Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Timeline Issues

Collapse
This is a sticky topic.
X
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • #46
    I'd be interested in seeing this timeline, if it still exists somewhere online. Clicking the link provided earlier in this thread leads to a dead end now.

    I read the afterword on the 20th anniv. ed. and honestly I never noticed these inconsistencies until they were brought to my attention. Dairine getting younger is rather glaring but everything else can be "reconciled" by refraining from assigning years to more than one book at a time.

    What I mean is, you can make a sliding scale, so that any point on the YW timeline (which is really a kind of parallel universe that resides in Duane's mind) can be assigned a point on the timeline of technological advances in our universe. Now in passing between these universes (which we all do when we read the books, and I will not dare to postulate how often Duane does this in writing them), two different kinds of time conversions are at work at any given moment.

    The first is the amount of real time you spend reading the book vs. the amount of YW time that passes "during" the book. This varies from person to person but usually we spend less of our time reading than the characters spend "living".

    The second is the amount of real time it took Duane to write each book vs. the amount of YW time that passes both during the writing and between the writing of books. This varies from book to book but it is obvious that Duane spends more real time writing or doing other things than the characters experience "living".

    Since Duane does not choose to make up this time by letting her characters "age" between books but DOES choose to let technology "age" between books, the only way to "make sense" of the timeline is to say that, were they to pass into "our" world somehow, they would think we were inexplicably slow in our advancement of technology. Perhaps they would chalk this up to so few wizards working in our version of the universe - we hop along like a person with one leg only (science); they run at a much faster pace with two legs (science AND wizardry).

    Dairine's age and Joanne's remarks are a god's (Author's) privilege to revise as necessary; if gods cannot change the past then what good are they? Or, if you don't like that line of reasoning, you could say that the Author made a mistake in transmitting some of the details of Nita and Kit's history. If you have difficulty with this type of thinking, you should see some of the discussions on the Tolkien forums..... Duane's "eternal present" is nothing compared to that!

    Comment


    • #47
      The archived copy of Peter's last published version of the timline is on Garrett's site, here: http://table76.donnael.com/YW/timeline.html
      -- Rick.

      Comment


      • #48
        Archived version

        A recent discussion on the crossingscon slack turned up a link for this on the wayback machine:

        http://web.archive.org/web/200602111.../timeline.html

        Comment

        Working...
        X