: Re: How can I explain my world if the character is technologically not yet capable of understanding it? One feature of my world is a plant that lives in a magmaous (rather than "volcanic") cave.

@Mendez196

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I think you may be looking at this as a character problem, but it is just as much a world-building problem. The basis of your question makes me think that this type of plant is unusual, but that just makes your problem here much more difficult. Developing your world further is the best way for it to make more sense, both for the readers and the characters.

The easiest thing in your case is to just make the plant a more common thing, perhaps by including more magma caves, so that more people know of this plant. This means that the more exposure to it in your world, the less discoveries need to be made about it. All of the questions a reader would have can be answered before the problem presents itself.

You also have to make sure that characters understand it in the context of their own world, whilst translating it to an understanding of our world for the reader. If it's medieval then, like you say, they're unlikely to know about IR radiation. But they would have their own justification for it, like that it's actually heat that causes the plants to grow. They might even call it "fireweed" or something.

You could even take it further than this, and have people in your world understand it to a level where they actually get the "how" science of it, just not the "why". Humans understood that plants needed the sun long before they knew what photosynthesis or chlorophyll was.

Maybe they take seeds or entire plants of fireweed from where they grow naturally, and replant them inside sheds and keep a fire lit in order to farm their own. Of course this would mean they need a use for it, such as food, or a herb/spice, or for medicinal purposes. The reader can then make the connection on their own, without the characters ever needing to have any deeper understanding of it themselves.

I don't know if this is useful for your story, maybe the entire point is that they are only just discovering this plant, in which case to make it more understandable in your world, you will need to make it more justifiable for it to exist in the first place. Introduce different types of exotic plants into your story that also don't grow as plants on our planet do, and this allows a smaller leap for the reader to understand it from a modern science-based context.

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