At one time in my life...
...I
fancied myself being an author. With a fancy pen name and everything. My first published work was
to be called Ringshadow, about an inhabited planet having an enormous, complex set of rings.
One might be tempted to say "Saturn-like," except that these utterly dwarfed Saturn's
rings. The rings also had embedded within its structure a multitude of moonlets of many different sizes. But the most
striking aspect of this world's rings is that, purely by chance, they lay exactly parallel to the
planet's orbital plane about its sun, so that the rings were lit perfectly on edge. This caused the
many moonlets to slice shadows across the rings, and given the enormity of the structure and vast number
of moonlets, the patterns of shadows were seemingly ever-changing.
Thus these complex shadow patterns gave rise to many stories, myths and legends, as well as groups of individuals called "Ringreaders" who claimed to be able to foretell the future based on the shadow patterns.
There was one other remarkable attribute of the rings... they almost literally split the planet in half. For the vast shadow cast by the rings across the face of the planet created an impenetrable band of storms so violent as to be impossible to traverse. Thus the population lived with the greatest mystery of all: what lay on the other half of the planet? Was it likewise inhabited? Did they too have Ringreaders? Would there ever be anyone capable of crossing the great Ringshadow barrier, and learn of what lies beyond?
It so happens that science may hold the answer. But no one believed in science...