An Asylum for Writers of Speculative Fiction

*Another crosspost in the hope of stimulating life*

Apparently the laws of nature mean you don't get deserts on the east of a continent in general. Most especially not the south-east.

And guess where I'd put my coastal desert? On the south-eastern side of the himalaya like ridge of mountains that forms the boundary between the south-eastern and north-western continents (they kind of whacked into each other on the slant) of my supercontiental landmass? Well it wasn't the south-west.

Now obviously most people aren't going to know this but now I do it's a problem because I like to do things right. And merely flipping it won't actually solve the problem since I'd actually got the western climate pretty much right (I based it off Europe from as far north as the tundra and as far south as the Med so I couldn't really miss.) If I flip it I'll have less rain in the north (well-watered as opposed to soggy) and possibly hurricanes in the south! I really don't need hurricanes...

And all I wanted was to work out where to put my Tibet-like plateau with regards to the mountains.

*headdesk*

Crossposting from my personal IJ in an attempt to wake the community up since it's been dead a while.

So there's this "fact" that I've known since I was a kid. I think I got it from one of my parents that they had Gas Lighting in Islamic Spain in the medieval period. So I'm worldbuilding and I think that would be a good addition to my setting but I want to check details so I consult google to get them and check I'm not mis-remembering.

I don't think I am since I found two references to gaslights in Medieval Córdoba. Both are buried in the text.

An article about a documentary called Cities of light states:

In one of the many striking images of Cities of Light, the camera glories in this mosque's towering Arabesque arches and crisscrossing vaults, decorated with glass tessarae brought from Greek Byzantium. Muslim palaces had running water and gas lighting not just indoors, but along prominent streets.

And This page states:

While Europe suffered the Dark Ages, Córdoba came to possess half a million citizens, seven hundred mosques, the first gas streetlights in Europe, three hundred public baths...

Which is great in that I'm clearly not alone in this belief but I need more information and google seems obsessed with giving me info on the War on Terror which has nothing to do with this.

Can anyone possibly point me to some authoritive text (or two) on that period of Spanish history that has more details.

The Chinese did have gaslighting (piped in bamboo apparently) earlier so it's entirely feasible for a kind of pseudomedieval steam/clockpunk setting anyway but I'm attempting to stick with tech that was known or at least theorised in Medieval Europe.

In other worldbuilding news:

Behold Archimedes Steam Cannon

and

Behold the Ancient Greek programmable broom bot.