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From: wollman@hergotha.csail.mit.edu (Garrett Wollman)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: Re: (ReacTor) Counting the Days: Five SFF Approaches to Calendars
Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2025 22:52:20 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab
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In article <102uhvh$f8$1@reader1.panix.com>,
James Nicoll <jdnicoll@panix.com> wrote:
>Counting the Days: Five SFF Approaches to Calendars
>
>So many different ways of measuring history and the passage of time...
>
>https://reactormag.com/counting-the-days-five-sff-approaches-to-calendars/

Some examples of my own acquaintance:

Graydon Saunders' Commonweal uses the French revolutionary calendar,
but with a couple of subtle modifications: first, the Commonweal is in
the southern hemisphere, so the months are aligned to local seasons
rather than Paris ca. 1789; and second -- this took me quite a while
to notice -- Saunders has moved Festival, and thus the turning of the
year, from the end of summer to the beginning.  There is off-hand
mention of pre-Commonweal dating systems but not in enough detail to
identify them.

Diane Duane's Middle Kingdoms use a calendar based on four 90-day
seasons, with the equivalent of the Gregorian adjustment implemented
by dropping the 208th day of every 128th year.  The extra five days
(six days for leap years) are the "Dreadnights", intercalated at the
winter solstice.  I believe there have been similar calendars proposed
IRL but don't know what they were called.  In an appendix, Duane notes
that the people of the Middle Kingdoms do reckon by the lunar cycle as
well, they just don't use this for dating; the lunar and solar cycles
coincide for Opening Night every 19 years, which is called Nineteen
Years' Night, obviously enough.  The dragons, being interstellar
travelers, have their own ways of timekeeping.

(I should go back and read those books and stories, given that it's
Pride Month and all, but I'm still trying to finish my Hugo reading
before the voting closes.)

-GAWollman

-- 
Garrett A. Wollman    | "Act to avoid constraining the future; if you can,
wollman@bimajority.org| act to remove constraint from the future.  This is
Opinions not shared by| a thing you can do, are able to do, to do together."
my employers.         | - Graydon Saunders, _A Succession of Bad Days_ (2015)