Putting Time Into Your Invented World - Timekeeping and SF Writing

Putting Time Into Your Invented World - Timekeeping and SF Writing
By Robert Gibson

If you invent a world on which to set your stories, you will have to think about its "day" and "year"; and you may find that these details are more than details - they can become a great part of what the story is about.

The world may be alien or it may be a future Earth. Leigh Brackett and J G Ballard have written short stories set on a fairly near-future Earth which for some reason has stopped rotating; of course this is scienfically implausible but the authors rightly did not care - they were writing with evocative purpose in mind. Stories of a tidally-locked, non-rotating Earth are, however, more plausible if set in the really far future, such as Brian Aldiss' novel Hothouse.

The late Arthur C Clarke wrote a light short, "Trouble with Time", set on Mars, where, since there is no ocean in which to put the International Date Line, one can step from one day to another on dry land - with amusing results when not knowing that it's Sunday has results fatal to a projected crime.

Aldiss' Helliconia trilogy is set on a world which orbits inside a double star system; there is the year, and there is the Great Year. The year is the time it takes for the planet to circle its star, but that star in turn circles its larger companion star in a much longer period (thousands of our years) and long-term climatic changes result from the varying distances of Helliconia from the more distant, giant sun. Over the three books of the trilogy, Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer and Helliconia Winter, the author brilliantly explores the cultural and biological changes over one Great Year. (Ufortunately the dating system he invents does not make much sense to me; the figures are not believable - over a million Great Years cannot have passed since the "catastrophe" - the capture of the smaller sun by the larger - since giant stars don't last that long.)

On Ooranye, the invention took a course influenced by my dislike for artificial time-zones. Time-zones are of course necessary but they irritate me with their pretence that you can parcel time up in this way; and of course the most irritating thing of all is Daylight Saving Time, with its pretence that noon - when the Sun crosses the meridian - occurs at one p.m. ("post meridian!) during summer. Anyhow, when inventing Ooranye, I wanted a world where the time was the same all the world over. This meant that the cycle of day and night could not be caused by the planet's rotation.

In any case Ooranye (the planet Uranus) is too far from the sun for its light to have the same importance as it does for us; sunlight is only about one three-hundredth as bright as it is on Earth. The Uranians have a much more influential light source: the micro-organisms in their world's atmosphere. This biomass has a pulsating glow with a thirty-hour cycle. At its darkest it shuts out the firmament completely, so that Sun and stars are invisible. At its brightest it illuminates the upper air so that distant detail on the horizon can be seen. Midway between these two points the biomass goes transparent, allowing the stars to be seen twice a day. Over the whole planet, the cycle is the same, so it is always the same time everywhere on Ooranye. Day comes to the whole world, then night to the whole world.

It is a big result to come from a mild case of irritation with time zones. The moral for writers is, treasure up your irritations and use them!

Robert Gibson is caretaker of the Ooranye Project, creating a fictional giant planet which can be explored on www.ooranye.com. The project's aim is to meld the subgenres of Future History and Planetary Romance, resulting in over a million years of civilization with its own societies, customs, conflicts, triumphs and disasters, politics, philosophies, flora and fauna, empires both human and non-human, and adventures that range over an area ten times that of the surface of the Earth. Lovers of planetary adventure are invited to view the history, comment on the progress of the project, access the tales and keep in touch with the developing destiny of Ooranye.

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