I’m interested in tornadoes, as you can probably see from the stories I’ve posted here. I think they have a lot of unused potential for speculative fiction and worldbuilding.
First let me speculate on why they don’t show up much in stories and myths. Compared to other natural phenomena like trees, mountains, stars, the sun and moon, and the sea, tornadoes aren’t particularly universal. They’re a distinctly American thing. They’re not unknown outside the US, but the US has both the largest number of tornadoes per year, and the most violent tornadoes by a wide margin. I think it’s no accident that the only book you can probably think of that features a tornado, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, was intended to be a uniquely American fairy tale.
So why do I think they should be used more? They’re freaking awesome, that’s why! OK let me be more specific. I’m not the first person to point this out, but tornadoes have a few unique properties that tickle some primal parts of the human psyche in ways that other natural disasters don’t.
First, they’re big, really big. The biggest on record thus far was over 2.5 miles wide, and they tower into the heavens like a skyscraper. But, and this is important, they’re not TOO big. They’re huge enough to inspire awe and fear, but small enough that our brain registers them as an object, an entity, rather than an event. A hurricane is arguably more destructive than a tornado, but it’s so huge that we can’t conceive of it as a thing on its own. It’s a phenomenon, a process, an event. You can’t point to a hurricane, but you can point to a tornado.
OK, so it’s a thing, a big thing, but it’s also a moving thing, a growing thing, dare I say, a LIVING thing. It’s born, grows, weakens and dies just like we do. And it doesn’t just move inexorably forward. It twists, it writhes upon itself, it turns this way and that, it slows down, speeds up, stands still. It moves as though animated by an unfathomable will of its own. And what a capricious will it is! It can raze one house to its foundation while leaving a nearby house untouched. It can reduce human edifices to rubble and human bodies to mangled piles of flesh and gore, but at the same time lift a cradle, sleeping baby and all, up into the air and gingerly deposit it in a nearby field, without waking the child.
And it most certainly doesn’t do any of this quietly. The sound of a tornado is most often compared to a freight train, but that simply doesn’t do it justice. It’s a grinding, roaring, shrieking, rushing, screaming cacophony.
So it’s a big, loud, living, capricious, calamitous thing. In short, it’s a monster. A monster whose coming is portended by prodigious omens—uncanny green clouds, icy stones falling from the hot summer sky, an eerie stillness. It’s a monster whose presence is heralded by the ghastly wail of the very sirens that were meant to prepare us for the absolute worst horror humanity could visit upon itself, a nuclear bomb, which is oddly appropriate, since a nuclear bombing is the way most people describe a tornado’s aftermath.
But what does this have to do with worldbuilding? A tornado could be a portal to another world, a god of destruction, a portent of doom, or merely an inciting incident. An everlasting tornado could be the pillar that holds up the sky, or the door to the realm of the damned. But it never seems to be any of those things. It’s just absent.
TL;DR: tornadoes are cool, more tornadoes, please.