philosophy of time

[marycatelli]

So the heroine lives in a world with non-Euclidean geography.  You can have a nice square fortress, with rooms on every side, and the door in the middle opens up on an open-air market, or a swamp, or a cathedral -- in stone when it's a wood fortress.

And two door next to each other can lead to realms where you have to travel thirty other realms to get from one to the other if you don't use those two doors.

You can also reach any sort of clime that way.  Hop from a flowering meadow to a freezing waste.

And then I found that the heroine left home early in the morning, spent some time at the market, and is on her way again, thinking about how advanced the day is, and how soon they will have to camp.

sigh.

Which requires a step back and consideration of whether they should all tick by the same clock, and whether the weather differences stem from seasons and not just from climate.  ponder ponder ponder.  Conclude that the interesting features of that would not harmonize with this story.  You can go all sorts of odd places here, and to map you need a network of nodes, but if you walk through a door at a summer noon, you arrive at a summer noon.

Comments

[earl wajenberg (from livejournal.com)]

"...if you walk through a door at a summer noon, you arrive at a summer noon."

Not to harass you, but does this world not have time zones or a southern hemisphere? I mean, you don't have to play tricks with the time dimension to have teleportation take you to other times of day or other seasons.

Of course, maybe it doesn't have time zones or a southern hemisphere. Or maybe the gating tricks don't cover a global-scale area. It's your world.

[marycatelli]

Nope.

Definitely not a hemisphere. For a hemisphere, you need a sphere, which this definitely does not have.

[earl wajenberg (from livejournal.com)]

Ah. No problems, then. Though if you _want_ to introduce "gate-lag," that's still possible.

[marycatelli]

Actually, it really isn't in this world. Because they aren't teleporting, the regions really do touch at the door. You couldn't put it down on a map, but if they had different times, it would an intrinsic property of the regions, not anything to do with the door.