Writing in Orbits
Do you remember that fun "how old are you on Saturn?" game from childhood?
One of the challenges of writing stories either in first-person omniscient (yup) or in first-person limited, and in a far-future specfic situation where Earth is so far out of the picture that it’s barely even in folklore, is that the characters narrating the stories do not help us Earthlings with some important cultural things.
This is a struggle for me right now because I’m writing a story in first-person limited, one of a few first-person limited stories I’m embarking on. The narrator is a new adult, and the story is set on Ameisa.
She is sixteen and became an adult at fifteen.
Ameisa does not have a very low adulthood age. To get Earth ages, you have to multiply the ages of any character by 1.23. Ameisa is in a binary planet system around a Sun-like star (slightly dimmer) and is a tad farther out from its star, 1.148 AU🜨, with a mass of 1.1 M🜨. Its atmosphere is slightly thicker than ours. A sixteen-year-old on Ameisa would be 19.68🜨 years old. A fifty-year-old on Ameisa is 61.5🜨 years old.
The closest-in planet I write about, Atara — where A Matter of Oracles, the novella I just published, is set — is 1.033 AU🜨 away from its star. In its solar system, it is one of two habitable planets at a stable Lagrange point relative to a gas giant (smaller than Jupiter). Tilōno’s age is familiar and easy to reference because it’s not that different from what a reader expects from the number.
Maðz, where The Village of Strong Branches is set, has an orbital period of 1.1 AU🜨, and its year-length is 1.1962 — so, not as long as Ameisa, barely. It’s also lighter than Ameisa, at 0.93 M🜨. The main character of that novella, Keð, is 26 on Maðz, which would be 31 on Earth.
Part of why I minored in astronomy in college (all the way back in the mid/late 00s) was because I wanted to know these orbital dynamics, and a lot of math went into figuring out how to put these planets together.
To get back to the subtitle for this post, one of the strategies I have used in the past to talk about ages is to structure dialogue or thoughts so that the other planets come up. The one I have never used is a random footnote saying “BTW, 15 on Ameisa is 18.45 Earth years,” although I have been tempted to do that.
The tricky thing is that not all of my characters have personalities or interests or end up in small talk situations where that childhood party game of “how old are you on x planet?” will come up. A burning example of this is in the narrative I am writing right now, where I’m writing a matchmaking scene between two young women over dinner. The first-person narrator, again, is 16 (19.68🜨), and the woman she is being set up with by her family is 20 (24.6🜨). In both Ameisi and Earth ages, they’re young enough that the gap is still a fairly big age difference. I’ve hacked something together to have this come up, but it doesn’t feel right. I will have to remove it from the draft. It’s a ghost story about nymph-like spirits called klamodya (sing. klamoda), anyway.
Maybe this is why I see people translating ages so seldomly in speculative fiction and why planets seem to have familiar orbits and people familiar ages. There are other things I do, such as giving characters the same names to make everything feel natural (which Karatau is le?) or avoiding using the color-word blue when characters are speaking languages that don’t have that color-word.
Or, for that matter, following through on what tides and quakes are like in binary planet systems like Ameisa-Laseå.
It’s a fun set of problems, and that’s one of the reasons I love writing these worlds despite the challenges of translating these environments for readers.
By the way, I would be 1.26 years old on Saturn. 🪐😎