I did not insult your intelligence. I replied to your post. I don't know what your intelligence is, only the words you write. Also, I'm speaking to many people here -- on the average, 90% of MR users aren't logged in, and since it has perpetual login (and annoying ads), it stands to reason that most of those aren't registered -- so I have to address everyone, not just one person. If I was only talking to one person, I'd send a PM.
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Originally Posted by BookCat
Taking the example of the water running upstream - please don't insult my intellect with such a basic explanation of FACTS - a fantasy author could easily explain this, if you feel an explanation essential, by saying that, regarding h20 (imagine they're subscript) gravity behaves in a way which draws bodies of water, as opposed to droplets, upstream, requiring the people on that planet to go to mountains for water supplies, or to devise a system which forces water from reservoirs in the mountains downwards through a series of pressurized pipes.
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So gravity works in reverse for bodies of water. How large do those bodies of water have to be? Rivers, after all, are merely the convergence of numerous smaller streams. If the bodies of water run backwards, with seas pumping their water into rivers (what happens to the salt?), rivers flowing into streams, streams into trickles, etc., does it go all the way back to the original seeps, where water slowly oozes out of the soil? If not, what happens when the down-flowing water hits the up-flowing water? If so, what happens with things that contain large amounts of water -- humans, for instance? What about buckets of water: there's certainly more water in a bucket than there is in a little trickle feeding into what will some day become a river. If that bucket of water counts as a body of water, shouldn't all the water conform to this gravity reversal and shoot straight up into the air? For that matter, why do bodies of water stay in their beds? Shouldn't a whole river just go airborne? Why should it stick to the ground and flow backwards instead of either following the normal law of gravity or the reversed law of gravity? Water flows downhill because that's what gravity makes it do, and water stays in its beds because that's what gravity makes it do. If gravity doesn't work on water, it's going to just take off -- not obey the law of gravity in one aspect (flowing along the ground) but not another (not flowing downhill).
Further, imagine a river which flows past a dry watercourse -- a stream channel that is eligible to hold water, but only drains its watershed, and hence fills up with water, during the annual rains. They're common in the western parts of the US, for example. If the water is flowing backwards, how is it going to know that it shouldn't flow into that desert watercourse at
this time of year, but it should flow into it at some
other (rainy) season? In its current form, the whole thing is self-working: when there's rain, the dry watercourse fills up, and the water flows into the river; when there isn't any rain, it doesn't. Nothing has to be figured out, it just follows the natural laws and works automatically. But with our backwards water, somehow it would have to know when it should be going one way and when it should be going the other, in a way that has more in common with a farmer opening and closing irrigation gates than with a river just flowing.
Why would the people in that place need to go to the mountains for water? If you have a town by a river that, with normal water, flows north to south, with your reverse water it would flow south to north. If you're going to get into the river taking off and heading for the sky, or being full of salt because it's emptying the ocean, that starts getting into the difficulties I've already described, not any specific to water just flowing uphill instead of down. And they'd only need one pump for the town -- just to pump the water down into the underground cistern it flowed (backwards) out of, the equivalent of an elevated water tank where water flows normally. This being, of course, in a town with running water; in your typical medieval town, I'm not sure how it would work where the water would come flying out of wells, and you'd have to catch it in covered buckets on its way by.
And then there's rain. That, I take it from the description, would fall down. What happens at the sources of rivers, then, where those rivers are pumping water from the seas
and water is falling from the sky as well? And what do the resulting floods do -- which way do they go?
How do droughts work? With ordinary water, if there's no water falling in a watershed (i.e., there's a drought there) it gets dry, but areas downstream of it can be fed by other watersheds. The Atlantic Ocean hasn't dried up yet because of the Sahara Desert. But what happens when the ocean is endlessly pumping out water into a drought-stricken area? Does the ocean eventually dry up trying to keep it wet? Does it stop before that? How does it know?
The point I'm trying to make is that things are interrelated. Water's flowing-downhill nature isn't somehow separate from its staying-in-streams nature or its staying-in-buckets nature. If you change it,
everything to do with water changes.
Of course you can write a story where the laws of physics are strange, different, or just plain whacked. David Brin, among others, has pulled it off brilliantly. But you can't do it without working out every ramification of your changes, because when things work differently ... well, things work differently. All of them. That's why I commented earlier about the fools who built the game Shadowbane and expected that players would conform to medieval models because of their medieval surroundings, rather than using their renamed phasers, transporters, telepathy, and so on, to the best effect. People don't conform to their environment; people use it, and if you don't foresee the results of that, you'll get what Wolfpack had: a bunch of Star Trek outlaws sacking a medieval world.
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To John Carroll, just look at how much controversy your yet to be written book has generated. Go with your big world; readers won't stop arguing about it and in the process create more interest in the book. You'll be the next er.. Dan Brown 
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Controversy is not quality. Take -- since I'm currently ranting about games -- the Star Wars online game, and its "improvements", called SW:NGE. As a short version for those who don't know what I'm talking about, Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) made drastic changes to a fairly popular game, leading to a loss of the overwhelming majority of the paying customers; the customer count never recovered. SW:NGE generated quite possibly the largest controversy the gaming community has ever seen, with the players saying "SOE stinks" and SOE defending their "enhancements". People still talk about it to this day. Heck, I've never played it, and never had any interest in playing it, and I can give you a fairly detailed rundown on what happened (PM if you care) just from what I've read on news sites and from player statements. It led to a huge amount of buzz ... and sales plummeted.
A million people saying "that game stinks" will not produce a hundred times the sales of ten thousand people saying "that game rocks." SOE had to learn that the hard way. I don't want John to have to do the same.