Calendar for a fantasy world with no seasons

I was going to post about the fixed calendar I created for one of my worlds, but then I realized, are you saying that the sun never rises or sets? Not just that it crosses the sky at the same place all the time? Because then you'd lack the basic unit of a 'day' that I've built my calendars around (though I did this for a country without a sun, but they still had a moon to base a rise/set cycle around).

Translational sun position? Like, how the sun only projects certain type of shadows once a year.

Is there anything that happens at regular intervals? Migrations of certain creatures or blooming of certain plants? You could base a calendar system around that.

I take it the sun remains in position during the day? (and there is a night-time?)

I really like the idea of no seasons. I think it's cool. But, the question begs to be asked--why keep time at all? If we think about our measuring of time, what does that revolve around? Planting and sowing. Building up stores for the winter. Age, perhaps.

If the sun stays the same, there is no cause to create time-keeping monuments (Stonehenge and perhaps the Pyramids). How would this impact a society if they are in an area where they don't have to worry about planting/sowing/winter, etc?

Perhaps look at areas where the weather does not change: far north, super hot desert regions, moderate areas that are temperate like Hawaii.

I'd look at animal and flower cycles. Is there a time of the year when animals mate and have babies? Do certain flowers only bloom at a certain time of the year (regardless of sun position)? Things like that.

I think once you crack this culture's REASON for keeping time (eg. just for tracking age, birthdays, etc) then you're going to find a way into the method of timekeeping.

I'm with CratersBabies. I see no reason to have a calendar at all. If there is no winter, you don't need to worry about it catching you out with your barn empty. If there's no spring, you don't need to be sure you have your seed ready.

Based on the weather, maybe? Are there rainy seasons, dry seasons, windy seasons?

If there are no seasons then there are probably no animal migrations. Even if the sun appears to remain constant, the stars will change as the planet goes through its revolution. Astronomers would be able to tell when one revolution around the sun has been completed and the night stars, 'reset.'

If there are no seasons and no moon, you could stil have a calander based around agriculture. Even without seasons there will be a planting time and a harvesting time. A time when the herd animals are mating and a time when the calves and lambs and such are being born. A time when the fruit trees blossom and a time when they bare fruit. This sort of calendar would not be exact and would not necessaruly match up to a 'year' in the astronomical sense. The calendar would also need to be reset every 5 - 20 years as the difference would cause an increasing inaccuracy.

A third alternative would be religious. If there is a predominate religion and clergy in your world they might invent a calendar based around religious festivals and holy days.

Rose La Vell said:

I'm in the process of creating a calendar independent from the movement of solar bodies. This fantasy world has no moons and the sun is always in the same place, so this prevents any sort of celestial timekeeping. How would you handle creating a calendar for a world like this?

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Depending on how you explain the mechanics behind the world havinga stationary sun, there are several possible ways. Even without annual cycles, you might still see recurrent weather patterns such as monsoons or draughts. Biological processes would still take time, so plants might give a method of counting (1st Bloom, Seed, Harvest, etc.) The ocean could provide some sort of indicator with changes in currents (not sure how that would work with no tides, but still a possibility.) Herd animal migrations might not follow temperature changes but could still be seasonal if tied to replinishment of grasslands.

But planting and harvesting could be on a rolling programme that had no regard to a calendar. Oh, the turnips are ready, okay let's dig them up and...what do we think we'll be needing next? Plant that, then.

Honestly, I wouldn't bother making a calendar for a world like you describe. I would be hard-pressed to see why they would care about something like time keeping. Since there are no seasons, there's no day/night cycle, there's nothing to indicate that there's a way to make something.

Unless, of course, you had a ruler who decided to decree something, just to control his people, and then it could be as weird and tricky or as easy to remember (depending on if he's an evil dictator or a kindly guardian), but I'd just have fun with it. Without a natural force to contradict any decree, I'd just have fun with it and reflect the character-who-creates-it's beliefs.

But, then again, I dislike worldbuilding, so I always make it as easy on myself as I can.

It might help if you elaborate on how exactly the sun and such in your world works.


Currently, I'm agreeing with the people who say that there's no need for a calendar, really.

In my humble opinion, you have greater problems with this world than keeping a calender...

If the sun is in the same location all the time, then your world is tidal locked.

Meaning its close enough to the sun to be trapped in its gravitational field and does not rotate. No rotation, no gravity on the planet, unless it orbits the star super fast. No rotation, also means, no night on the sunny side, and perpetual darkness and freezing temperatures on the dark side.

Or so are my thoughts when I read something like this... Yes, its fantasy, but even fantasy needs to have some realistic grounding. Magic can only account for so much...

I suspect gravity is a function of mass, not rotation.

While I agree with Thothguard, it's your world and you can design it any way you want -- as long as you can write it in such a way as to allow us to accept it and believe in it while we're in the story.

How do YOU see timekeeping in your world? What's important for the inhabitants to track?

I would imagine if they have science, they would be able to mark the passage of their planet around its sun by shifts in the constellations at night?

But, yeah, I'm not sure they would need a calendar. It does mean that rites of passage that on Earth are based on "birthdays" would be unlikely to exist there.

And if the place is really tidally locked to its sun, I imagine the plant life there would be quite different. Many of our crops are sensitive to day length for their growth and reproduction cycles, if not to seasonal temperature swings.

The fauna would likely be quite different in its habits too. If tidally locked, there would be no reason for seasonal migrations. No seasonal breeding cycles either. No seasonal changes in coverings (think: molts, or winter coloration). Would there even be regular cycles of sleep and awakening? Or would critters just take regular naps?

Hmm. Perhaps one Earth analogue for the fauna might be our abyssal species. Deep-water species see no light, so no seasonal changes on light. But even there, they probably see a seasonal difference in the "rain" of dead stuff drifting down from the shallow waters?

It's a neat idea to explore, IMO.

--Steve

Buffysquirrel said:

I suspect gravity is a function of mass, not rotation.

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Yes. But there would be no Coriolis effect on weather patterns. I imagine weather would be more stable there? Not necessarily in a good way, just perhaps more predictable?

--Steve

Rose La Vell said:

I'm in the process of creating a calendar independent from the movement of solar bodies. This fantasy world has no moons and the sun is always in the same place, so this prevents any sort of celestial timekeeping. How would you handle creating a calendar for a world like this?

Click to expand...

Sounds like the job for an ancient order of mystics, the type where a person spends her/his/its life refilling a water clock and adding tally marks to some ledger.

Asking someone "what day it is" might border on being a religious/cultural test -- or how wars start.

Just .02 from left field.

Introversion said:

I would imagine if they have science, they would be able to mark the passage of their planet around its sun by shifts in the constellations at night?

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If they're on the sunny side of a tidally locked planet, there is no night. Depending on the technology level of the world, they might not know the stars exist.

I think the first thing the OP needs to worry about is the idea of time. How does the concept of the passage of time register with people who do not have a day/night cycle, let alone seasons?

Heartbeats and breaths would be their first introduction to the idea of time passing, so a clock based on a standardized beat would be an easy concept for them to grasp.

But does their time system just keep running indefinitely, or does it roll over and start from zero at some point? And if it runs indefinitely, what's the starting point? Maybe, to keep appointments, the two people who want to meet have to "synchronize watches"--i.e. zero their clocks in unison, and then agree on a set number of beats later at which to meet.

A water drip clock would make sense to these people, as it's analogous to a heartbeat or a breath.

You can rig a water drop clock to just keep running indefinitely, or you can have one that fills a vessel of a standard size. When the vessel needs to be emptied, that's the start of a new "hour", so a finite-size water drop clock would eventually lead to the idea of time rolling over and starting from zero again.

(Note this would be a radical concept to these people. They'd be much more comfortable with the idea that time just goes on and on without stopping. That's what would seem "natural" to them because they don't have anything in their lives except for their own sleep patterns to think of as a reset point.)

A clock that resets to zero at well-defined increments, once it becomes common, would eventually be standardized by society, i.e. everyone would synchronize their clocks to some central standard (and maybe old-fashioned people would rail against this "complicated" scenario, grousing about the good ol' days when everyone just set their clock whenever they woke up.)

Once the synchronization has happened, then your society will start to develop analogues to the ideas of days, weeks, etc. There will be certain blocks of time that it will be convenient for people to talk about.

1000 seconds is roughly half an hour, and 28 hours is about 100,000 seconds, so a decimal system based on the heartbeat wouldn't be bad. People can talk about kilobeats of time. "Let's meet in a hundred kilobeats. The yoghurt will be ready by then, and I can bring you some."

Star position would still change as the world orbited around its sun (I am assuming when you say the sun is always in the same pace, you don't mean the planet is tide-locked but that the sun always describes the same path in the sky because the planet has no axial tilt).

If the planet it tide locked too, and the people live in the sunny or twilit areas, I'd speculate that there would be no concept of a year at all (unless they venture to the dark side and see stars). It might even delay or forestall the development of cultural concepts of the passage of time in that sense. Perhaps these people would denote/measure time increments in terms of the life cycles of different creatures or plants.

"Meet me in five butterfly lives," or, "I'll see you before the chicks fledge."

It would be interesting, though, to wonder how the life cycles of organisms would evolve on a world without external cues to keep their internal clocks synced.

jjdebenedictis said:

If they're on the sunny side of a tidally locked planet, there is no night. Depending on the technology level of the world, they might not know the stars exist.

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Yeah, I was unsure if the OP was positing tidal-locked or not. As you say, if they are, then perhaps only visitors to their world's twilight edge could see stars.

--Steve

Sunspot cycles might be relevant in such a world, if they're pronounced enough to have noticeable effects on weather/temperature, the appearance of auroras in the polar regions etc.

But it would be more a matter of averages than something you could absolutely predict. Now if civilization arose in the twilit areas, then the stars they could see would change position in the sky over the course of a year, of course. That might be relevant if it affected navigation.

But does their time system just keep running indefinitely, or does it roll over and start from zero at some point?

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Do they have the concept of "zero?"

. . . hmmm . . . gives me an idea, a world with no zero . . .

Introversion said:

As you say, if they are, then perhaps only visitors to their world's twilight edge could see stars.

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Then run back, tell everybody else, and get burnt as heretics?

Buffysquirrel said:

Then run back, tell everybody else, and get burnt as heretics?

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That seems plausible.

Although, I wonder what sort of religions would develop on such a place? I suppose "sun God" is obvious. But so many of humanity's myths and early religions seem to be grasping for explanations of natural phenomenon like: The rising and setting of the sun; seasons, constellations, tides, etc. There would be none of those cyclic phenomenon on that world.

--Steve