Clementian (also here) planetary creation begins:
"T'Kela rotated once in thirty hours and some minutes, with eight degrees of axial tilt. Considerable night remained when the car stopped..." (p. 66)
Right. The t'Kelan rotation period is longer than the Terrestrial rotation period so the nights are longer and this affects the experience of human visitors to the planet. Pretty obvious but the environmental data become considerably more complicated.
The sun is red and apparently half again the size:
"...of Sol seen from Earth or Pax from Esperance..." (p. 67)
- the point being that, of the two human characters, van Rijn is from Earth whereas Joyce Davisson is from the colonized extra-solar planet, Esperance, which was colonized because it was Earth-like. Joyce remembers:
"...her home on the green planet of the star called Pax - a field billowing with grain, remote blue mountains, the flag of the sovereign world flying red and gold against a fleecy sky..." (p. 58)
We remember fleecy skies and cool green hills in Robert Heinlein's Future History. Sometimes the future histories seem very close.
We also find that we have previously summarized some complicated information about the t'Kelan environment.
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Thirty hour days would still be much easier for humans to cope with than the 60 hour days of Ivanhoe.
Ad astra! Sean
Note that humans evolved near the equator, where days and nights don't differ much in length throughout the year. Then we spread into the northern and southern hemispheres, where they -do-.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And that would affect our pre-human predecessors and their human successors in both practical and more subtle ways.
Ad astra! Sean
Poul emphasized the -restrictiveness- of winter in Scandinavia many times. You have to hunker down, it's dark most of the time, and the weather is... to say the least... inclement.
I am interested in Sweden because of Stieg Larsson. I think that I would enjoy hunkering down and would appreciate spring and summer all the more.
XC skis make winter in such climates a bit less restrictive. On skis one can go over the snow as fast as walking with no snow or faster if the trail is already broken since the last snowfall. There is still the short daylight to live with, but a (near) full moon mitigates that for several nights per month.
My experience is in the more southerly parts of Canada where winter solstice days are longer than in Scandinavia (just under 8 hours from sunrise to sunset here in Calgary), so the full moon is a bigger help in Scandinavia.
Kaor, Jim!
But I believe Stirling had in mind how harsh life was for people enduring Scandinavian winters in Anderson's stories. Heating must have often been inadequate and food supplies have often become dangerously low as winters dragged on. And day to day existence drab, limited, and not much more than hunkering down trying to stay warm.
Ad astra! Sean
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