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What's The Date?
Topic Started: May 22 2014, 08:23 PM (595 Views)
Neco the Nightwraith
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*Edited to add that there might be mild spoilers...*

You know what I wonder? Having read Peacemaker now, and Geigi's history at the end, it occurs to me that humans have been around or on the atevi planet for at least 300 years. So, in that light, how long did it take them to get from Old Earth to the atevi home world? And what year was it when Phoenix left Earth?

Reckoned in old Earth years, what would the date be at the time of Peacemaker?

Some of the things we may never know. :/ But I was just thinking that, if Bren read an old poem from the Archives, the impact of how long ago it had been written might be considerable.

Any thoughts? I know there are some of you who had been keeping timelines, but not how far along you might have gotten.
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BlueCatShip
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IIRC, all we have on the travel from Earth to the eventual arrival at the atevi homeworld is in the introductory section of Foreigner 1. I'll need to reread that to see.

A rough sketch before rereading:

* The original crew leave on Phoenix from Sol at some unspecified time in the future. Remember this is an alternate future, not the Alliance/Union history.

* Phoenix is an early jump drive, not their first attempt, but not too long after, a 1.5 or 2nd generation jump drive and systems. How they handle things with their pilots and bridge crew contributes to whatever unknown thing happened in jump that threw them off course. We don't know if this accident moved them in time as well as space. We also don't know if they could have moved in some higher dimension(s) into an alternate universe or reality than the one in which they started. But apparently, we may never know that, unless they somehow re-establish contact with Earth (doubtful).

* After they come down from jump back into real space, they are not yet at the atevi system. It takes them either one or two star systems before they arrive at the atevi system, one of which has nearly lethal radiation and conditions very hazardous to the crew and colonists. I think we get an estimate of how many years that was, but I'll have to reread. My memory says it was several years, but not a century.

* As a rough estimate, I think we can say that it took less than ten years, besides the unknown time and distance in jump. If so, then they've been away from Earth roughtly 310 years or less. As a rough comparison, that would be as if a ship left England (or your country of choice) in 1700 or so and we are the descendants. (As a further comparison, my earliest ancestors of my family name to reach the American Colonies arrived in about 1755.)

* By that distance, Mosphei' and Phoenix ship speech should be two dialects about as different from Earth's main spacefaring language as, say, Australian, British, and American English are from each other. In other words, the accents and vocabulary and some speech habits will be different, but they'd be mutually intelligible readily enough.

* My memory says Ben Johnson, for example, was earlier than the 1700's, but I'm embarrassed to say I'd have to look him up to see when he wrote. -- Shakespeare and the King James version of the Bible were both from not quite a hundred years prior, 1611 and thereabouts, and we know the difficulties that presents to modern readers (and listeners). -- Anything much earlier, and Bren would be relying on his linguistics knowledge to read old languages, just like if he were to read Chaucer or Middle French, say, or Beowulf or the Venerable Bede, or even further back into mediaeval and then ancient Latin and Greek. But Bren might have some training in that, besides his study of atevi. I would think he'd be familiar already with the vast distance in time that any literature in the Archives would represent. But it would strike him occasionally anew, just like when we read anything from that far back. -- Funny how culture can change drastically or only slightly, but the basics of being human don't really change throughout any recorded history.

* OK, now I'm still adding asterisks to every paragraph, and I want to reread that introductory section.


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BlueCatShip
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I didn't get through reading before time for other stuff tonight, but from the intro, we learn:

In the Foreigner history from Earth's point of view, they (humans, Phoenix) know there is other, non-Earth life out there. Whether they have encountered other intelligent life before is not said. But because of this, they're a bit cautious, looking before they leap. However, they don't expect anything at the target system to which Phoenix was originally headed. So they have extra supplies and are headed there fast.

Phoenix is not the first jump-capable ship, nor would the colonized system have been the first station for trade. Earth has already done this successfully a few times, and they have applied this to Phoenix's mission.

At the stopover at the jump mass point, before they make the jump that gets them in trouble, they spend 100 hours in transit. That's 4 1/6 days.

They overshoot the jump before Taylor aborts the jump and brings them out of jump space down into real space again. After that, they cannot find any known referents, according to Navigator McDonnough. They expand the search, and at one point, it's said they don't find a known match with anything within a radius of 30 light years from Earth along the vector they were supposed to be on, or anything within 30 light years of Sol at all known.

The system where they first come down into real space again is a deadly binary blue-white star and a red dwarf star, but the blue-white star is not Sirius. -- I stopped reading where they decide not to show the external view of this star system to the colonists / passengers yet.

An interesting point, I thought, implied by all this:

This means that, from Earth's point of view, if Phoenix was lost, then they (Earth) could still send a ship to the target system or into that area to explore, to discover what happened, if possible, or to establish a system and station for trade. But likely, they'd send colonizing missions elsewhere first, and send a ship or flotilla or at least probes, to ascertain what did happen along Phoenix's intended route. They'd want to know for safety, in case there were anything or anyone there that was hostile, or simply sentient, or some unknown quantity they'd need to know about before they come up against it in future. Or so it would seem to me.

We don't know what did happen. Even if Earth were to send out a subsequent mission to find out, then if it was a sufficiently strange accident or phenomenon, they might "miss" finding Phoenix, because of spatial distance, time distance, or...higher dimensional / alternate reality distance. (Oh, dear, that could be bad.)

That there doesn't seem to have been anything in about 300 years argues strongly that if Earth did try to find what happened to Phoenix...they're looking in the wrong place, time, or reality. Yikes.

It could also mean that Earth did send a later mission to the original target system. So in almost three centuries, is there now a whole trade route there?

Where is the atevi home system and where are the one or two star systems Phoenix went through to get there? Where are the kyo? ... How remote is this region of space from anything known to Earth? That is, if we assume it's even in the same reality or universe, or within the same part of our own Milky Way galaxy? Or was the accident, some unknown quantity that threw them so off course, so bizarre in physics that there is essentially no chance that the atevi and Phoenix will find Earth, or that Earth will find them?

I suppose that's a moot point, but it could be interesting.

However, there was nothing to give a real date or even an approximate date, to link it to time on Earth, and at that point in the reading, they have only been out of the initial failed jump a few hours, a day or two at most. One other item: This does not say how long it took to get from Earth to the initial jump mass, the jump point of origin before the jump went wrong.

So a date is inconclusive so far.

I've always taken it that this bit of setup was to say that, despite all the high technology, there are still such unknowns that a ship could be "blown off course" and "fall off the edge of the known world" into "unknown waters" and "unknown lands" and find a strange new land quite by accident.

Columbus thought he was on course too, but he misjudged (at very least) the distance involved. -- Not that his voyage has any real comparison to the Phoenix, other than to say that the Phoenix mission planners and the mission crew ~thought~ they had everything accounted for, and yet the cosmos, the natural universe, still had something or other very much unaccounted for in human planning and knowledge. We don't know if it was a "storm" or a random clump of particles or some higher physics phenomenon (stray cosmic foam / string / whatever-it-is?) that "got in the way." Or, for that matter, if some intelligent (or unintelligent) alien what-not intervened, purposefully or not.

Meanwhile, they are still inconveniently "marooned" in a section of space far from Earth, and all we know of, presumably, are the atevi and the kyo, the Mosphei' human colonists and the Phoenix ship dwellers.

I find myself really wondering what Earth and its colonies have been doing for the last 300 or so years.

But then, as far as I know, we don't know much what Phoenix was up to while the ship was gone, or what the kyo have been up to either.

Bren, however, has been very, very busy. Hey, Bren! Duck!
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joekc6nlx
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I'm not sure where she said it but CJC has indicated quite clearly that the Phoenix skipped to an alternate universe, so the chances of an Earth ship finding them are vanishingly small. Consider the steps necessary to duplicate what happened after they left the jump point mass, especially trying to duplicate whatever caused the error to the navigation system. I'm not sure they could reverse-engineer that anomaly.

I wonder if the ship's literature, whether it be fiction or technical material, would have been a stabilizing factor in the language. Phoenix would probably continue to use the standard vernacular in its everyday language, since it appears to me that Phoenix is a static society. Rules are not to be broken without severe penalty, especially if that transgression results in a safety violation or hazards the ship in some way. Since Mospheira has other, variable factors in the environment, such as weather, winds, sunlight and darkness, the omnipresent fear of the atevi overwhelming the island, etc., their language would be more subject to change over the 300 years. I'd guess that there wasn't enough "linguistic drift" between Phoenix and Mospheira to hamper communications.

I've often wondered about the same questions Neco put whenever I pick up a new story. When are we in history? What has been going on in the interval between our present time and the time in the story? Have we gotten better, gotten worse, is Earth even relevant any longer or is it a backwater? Cyteen seems to be one of these stories where Earth is a minor player in human affairs, so is Lois McMaster Bujold's "Vorkosigan Saga", Anne McCaffrey's "Pern" series, and I especially wondered at Andre Norton's "Star Guard" and other series. No clues, other than "Star Man's Son" which was also titled "Daybreak - 2250 A.D.".

Even when there are clues in the stories, it's more like the characters find them, but don't recognize them as being significant. Maybe some future desert tribe wandering in the Sahara will come upon a sun-dried brick building with a strange arrangement and wonder who lived there....not realizing that it was only a set for a motion picture. :baji
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hrhspence
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Consider that Egypt and Greece are considered the beginnings of human civilization; and yet they play a very minor part in modern interactions. We hear about LA, NY, London, Paris, Moscow and Beijing. We almost never hear about Ur or Babylon, though those of us who are educated know about them.

I just asked my 2nd period High School class if any of them had heard of Ur or Babylon: 0 for Ur and 1/3 for Babylon.
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BlueCatShip
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Na Spence, if you'd asked me in high school if I knew about Ur or Babylon, I would've said yes. Sunday School plus a scattering of other things, reading and video. I don't recall if Ur was ever mentioned in History classes, but Babylon would have been.

However, I still don't know a whole lot about Roman and Greek history, despite that they are the foughtt6ndations of a lot that Western civilization has today. I have a broad sense, an overview, and some idea of the cultures, but not a lot of detail. I don't recall as much English history as I would have in high school and college, but that, I do know something about. Despite going through college French into two semesters of French lit., I don't feel I know much about French history except a sketchy outline.

I'd guess Joe has it right about how written/spoken language in Phoenix's archives and daily usage in procedures would affect their speech. Formal language for ship's procedures would likely stay, but drift a bit on details. So it would be like the specialized navy and aerospace jargon people use now, with other things for a formal, classical language. Ordinary daily speech would not have drifted a lot yet, but that speech level would have slang and a few differences from what was used at ship's launch. Phoenix crew and Mosphei' colonists would understand each other pretty well, with a few pauses to explain a word or phrase here and there, or other preferences like word stress, vowel shapes, usage, and maybe a grammar detail here and there. It would be like different international dialects of English now ~except~ that those have been in mass media contact since the invention of radio and TV.

There would also be a difference between how the Archives influence their modern day speech, versus how, say, ship's business or daily Mosphei' goings-on are talked about. That is, how much, in our daily speech and writing, are we really influenced by, say, Chaucer or Shakespeare or the KJV, or other writing? Educated readers keep some of that in memory and so it influences them slightly, but it's not usually a daily thing.

I've just realized though, that occasionally, some fairly major changes in usage can happen in that amount of time. For instance, though most modern English speakers know "thou, thee, thy, thine" and the archaic verb forms that go with them, those are now nearly gone, except sometimes in formal or religious usage, and even that's rare now. Ask a modern speaker when to use "ye" versus "you," and he or she might or might know the difference. ("Ye" is the subject pronoun. "You" is the object pronoun.)

In that same length of time, we have not yet all agreed on a new "plural you" pronoun. Y'all? You all? You guys? Youse? -- I use "y'all," and even "y'all's" occasionally, but I also use "you guys," because I'm a big city Texan. (Most Texans probably use both, though.) But "youse" sounds like a New Yorker to me. ;) And "y'all" probably sounds just as odd to people outside the US, but it's gaining ground all throughout the US. I've been told it's occasionally appeared in Australia, but that may be only from media and in humor more than anything serious...yet.

By comparison, "they, them, their, theirs," aren't native English (Anglo-Saxon) and aren't native Norman French imported into English in Anglo-Norman. We got those pronouns from the Vikings and Danes who colonized England so thoroughly in the late Old / early Middle English periods, that we have "they" and things like the Dane-Law that entered English. So some major changes can occur that might make a larger dialectal difference.

However, I'd tend to think that because of stored media (text, audio, video) and education, that Mosphei' and Phoenix would have only about as much language drift as, say, if I were to go live in northern England or Scotland, or somewhere in city or rural Australia or New Zealand. Or maybe India. I'd understand most of the British and Scottish, Australian and New Zealander dialects without too much trouble. I'd have to ask about some phrases and expressions, some words I wouldn't know, or that are used differently. The accent and pronunciation, a few patterns, I'd have to get used to and learn to use. But we'd understand each other almost entirely. There would be some cultural differences, attitudes, ideas, that would be different and both sides would have to get used to, living in each other's spaces.

I wonder how much the ship knows about the initial jump and what went wrong. I think it's probable that they still don't really know or understand what happened, and that they have competing theories on it, but that they probably don't know how to reproduce it. There are probably still too many unknowns, big question marks. Earth very likely wouldn't know at all, unless some signal was send through jump, and that would have faded and cut off at some point.

Hmm...but would a ship routinely send signals back, before, during, or after a jump, to its most recent launch port or toward Earth? I'd think only for special purposes and not a continuously streamed signal. Hmm.... Interesting point, there.
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hrhspence
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I do agree with what you've said ^ BCS. I would also like to point out that you are a linguist by training and would have little difficulty with regional dialects. However, there are people with very little talent in that regard.

When I moved from the Intermountain West of the US to the US state of Georgia, there was an African American gentleman in our church group that spoke with a very, very strong rural Black accent. It took me 6 weeks to understand him; my wife never did even after a year!
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Neco the Nightwraith
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An alternate universe, eh? That's.... thrown everything into a weird light. XD

Maybe one of you could pose this question at Shejicon IV?

I once posited the "What if?" that the atevi world was Earth but well advanced into the future. (That was so long ago, I can't even remember when I wrote it. I must have been back in high school...) Because of the single big continent, mostly, but also because of other similarities in physical structure in atevi/humans, etc. It was weak at the time, but "alternate universe" starts to make it seem less weak...
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Neco the Nightwraith
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Found this in Foreigner #1, paperback version, page 144:

Quote:
 

"Malguri," Banichi said in his deep tones.

"A fortress of the forty-third century," the driver said, "the architectural jewel of this province... maintained under the provincial trust, an autumn residence of the aiji-major, currently of the aiji-dowager..."

...

He was used to atevi architecture, was accustomed to antiquity in the City, and found it in the customs of the aiji's hall, but this place, bristling with turrets and castellations, was not the style of the Landing, like so much of Shejidan. The date the driver had given them was from long, long before humans had ever come into the system, from long before there had ever been a strayed ship or a space station- before- he made a fast re-reckoning- there'd been a human in space at all."


Not very helpful, as we don't really know what year it is to the atevi either...
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bmills
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The timeline of the first few chapters of Foreigner is very murky, but here are some points which I've pondered. When Phoenix arrives at the heavily radiated solar system, the pilots are given a greater voice in decisions because they undertake the hazardous work of going out to mine resources in small craft, causing them healthy issues and shortened lifespans. But by the time Phoenix reaches the Atevi system, that respect voluntarily given to the pilot's has ossified into the hereditary aristocracy of the Pilot's Guild, which the rank and file defer to, but resent and seek to escape by settling on the Atevi world. It seems to me that this social transformation would require at least one generation, and probably more. At least one generation grew up with the Pilot's Guild in charge, not because they earned it, but because they inherited it, and to this generation, that's just how things are, and how they've always been.
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BlueCatShip
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(I haven't read further in the first section yet, but will this week.)

OK, from bmills' quote, we know at least that the 43rd century in atevi time predates human spaceflight by a large span of time. We can assume Phoenix is well ahead of the human 21st century. ~IF~ they are around the same point in time as early Alliance/Union exploration, then I think we can say the humans from Bren's Foreigner timeline / alternate history, at the Phoenix mission launch, are at some point between the 22nd and 26th centuries, human dates. ... Still too vague to pin down.

-----

Accents can be rough, even if one has an ear for them. Some speakers will say something, in person or recorded, and I have to puzzle over it. "What the heck was that?" But we all have that to some extent, even in our native language.

When listening to French in songs, audio, movies, sometimes I "get" what the speakers are saying and sometimes not, because I haven't been in immersion, actually in French-speaking territory, living there for some period.

When I went with my parents on a business trip vacation to Mexico City, while my dad was there for work, it was the summer between my senior high school graduation and my first freshman college semester. My Spanish II, from when I was a high school freshman, was still fresh. I was surprised by how much I could pick up from speakers / listening and how much written Spanish I could get. Speaking it myself was OK, but I didn't have to do as much as if I had been on my own. The cabbie we found spoke very good English, despite no formal classes. He'd learned somehow. -- I can still manage a lot that's written, partly because my French is still good, if pretty rusty.

However, if I were immersed in Spanish or French, I would ~still~ have to carry a dictionary and ask what words meant, and puzzle through things. -- Yet people who don't have training or experience ~do~ pick up phrases and speak and hear fine.

However, if you set me down in the middle of, say, Tokyo or some other city where I don't know the language, or even the writing system, whew! I am not sure how fast I would begin to pick up the language. It might be quicker than someone who doesn't have that natural knack or the background, but I'd still be floundering for a good while. If you set me down in, say, Moscow, I'd know most of the alphabet, and I could guess at a little, but I'd be essentially starting from zero.

My one experience with something like that was at a former friend's grandson's bar mitzvah. During the readings from the Torah, I was surprised to be able to pick up a few words, mostly cognate nouns and repeated phrases. It helped that the bulletin / program gave the references for which passages were read. I was surprised to be able to pick up anything at all. Unlike her grandson Todd, I couldn't claim I have many Bible passages memorized. But I guess I was familiar enough with it to notice patterns and nouns from a ~very~ different language. -- I would ~not~ expect that with, say, Japanese or other languages unrelated to English.

I'm really curious how I'd feel if I were in Paris or Québec or back-country Louisiana or France, say, and had to get by on my own with French. -- I imagine it would be how Bren would feel the first day he stepped off the plane, and suddenly, it's all practical instead of theoretical, with real people.
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nightcrow

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Dates are definitely murky!

I'm rereading _Inheritor_ right now, and of course the ship and its history are central to the plots involved... it does seem that significant amounts of time passed between the ship falling out of transit and reaching the atevi homeworld. (Long enough for there to have been political/power shifts and the bickering that would go with it, with the passengers ceding their authority, and the gradual rise of the Pilots' Guild to authoritarian power... Not to mention however long it took them to build the station once they did reach atevi space!)

I'd be very interested in whether someone can track down whatever the basis of that "heavily applied that they reached an alternate universe" statement upthread is! I hadn't really considered that, and I don't think it's ever brought up within the novels, except in perhaps the absolute vaguest terms (i.e. "anomaly" doesn't explicitly rule out an alternate universe).

My own personal hypothesis, given the complete and absolute lack of any referents (despite, as others have noted, Earth having done some spacefaring, enough that stations now come in "prefab" versions to be installed on arrival somewhere) for the ship that it can recognize, is that the anomaly that altered its course was <i>temporal</i> as well as spatial: they're not only a long way from home, they're a long when, too. That would explain the lack of anything familiar; if far more time had passed than they anticipated, well. Stars would be missing; stars would have formed in the meantime; stars would have shifted in mass and type, and attracted and lost orbiting material; in short, they could be standing in their own backyard and not recognise it.

(Not that I think they <i>are</i> close to Earth, necessarily. But if they were moved through time far enough that, say, an unexpected event had caused Earth or its sun to become unstable and humanity was forced to shift its activities elsewhere? It might indeed be the case that they're closer to Earth than when they started out.)
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Neco the Nightwraith
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There's also a curious reckoning of Bren's age as well. He claimed in Foreigner that he was of a certain age (early twenty-something)then later on (Invader? Inheritor?) claimed he was a somewhat older age (later twenty-something) by atevi reckoning.

So, are the humans still counting in old Earth years, or do atevi count things entirely differently? The ship, apparently, counted in old Earth years, because that's what Jase said when he gave his age (Invader), but why would a planet bound population still use the old system? Surely it'd be more accurate to count according to planetary years.

(Then, in Invitations/Deliberations, it's said that both Bren and Tabini were the same age - 23- when they started their tenure.)

Oh, the things we may never know. Maddening, isn't it?
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Xheralt
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Nightcrow, on forums like this, use square brackets [] around the tags (i for italics, b for bold, s for strikethrough, etc.) instead of html's angle brackets <> and you'll get the desired result.
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