How have you seen this issue handled and/or how have you handled it yourself?
But very few planets will have a day suited to humans--though those with the greatest extremes are unlikely to support human life. A day may be 2 hours or 14 hrs or 46 hrs or 8,760 hrs. A planetary day might be longer than a human can adjust to in their wake/sleep cycle. You might have to introduce a time word to indicate the wake/sleep cycle if it is unrelated to the planet's full rotation.
If your MC is an alien with no human references, you're still telling this story in English. Unless you really want to come up with a new time system, I'd suggest sticking with human time word, like using 'minute' and thinking of it as "their time unit closest to a minute and so it is translated as a minute."
Standard
Galactic Standard
Intergalactic Standard
Earth Standard
Terran Standard
You could simply say (Insert Planet) Standard.
[This message has been edited by InarticulateBabbler (edited February 28, 2007).]
Or from noon to noon, or from sunrise to sunrise, or from when a certain star is at its zenith until it reaches its zenith again, or some other arbitrary way of determining the period of the rotation of the planet.
But it's quite possible days might not having meaning as a time period to an alien race. If, for example, they live underground or underwater, the daily fluctuations of solar radiation on the surface may not have any direct effect on their lives. Or their world may be tidally locked to have one side always toward the sun. Or if their lives move at a much slower pace than ours, then day/night cycles might be as significant to them as a fluorescent bulb's flicker is to us. If their lives are much faster, then a race might evolve from non-sentient beings and develop civilization between sunrise and sunset.
Sorry for quibbling, but I just felt the need to point out that it's important to check one's assumptions when writing about aliens.
But as to the larger point of how to describe time periods for non-Earth cultures, it depends on what your goal is.
If your main goal is the reader understanding the time periods involved, then you should probably use the units the reader is familiar with. Consider it as "translating" the time units used by the characters so that they are understood. It's like translating pounds to kilograms or vice versa, depending on whether your audience is American or European. It doesn't matter that the alien planet has no moon and therefore no months. If something takes four months, just say it takes four months.
If your goal is to provide contrast between the alien culture and the reader's culture, then you need to get more involved.
To continue with the example of the planet with no moon, maybe a culture on the planet will divide a year into seasons. (Don't assume that seasons need to be exactly the same as ours. Maybe there's the snow season, the early rainy season, the warm dry season, the hot dry season, the late rainy season, and the cool dry season.) Whatever divisions they have, maybe they count down the days until a division is over, rather than counting up from when it starts, or maybe they count days before and after a major holiday. Such things can be used to add richness of detail to a culture.
Does the culture have access to accurate clocks? If not, then they probably don't do much that needs to be accurate to the minute (let alone the second.)
In writing my fantasy novel, I went through and changed every reference to "seconds" to refer to either "moments" or "heartbeats." (The latter continued a pattern of using body parts for measurements: thumbwidths, palmwidths, paces.) Doing that implies less accuracy about time than we're used to, while still giving the reader a fairly good intuitive grasp of the time involved.
[This message has been edited by EricJamesStone (edited February 28, 2007).]
I run into the same problem with miles, kilometers, pounds, ounces, feet, etc. I realize that I am translating the entire story into English, but when I get to something that can't have an exact English translation because it's not exactly the same thing, it feels uncomfortable. I try to avoid these references whenever possible, but time comes up a lot in civilized cultures.
In general, time's function is to mark change. What changes in their world that's important to them? We're tied to orbits and seasons and the like, and subdivide further for convience and precision. Also, how they record/measure time could be important (like our two-handed clocks). Possibly their religion is important. It's no accident we count seven days to the week.
If it's a race with technological advancement I'd guess they'd have their time measures to communicate time down to microseconds or less, and out to millions of years or more. Aside from whatever their "prehistoric" base time period was, they would likely have units that would line up at least on the same order of magnitude as ours. Unless there is really something remarkable and different about time in their world (some other universe with a different dimensional arrangement?), or it's critical to the story, you might consider not worrying about it too much. You'll have to convey it to the reader in some way she/he will understand anyway. You could save them the trouble of doing the math in their head while they're trying read your story.
"His pulse is 42 beats per millionth of an orbit," the doctor said. Hmm, is that good or bad.
Next, I think if it is important to come up with a specific time/measurement system for the race, you should try to make it unique. Don't just rename seconds to Marklars, and so forth, but invent some kind of mostly unique or original method for tracking time. It's a great opportunity to tell the reader something about the race itself, how they tend to think. A highly technical race will use something like the lightspeed measurement above. A loyal monarchy might measure a Marklar by the King's heartbeat, and redefine it with each new King that comes along--creating much confusion, but they refuse to change it, despite the protests of their historians and scientists alike. (Because changing the basic Marklar, changes everything based on a Marklar. Everyone might be opposed it except the Kings.)
Now when we leave earth and enter space, Seconds, Minutes, Hours will always be useful to us. The day will simply be a convienient measurement of time to split up shifts for workers, at least when one is not on a planet. On a planet, the rotation of the planet will have an effect on what we call a day. We might create a different word for a shift day and a rotation day if they are really way off. Of course, people living outside will use the rotational day simply because one wants to work in the day and sleep at night. Unless the length of a day is way off from our normal twenty four hours, we will use planetary rotation for our days.
Other species will likely base their time on their home or dominant (if they have an empire) planets. Their divisions will be a different number and a different length, for whatever reason they choose.
Battlestar Gallactica arrived at earth. Two of the pilots went to earth. They told the physisist that they will be back in a few (forgot the word they used) He asked how long was that. I think it was their version of a second.
I have a preferance in my writings to base the advanced societies on American systems. Feet, Yards, Miles, seconds, minutes, hours, gallons, tons, and so on. It is just a flavor of my writing. It would have a different flavor if everthing was metics.
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don't overlook the fact that most alien races probably do not exist within the constructs of 3-dimensional physics.
Sorry, but that is not a fact. It's an assumption, and a precarious one at that.
(I have set a couple on so-called "ribbon worlds"---one side always facing the sun, narrow habitable band---where the only variation they have is a sun slowly moving up and down, what is it, libration? But, then, their clock is an imported one.)
Perhaps you should define for the reader what everything is. It helps to use something that sounds similar to our units. Call a second a seekont (or whatever), and show a character counting (one seekont, 2 seekonti, 3 seekonti), then the audience knows what a seekont is. You can define an hour (huron-similarity to the Indian race coincidental) by telling us there are 30 huron in a day. Then we know that they are larger units. Call a day a revolution or something like that. And I like cycle for a year.
OSC says that the first paragraph in the story is free. Sometimes the first paragraph in a chapter can be loose as well. You can use that to tell us the difference. "The planet Neranti lay a large distance from earth, so far in fact, that the two races would never meet. It spun twice as fast as earth, so each day was about twelve hours. But it revolved around their sun half the speed of earth, so each year would be equal to two earth years."
But even that's unnecessary. A year really only matters to your characters. A year is the time it takes the planet to move around it's star. Tell us the age a person reaches maturity. Tell us how long a person lives and we'll figure it out.
And that's if the planet even spins. I'm working on a story that takes place on a world that moves around the sun, but never rotates.
For basic things like weight and distance, I would keep a 'bible' so I know approximately how far things are, so you know how long it takes to walk/drive/ride a horse. If two cities are 30 'collandas' apart, tell yourself a 'collanda' is a kilometer, or two, or 3.5. To me, I'll know its a rough measure of distance. For you, you can keep distances and travel times consistant.
Matt
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In particular, watch out for what Damon Knight calls “calling a rabbit a smeerp.” Just because you call a long-eared short-tailed lagomorphic mammal with long hind legs a “smeerp” doesn’t make it alien. We all write sf in standard English, unless we are Anthony Burgess (who did made-up dialect well), or some other people who do it not so well. There’s no particular reason to translate words for time, distance, and food into gibberish. (I don’t know why time, distance, and food are so susceptible to this in science fiction, but they are.) If your characters are drinking coffee, have them drink coffee, not “klaa” or “jav.” Coffee’s been around for more than a millennium. It’s probably going to last.
Even in a made up fantasy world, as opposed to a science fiction one, I just stick to seconds,minutes,months,years, inches,feet,miles... we're already translating everything into English, anyway, it only makes sense to translate units as well, unless you have a very specific reason, embedded into your made-up society, to have a new, unique measurement of distance/time/etc.
Just use units people are familiar with. The concept of time isn't something that should be messed if it can be avoided; it's too fundamental. Assigning arbitrary units is an unnecessary complication. I don't want to do a bunch of conversions when I read... usually. The only reason to stray from familiar units would be a planet with something like a 52-hour day or a 500-day year. In this case I'd represent the day length in earth hours, and the year length in both earth days and other-planet days.
Also some cultures (say, the American Indian), nothing less than the course of a day (the sun is high, the sun is low, the moon is up) mattered to them---a watch would be a toy, but not something that would impact on their lives to a great extent.
Matt
However, a completely viable question remains: What are the aliens going to call it, when talking to one another?
IMHO, that is the only relevant question.
[This message has been edited by InarticulateBabbler (edited March 08, 2007).]