Re: Found Out in Fantasy
Thanks, Uncle Jim. That bit on conjuring is not only dead-on accurate with what we're doing, but what you said reminded me of this quote from Shelley Winters: "Fooling people isn’t enough. It’s the ability to move them that matters."
The part I’m still having trouble with, though, is time. As on other planets. Ones that have never had any contact with Earth.
For instance, Jupiter has a day of just nine hours, and a year that’s equal to twelve of our years. One couldn’t write from the perspective of a planet like Jupiter and say “We walked for a full day” or “I was married for a year” without us, reading from our own perspective, misunderstanding it. It’s also not likely other planets would have a single moon or that their moon will have a 28-day cycle, so their weeks and months would be different as well.
I guess the answer lies in how I can’t think of one novel that uses an altered time frame. Maybe Arthur C. Clarke or some hard sci-fi writers have done it, but mostly it seems that every author creates some planet that acts just like our own (even with the same gravity and atmosphere), and then uses the same terms of minutes, hours, weeks, months, and years. Summer and winter as well. (Though not Tuesday and October.)
It makes sense in that readers most likely don’t want to be bothered with learning a whole new system of time, and it’s true that I always thought it was distracting when on the old “Battlestar Galactica” series they’d say stuff like “Meet me in ten microns.”
But now that I’ve been studying up on ancient time-keeping to set up something real for this world I’ve created, it’s kind of frustrating to see that others (at least in my limited reading) haven’t addressed the issue. People travel from planet to planet and there’s never any mention of adapting to different lengths of day, even though here on Earth we have to adjust going from one coast to another.
I guess I’m being too scientific about it, in trying to make everything seem totally real and accurate, when all one need do is make the characters and their motivations clear and believable.
Any thoughts on this, or how you resolved it with your own worlds, would be greatly appreciated.
P.S. I just re-read this, and what popped into my head were three valuable words: Keep It Simple. If there's no need to complicate matters of time, as for the plot, then don't. Just like you wouldn't complicate matters with gravity on that planet if it wasn't needed. In fact, like any kid who's trying to deny he broke a window, in trying too hard to lie, you give yourself away. Just act like it's normal and people won't even think of the matter of time.
Methinks my muse is right.