hello mr ware, the siltcord has been discussing and so i would like to ask if you have any notes/thoughts on speculative biology or ecology in the world of the silt verses?

Howdy! That's a really fun question and I think my only note for anyone playing or imagining within the setting would be to run riot with it. (Because we're talking about a million different accelerated and highly localised evolutionary triggers compared to our world, right? What does happen to the fish swimming downriver from an automobile plant dedicated to a god of oil, coal and gas? What god are the bees worshipping when they construct their vast golden cathedrals, what blessings manifest in their swarms, and what happens if a hive grows large enough? Back in Season 1, we mention that something with a beautiful siren song joins the birds in the branches - how would the birds ultimately be changed by that and become its evangelists?)

I think there's a ton of inherent possibility in speculative biology and ecology if you want to get into the margins of the setting, even as a discipline - I wonder how brave and hardened you'd need to be to put on a pair of waders and head into the wilds trying to chart all of these localised mutations. But it's the sort of thing you need to be really cautious about within a compressed and discrete narrative - the more weird background detail you introduce, the more gonzo and alien the setting becomes, the more we lose the sense of familiar drabness and closeness to our world.

In other words, we barely touched it but it's out there as an idea and I think it's awesome.

PS: Apropos of nothing, a little while back I was reading Cuckoo by Gretchen Falker-Martin, who repeatedly introduces 'ghostly phlox' as a strange background detail of her desert landscape. It's such a wonderful choice because despite having a beautiful meaning, the name of the flower itself is fleshy, lumpen and weird. PHLOX. It sounds alien and wrong. I guess the tie-in is that if we'd done more with ecology in the show, it'd have been about looking for elements like that which are unobtrusively off but off nonetheless.