What Time Is It?

Time is a vexing problem for the fantasy-sci/fi writer whose world is not populated by humans familiar with our standard time measurement system. A writer is stuck with creating a time standard that makes sense for their world.

We modern humans are time-obsessed creatures. We constantly want to know what time it is, and what time it will be. We are surrounded by clocks, watches, and calendars. It is the one measurement that is nearly earth-universal. Almost all societies on Earth use the familiar seconds-minutes-hours time slices of the day. This began from the earliest days of civilization, way back in Mesopotamia, somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 years ago.

The Mesopotamians sliced the day into four sections of six hours each, giving us a 24 hour day. Each hour was divided into quarters, until much later, when it was segmented into 60 slices called minutes. Then, around the 1670s AD, seconds were added as another refinement. This gives us what is now the familiar 86,400 second day.

Earliest society cared mostly about the seasons. Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall, these were important time periods that one needed to be able to plan for. So a calendar was helpful in keeping track of the days. It wasn’t long before they realized that the seasons repeated themselves about every 365 days.

Separating the day into various segments became important mostly through religious practice. Monks and nuns, and often the general populace as well, were expected to do certain things at particular times of the day. Bells or gongs would be rung, or priests would sing out. Government duties became regimental, with meetings only occurring at certain times.

All of these bells and gongs and singing relied primarily on the sun’s position, read via a sun dial. But the visibility of the sun was not always reliable (and, of course, useless at night), so burning candles, dripping water, and falling sand (i.e.- the hourglass) were put into use.

In England's medieval period, before pendulum clocks, monks would ring the bells of the church on an hourly basis using hourglasses and candles to mark the time, and they divided the day into twelve segments. This created a relativistic hour throughout the year. Since England is so far north, the winter day is about eight hours long, and a summer day is eighteen. So dividing a winter day into twelve parts created hours only 40 minutes long, while in the summer they were an hour and a half! Springtime was hard on the monks, because the midday meal progressively started later. So the hunger-panged priests would speed up the ringing of the bells in the morning and slow it down in the afternoon, all so they could have their meal when their stomach expected it.

What does all of this mean for the fantasy-sci/fi writer? It means that if the writer’s world has no connection to Earth and humans, then an entirely new system must be created for these creatures to use.

If it is a primitive society, then there won’t be much separation in time. Days and seasons, maybe lunar months (if your world has a moon), but that’s about it. As a civilization becomes more complex, however, so does the time system, out of necessity. Days become segmented, and further refined, calendars get important future dates, and special days, and so forth.

The problem is, even once you’ve created this new time system, you have to name all the units, and then convey to the reader all of this knowledge, all without boring them to tears, or confusing them to the point of exhaustion.

Step one is to note that your work is a ‘translation’ of this society. We humans are reading this text about some world that has no connection to Earthy humans. So this English text is a telling of the events, and therefore there is translation taking place. When one writes that, “Marec walked over to the rock,” one doesn’t put in the alien’s word for ‘walked’ or ‘rock’. One assumes, however, that ‘Marec’ is at least a rough approximation of Marec’s true alien name.

However, if Marec is quoted as saying, “I will meet you in one hour’s time,” there is a disconnect. How would Marec know how long an hour is? Why would his society use hours, when that is a human invention? Is it a translation for whatever an hour is in his world? Perhaps… but the more a writer interjects words that are human inventions the more the aliens sound like poor knockoffs of humans. It’s like a primitive alien telling someone that, “we need to retrofit this altar so that it can hold more people.” The world ‘retrofit’ is just too modern. An author must translate the aliens’ words in such a way that the flavor is retained. A primitive society needs to sound like a primitive society. A magical society needs to sound magical.

So generally, an author will create names for time slices that are similar to the ones we are familiar with. And a calendar will be created, with various segments, counting up to that world’s year. Often, calendars will be patterned off of natural events, like seasons, moon orbits, or even perhaps mating periods.

As an aside, this naming convention needs to be used for the fauna and flora of the world as well. One doesn’t want to read that, “Marec held his cat, slowing petting her long shiny coat as he watched the procession.” The reader’s suspension of disbelief jumps at the word ‘cat’. What’s a cat doing on this alien world? An easy way around that many authors use is to just have a creature that is similar to a cat, and give it a different name. “Marec held his folum, slowly petting her long shiny coat as he watched the procession.” This means you need to keep good notes on all of these creatures’ names and vital information.

As an example of a time system, in a world I created way back in my youth I had six seasons: Torc (Winter), Suu (Spring), Ramal (Wet), Ar (Wind), Su (Hot), and Miluc (Fall), with a 216 day year, giving 36 day seasons. I then divided each season into three 12 day ‘weeks’, using the words ‘Rising’ and ‘Falling’ for the first and third week of that season. So Rising Torc was the first twelve days of winter, just Torc for the second week, and Falling Torc for the last week. This all meshed together nicely, probably a little too nicely, for the chances that a planet has exactly 216 rotations for every revolution is rather unlikely, but what the hey, it fit with what I needed. Each season was also associated with a color and an element in the society.

I divided the day into ten daylight hours (called tir), and ten night hours (sut). So 3 tir was three ‘hours’ after sun rise. Of course, we don’t know how this correlates with human time, because we don’t know the orbital period of this fantasy planet in Earth units. Just because it has 216 days in one of its years, doesn’t equate to anything on Earth. But it doesn’t really matter, other than I let one fantasy tir equal to about an hour. Which means it has twenty-hour days, about, and 216 days to a year, meaning that its years are shorter than Earth’s. Which would put its orbit closer to the sun. But that’s okay, because I had this world’s sun be a small orange-yellow, about half the mass of ours.

I divided each ‘hour’ into ten units as well, using the prefix ‘uli-‘. So ulitir was a tenth of a tir. Ulisut was a tenth of a sut, but equal to the same amount of time, its just one was used during the day, the other at night. Since this was a magical-medieval fantasy world, I didn’t bother to slice time any further.

I also named the twelve days of each week, and created holidays, and various important dates and times for the society.

An author who decides to write a fantasy-sci/fi world that has no connection to Earthly humans has quite a job ahead of them. Time and space measurement, animals, plants, people and proper names all have to be created, named, and cataloged so the world makes sense.