“At first glance, Zarmina looked like it was already inhabited, with crystal glittering on the light side and illuminated highways on the dark. Huge flat shapes swung through the planet’s atmosphere like cargo planes. The fields marched with coordinated waves of activity. The planet was as noisy as rush hour in Shanghai with the clatter of clapperweed. Except of course that there was no native intelligent life on Zarmina. Instead of the rectangles and lines of cities and highways, the lights of Zarmina were fractal skeins of re-distributed sunlight, bright at the terminator and fading almost to invisibility at the planet’s Night Pole.”
Want to see more of my playing with the ecology of a tidally-locked planet?