Calendars are very useful. They can tell you when to plant crops, when to celebrate religious festivals, and when exactly you should fire off a letter of complaint to Ea-nāṣir about his having missed the deadline to deliver high-grade copper. Calendars are especially useful for science fiction and fantasy authors, delivering such information as how long the culture has been keeping track of the passage of time1, what event was important enough to be their benchmark, even whether or not the concept of zero pre- or postdated the calendar’s year one.
Perhaps some examples are in order.
Glen Cook’s A Shadow of All Night Falling (1979) provides a very straightforward date from which subsequent events are measured. The great city of Ilkazar, keenly aware of a prophecy that Ilkazar would fall because of a witch, prudently burned every witch it could find. Fans of self-fulfilling prophecies will not be astonished to discover that this policy led to the very event they hoped to avoid. Outraged at his witch mother’s execution, Varthlokkur studied magic until he had the power to level the city and inadvertently provide a yardstick by which events could be dated: AFE, or After the Fall of the Empire.
This handy system provides useful information not merely about the pace of history in the region (later events are set in the 10th century AFE) but also about Varthlokkur: the ageless wizard is both powerful and vindictive. He also has impulse control issues that figure into the plot.
Dates in Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937) are given in terms of the Year of Our Lord Hitler, with months named for such persons as Himmler. The reader could therefore sense that history had not developed necessarily to the benefit of the Allies (such as they were in 1937). In fact, the novel swiftly makes clear that history has not developed necessarily to anyone’s advantage, not even the people at the top of the exceeding unpleasant regime that resulted from total Nazi and Imperial Japanese victory. Human extinction seems a very real possibility.
Indeed, thanks to the Nazi habit of rewriting history, embracing the most bold-faced lies to glorify Hitler and by extension themselves, it’s not clear that any of the dates given in the book accurately measure the time elapsed since their supposed founding date. As the people in charge don’t believe in objective facts, I doubt they worry much about the accuracy of their calendar.
The Kesh in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home (1985) are a far nicer lot than Burdekin’s Nazis (low bar, I know). While the Kesh do have formal dating systems—“cycles” of fifty years and “gyres” of four hundred and fifty—and while the Kesh don’t seem to have any problem calculating the intervals about which they care—people’s ages, say—individual years do not get specific designations, nor do the Kesh seem to be particularly concerned about calendrical precision. The text comments that Kesh often don’t know what time of year it is.
This vagueness tells the reader a lot about what the Kesh value and what they do not. It also informs the reader that the climate of Northern California in Le Guin’s far future is extremely forgiving. Try that “oh, who really cares if it’s August or February, la la la” crap in Ontario and your corpse would tumble out of a snowbank during the spring thaw.
H. Beam Piper’s Terro-Human Federation divides history into Pre-Atomic and Atomic, the dividing point being the year when a sustained artificial atomic reaction was first achieved, 1942. Atomic power is very important to the Federation, not least because its military application is why so few people live in Earth’s northern hemisphere and why the dominant language of the Federation is a creole of Southern hemispheric languages.
Piper is the author who inspired this essay2, because a mere half century after encountering a Piper work using the Atomic calendar it suddenly occurred to me to wonder how the process of switching to the Atomic calendar was handled. The answer seems to be “gradually.” In “Omnilingual” (set in 1996), the current calendar is still in use. By “When in the Course —” (the 22nd and 23rd centuries, or 3rd century), Venus uses the Atomic calendar3, but at least one character still uses the so-called Christian calendar. By Four-Day Planet (1961), set in the 5th century, the Atomic calendar is universal.
Vernor Vinge’s Zones of Thought discard time measurements based on local phenomena in favour of seconds. The length of years and days will vary from world to world and from doomed asteroid city to doomed asteroid city4 but the second is consistent5. Therefore, time is measured in megaseconds and gigaseconds and so on.
From what event are those mega-and-gigaseconds measured? Why, 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970: Unix’s start date. What does this tell us? That Vernor Vinge was a giant nerd, yes, but also that legacy systems can remain in use for a very long time. Design choices made today could be complicating some unborn stranger’s life thousands of years from now. Consider your design choices carefully, so that you can die knowing ten thousand years from now, some engineer on 40 Eridani A ii will be cursing you.
The above is a very, very small sample of calendrical choices featured in SFF novels. I didn’t even touch on revolutionary calendars, calendars where the current year is always the zero point and preceding or future years continually renumbered, dates measured by the reign of a ruler, or the extremely ominous calendar that counts down to Armageddon. Feel free to mention your favourites in comments below.
- Or at least, how long they claim to have been counting/tracking time. I am sure there’s an example out there of a completely fraudulent calendar claiming great antiquity for the regime using it when in fact the calendar and the regime are only a few years old. Yes, yes, I know about Anatoly Fomenko’s New Chronology. ↩︎
- Well, the starting point was my proposal to choose as the new year zero the earliest year we currently think beer was being brewed, 13,000 BP. That would have the advantage of decoupling the calendar from culture wars and also remove the arithmetical irritation caused by the absence of a year zero. ↩︎
- Venus’ year is only 62% as long as Earth’s. There’s never any mention of needing to account for that when converting from Christian dates, so the Atomic calendar must use an 8766-hour year. I don’t know how the Atomic calendar differentiates between local years (like Venus’) and the standard year used in the Atomic calendar. ↩︎
- A hat-tip to Joan D. Vinge’s Heaven Belt works, which as you know are set in Vernor Vinge’s Zones of Thought milieu. The Outcasts of Heaven Belt (1978) was in fact the first work set in the Zones of Thought. ↩︎
- Well, except that thanks to relativity, the second count can’t be consistent across interstellar distances. ↩︎
He was a computer science professor (so yes), which explains and adds another layer to his choice of the UNIX epoch.
If I recall correctly, non-traveling locals used calendars suitable to local purposes, but the traveling Qeng Ho used their seconds-based system converting to Customer systems only when necessary to make a sale
In John M. Ford’s The Princes of the Air there are presumably ways to refer to dates but I don’t think we see any beyond years in one spot (wine vintages), and it’s not clear how the years are counted. In general timespans (e.g. people’s ages) are referred to in hours, presumably for the same reason Vinge used seconds, in that they’re arbitrary and therefore don’t depend on planetary rotation or orbits.
yoon ha lee’s machineries of empire series features the calendar as weapon of war (and by extension mass destruction) and also as a tool of rebellion. very cool sci-fi system
Though I must admit I did not understand it. I would say however in this universe the various calendars define the natural and social laws of the place where they are applied. Thus their central meaning to the story
Tolkien famously invented several calendars. The Shire Reckoning system and the Numenorian calendars are rather similar to our own, with some differences. The Elvish calendar was the most unusual, with their years (yen) being roughly 144 of our years (reflecting the much longer lifespan the Eldar had), but with a shorter solar year called a loa, with 6 seasons that could correspond to longer months. In high school, ever the geek, when I was required to keep a journal for one class, I used the Elvish system. I had a forgiving teacher :)
There is the botanical/ecological division of the year into pr(a)evernal, vernal, (a)estival, serotinal, autumnal and brumal/hivernal.
You must always be prepared to switch to some other timekeeping standard, because your calendar’s days are numbered.
I am glad that you featured Piper’s TFH and it’s calendar. When I first started reading this, the Atomic Era popped immediately to mind.
Came here to check for Zones of thought mention – was not disappointed.
Here’s a page of Star Trek-universe calendars I compiled as a tie-in to my first Department of Temporal Investigations novel: https://christopherlbennett.wordpress.com/home-page/star-trek-fiction/dti-watching-the-clock/dti-calendar-notes/
Piper always weirded me out with the hours/not days- although I guess it made sense on Fenriss.
Well, the starting point was my proposal to choose as the new year zero the earliest year we currently think beer was being brewed, 13,000 BP.
The fact that this caused endless wars between the Revisionists and the Preservatists each time some meddling Archaeologist discovered an even-older beer brewing vat is entirely outside the scope of this discussion.
Shall we discuss the Century of the Fruitbat and the Century of the Anchovy?
Not to mention all of those inconvenient bits of history that were stashed away by the History Monks.
And there was a local calendar in one of Pratchett’s books in which the years were numbered backwards, but nobody knew (or wanted to) what would happen when it reached Year Zero. Can’t remember which book that was in.
The Theocracy of Muntab,from Thief of Time.
Okay, why does a link also form a line break? Tor, something’s borked.
That’s been a problem with this board software ever since it was introduced. A link causes a line break and the underlining appears at the start of the line rather than under the link text itself. You’d think someone would’ve addressed that glitch by now.
The more recent problem is that sometimes the board won’t let you post a message at all if it contains too much stuff other than plain text, such as italics and links.
Quoting also appears to be broken.
Steven Brust’s Dragaera features 30 hour days, five day weeks, 17 day months, 17 month years (which means that their years are a few days shorter than ours: 8,670 hours vs 8,760), 17 year Turns, and 17 Turn Phases.
There’s also the reign of a House, a variable time period that never lasts less than one Phase or more than 17. 17 reigns constitutes a Cycle through all the Houses, and 17 Cycles= a Great Cycle. The Vlad Taltos books take place during the first (Phoenix) reign of the second Great Cycle in the history of the Dragaeran Empire.
Sharon Shinn in her Elemental Blessings series introduces a totally original calendar. Each year consists of 5 quintiles + 5 change days between quintiles (holidays). Each quintile consists of 8 weeks. Each week consists of 9 days. Together, they make a year 365 days long.
The Qeng Ho actually date events from the first landing on the Moon — it’s just that internally their clocks still use the Unix epoch start so there’s a little tiny adjustment buried somewhere deep in the system.
Yes, they really do need their Programmer-Archaeologists ;)
That’s what the text of _A Deepness in the Sky_ says, but it’s pretty clear that Vinge (who was a CS Professor and knew that UNIX systems use Jan 1, 1970 as their time origin) meant this as a mistake by the Qeng Ho. This is close enough to the date of the moon landing in July 1969 for the Qeng Ho to get this confused in the far future.
Umm- does this mean that Y2K will happen (again?) on January 1, 2070?
Actually, 2038 might be a problem related to unix time for some devices . See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
Greg Bear mentioned the Binary Millennium in his Queen of Angels.
My recollection is that most people think the start date is the Moon landing, but that turns out to be simply a plausible mistake.
The text seems clear that the start date is not the Moon landing:
That does not compute; a year is ~30 megaseconds, so there’s only ~13 megaseconds (not a hundred) between the two dates. Did Vernor mis-shift a decimal point?
Venus’ year may be 225 earth days long, but a day lasts 243 earth days. Beyond that, it makes little sense to measure both on a planet with full cloud coverage for timekeeping. Therefore, I guess it does not matter what calendar they use.
I wonder what length of day Piper thought Venus had?
“Consider your design choices carefully, so that you can die knowing ten thousand years from now, some engineer on 40 Eridani A ii will be cursing you.”
I would posit that “Be utterly whimsical in your design choices, because no matter what you can die knowing ten thousand years from now, some engineer on 40 Eridani A ii will be cursing you.” is a more accurate construct.
40 Eri A ii is Vulcan, though, so I doubt the engineer would be cursing, just raising an eyebrow and making a coolly scathing remark about the illogic of it.
I think there’s a new calendar in A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ, too.
Look, just so long as nobody re-invents the Romans and their absolutely bizarre system of counting dates backwards.
(It’s like this. Every month has three important days: the Kalends, the Nones, and the Ides. The Kalends is the first, the Nones are either the 7th or the 5th, the Ides are either the 13th or the 15th. If you want to know a date, you don’t count up from the Ides as we do, you count backwards from the nearest signpost. The trick is that you have to count inclusively. So March 15th, as we know, is the Ides of March. So far, so good, and the day before that is Pridie Ides, the day before the Ides, great. And then the day before *that* is THREE days before the Ides, because you count “Today, tomorrow, and then the Ides, that’s three days”. I learned this in Latin class in high school, spent three minutes arguing with the teacher until she made me stop, and I’ve never quite forgiven the Romans for any of this.)
Big Brother Iron (2002) by Charles Stross, his take on 1984, has an interesting problem with the calendar:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/toast/toast.html#bigbro
In my upcoming ANALOG novella “Aleyara’s Flight” (the sequel to “Aleyara’s Descent” from 2023 and my upcoming prose collection of the same title), I put in a bit of exposition about the calendar used by the Biauru, the aliens featured in the stories — a 469-day year divided into 14 months alternating 33 and 34 days, with an “anti-leap” day omitted every 4 years. I debated whether to leave in such a niggly detail, but since the stories are told entirely from a Biauru point of view, I couldn’t step outside of it as a narrator and say “Oh, by the way, a Biauru year is 1.464 Earth years,” so I had to hint at it by establishing that the year has considerably more days in it. Of course, that only works if the reader assumes the planet’s day length is similar to ours, but that’s a reasonable assumption in this case (it’s 27 hours, 23 minutes).
The calendar in Huxley’s Brave New World uses the roll out of Ford’s Model T as the starting point.
In Edgar Rice Burroughs’s “Pellucidar”, the habitable hollow sphere-world found inside the Earth, its sun never moves, therefore the perception of time is extremely, nay, absurdly flexible. I think where I stopped reading, probably at the end of book two, there was a proposal to broadcast a time signal by radio throughout Pellucidar to get rid of that nonsense. However, the Wikipedia page seems to say that this didn’t catch on.
Earth time in seconds might be managed similarly around the galaxy in Earth’s frame of reference, though I think your astrally-projected hand has just tapped my shoulder while you astrally whisper in my subjective ear, “Stars move.” Including Sol. So Earth seconds are going to run astray from seconds elsewhere in the galaxy after all.
It’s begun to bother me in Jack Campbell’s “The Lost Fleet” setting that the human race occupies planets of many stars where the physical day and year reasonably must be different on each world but I think it’s never mentioned, though admittedly, the cast spend most of their time in space fleets fighting other space fleets. Relativity is mentioned, but they try to avoid it. Space time is Earth time, in minutes, seconds, hours, days, weeks and I think months, and years, but I think actual dates aren’t mentioned, either. And I think I’d have noticed if anyone was adapted by science to live a day significantly different from 24 hours. And no, they’re not changing the rotation of planets to be 24 hours, either.
A society like this with no sense of when in the calendar they actually are, may be functioning without rental and income tax. And I don’t remember that coming up, or is it possible that these are paid daily and so are never a concern on a longer time scale?
There’s a Doctor Who story where cloned armies of humans and aliens have been fighting for control of a crashed colonist spaceship for longer than any survivor remembers, but it turns out to be one week.
And so many more stories in that series that are funny about time in other ways.
In C.M. Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons,” one of the characters tells the revived 20th century protagonist that the year is “7-B-936,” It’s assumed that it’s in the distant future, since the bronze casket in which the protagonist was found has oxidized significantly.