Is My Sky Blue?

So, part of the fun in creating a Fantasy world is that you can essentially do whatever the fuck you want.  Of course this comes with the eternal caveat of maintaining consistency (well, unless you really want to make your readers angry).  The other part of the reason for changing things is to remind your readers that the world they are immersing themselves in is not the real world, so they can relax and not worry about the ideas you are exploring that might otherwise be troubling to them (I covered that last idea in the post "Why I Love Fantasy").
    There are loads of ways in which you can alter the world to shake up your reader.  Multiple moons are a dead giveaway to any space-traveler awakening on a new world.  James Cameron's "Avatar" gave us islands floating in the air (not to be confused with Dr. Dolittle's island that floats on water).  Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" series features a sickly looking star, providing illumination to his ancient cultures.  In Steven Brust's "Dragaera" series, you can't even see the sky through the net of sorcery over a portion of the world.  All of these ideas have a similar "We're not in Kansas anymore" effect.
    When selecting something to tweak in your world, addition is always easier than subtraction.  In the words of Malcolm Reynolds, "You can't miss someplace you never been."  Including a new and strange feature is an obvious something.  You encounter it.  You can describe it when your characters see it for the first time.  Removing something from the world is much more difficult.  If your characters have only ever lived on Arakis, they can't really miss sailing the ocean.  Additionally, there may be significant pieces of culture and language that change (they'd never be "three sheets to the wind," even if they were) with something's absence.  Before you take something away from your world it's important to take the time to work out the ramifications.
    Setting off this thought was a post I read the other day (see below) about why the sky is blue (no, it's not the reflection of sun off the ocean).  It additionally addressed the question as to why the sun is yellow.  This all brought me back to the image of the guttering Sun of Vance's "Dying Earth" (I need to go back and reread them to see how he used it, also because they're great). The changing of the Sun leads to interesting questions for the writer.  How would this lower energy Sun effect the environment?  If the sun itself is red, would that then alter the color of the sky?  What would it do to the appearance of other colors?  When you start messing with something so essential, it can have significant implications. 

   
   



This inspired today - http://io9.com/the-sky-is-not-blue-so-why-does-it-look-blue-1649379309/all