Worldbuilding for Masochists Episode 171: Eight Days a Week
As we turn the pages of our own calendars, let's think about how the cultures we build in fantasy and science fiction mark the passage of time! What shapes the patterns of life for your characters? Do they judge years and seasons and months by the movement of celestial bodies, by agricultural phenomena, by winds and rains and storms, or by something else? The lunisolar calendar is a frantic hodgepodge in our own world; how does that change if your planet has multiple moons? Does your month divide into smaller units like weeks, or not?
Different cultures will conceive of all these things in varying ways, and attention to detail with your calendar can communicate a lot about your world to your reader. The calendar and timekeeping can touch on everything from religion to labor practices to human biology. Your culture's choices might reflect their priorities and values -- or, perhaps, what those priorities and values were at some time in the past when the calendar was set.
And then, of course, you might also have to name all those months and days of the weeks! So how do you handle that? Our own world has been wildly inconsistent with the choices, which means so can your invented societies!
We also look back at our writing years of 2025 and our intentions and hopes for 2026!
PS: Find your birthday in the French Revolutionary calendar!