will - *must* - be megafauna, *except* when Humanity
or some intelligent life destroys it.
Perhaps Weber & Evans used a different Premise for their
Multiverse. Perhaps they never existed,
or they just naturally disappeared
Or perhaps we just haven't seen existing megafauna.
I don't recall any elephants or hippos, for example,
and I am in the process of rereading the books.
Perhaps the Arpathian herds include Aurochs.
I am trying to list everything they told us in the books,
and am *astounded* at all that they did not!
This story was intended for one volume, maybe 600 pages.
It required two, totalling 1250 pages.
Why should they insert even more data, Infodumps that
don't affect the Plot, just because you and I wonder?
HTM
tonyz wrote:It's not the absence of salience that's a problem. I have no difficulty with "humanity never showed up in the other universes". It's that we see the effects of humanity (I.e., the absence of megafauna, particularly in the New World -- e.g., mammoths), without their presence. Admittedly, maybe nobody has wondered about that in-character yet, but we specifically have a Sharonanzooloist exclaiming over new species, and an Arcanan who knows about dinosaurs, so both sides are doing some kind of research and ought to have aske dthemselves some of these questions.
And I fully understand that the authors can write about whatever universes they want to and this is mostly about the t human civilizations, not comparative paleontology/ecology, but I'm wondering about the in-universe explanation for how things just happened to work out so neatly.