Re: Time on Fantasy worlds

Gerry Quinn <gerryq@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Tina_Hall@xxxxxxxxxxx says...

How do you say "after a few minutes", for example, in the
appropriate words? How "an hour later"?

In the trilogy, I've now temporarily decided on a number of
'arrows', several per one minute (figuring an arrow takes some
time if you shoot it as far as you can, and that being common
enough to end up as a rough time-unit). Don't know whether I
like it, but it's better than minutes.

If you were talking about humans you could have 'breaths'. Of
course they would be nominally standard breaths, because the time
of one varoes - but if people were used to the measure, they'd
know what is meant.

That is an idea.

A religious society might use units of a common short rite.

I would be a bit at a loss how to implement that, being not a religious
type and not familiar with the rites. It would feel odd to me even if I
had a folk that has gods, deities, or whatever.

So far, my creations are all atheists, or perhaps agnostics (confusion
of the term here). They don't even get the idea of the existence of
deities, and know that there's nothing after death.

The critters that sparked the question are closely tied to nature,
however. I wonder whether there's anything there that could work. (You
could say that there is a kind of mindless deity, controlling
everything; magic. The folks are well aware of it, but there's neither a
real nor a perceived reason to pray to it or something, simply because
they know it's a mindless force present in every one of them.)

You could invent a common animal or bird that has a certain
behaviour or call that is consistent in time. Imagine a bird
that goes "Scri- scri-scri-scri-scree (pause)" repeatedly for
long periods. If that were common people might use a unit based
on its call.

I keep wondering whether I can't use the drakes (mini-dragons) for this,
how long they take to fly somewhere, or something else related to them.

For hours, I'm trying to re-word that so far. But I'd like a
normal word that can easily be associated with roughly an hour.
(Can be anything from 45 minutes to twice that.)

I'd just use hours.

The hours is the thing I want removed. :)

--
Tina
WIR: Seasons & Elements trilogy, a serial in three parts.
WISuspension: Magic Earth series, a serial in six parts.
Posted to Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.composition.

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