewise we love wildly original approaches to magic systems and the surprising ways they might affect the development of a fantasy world. But what about science fiction landscapes? Think about the  The Shimmer from Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, or the Visitation Zones in Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic. There are a lot more strange landscapes out there. Here’s more from Signals from the Edge:

In [Skyward Inn by Aliya Whiteley] novel, we have two different weird landscapes that are connected to one another. We have the Earth as we know it (well, kind of), and we have the planet Qita, which has been conquered by Earth.

Both of these landscapes are connected, to the point where what happens on Qita, happens on Earth. At one point in the novel, Earth’s land starts to turn to mud, and then slime, and then a flood sweeps all of the inhabitants up into a central location—the Skyward Inn. But not only is the land itself turning to sludge, so are the people.

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