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from the whatever-happened-to-the-Even-Seasons? dept.
A central conceit of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire books (and the popular HBO series Game of Thrones based on them) is that the seasons of the planet where they take place are not as predictable as the Earth's annual cycle. Somehow the phrase "winter is coming" wouldn't seem as foreboding if you could reply, "Yes, that usually happens in December through February."
But how could a planet have unruly seasons? Earth's seasons are due to the tilt of its axis. During one part of Earth's orbit, the Northern Hemisphere is tilted away from the Sun, with the resulting indirect sunlight spread thin over the surface of the hemisphere, causing winter. On the opposite side of its orbit, summer comes as this hemisphere is tilted toward direct sunlight. There isn't much room in such clockwork for randomness.
Well, if you've ever wanted to debate fan theories, here's an excellent new resource for you to draw from: a real climate model simulation of Westeros and Essos.
Source: Ars Technica
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Wednesday December 27 2017, @03:03AM (4 children)
I'm not an astrophysicist, so I'd love to hear a theory from one of them, but in my opinion, there's two important points here:
George RR Martin seems to me to be a little bit sloppy with a lot of more-technical things; for instance, he obviously didn't think that much about the languages in this fantasy realm the way JRR Tolkein did. Tolkein invented a couple of actually viable languages for his stories, whereas Martin has his knights called "Ser" instead of "Sir", even though on a fantasy world, the idea that they'd be using Latin characters and would care about 'e' vs 'i' is pretty silly. Normally in fantasy fiction like this, we presume that the primary language is something not-English, and we only hear the translated version for the benefit of the viewer/reader, but Martin actually makes a bunch of references to English puns and such. So I really don't think Martin really thought this part through that much, since all his focus seems to be on characters.
Anyway, how do we know that a "year" on this planet, whatever it's called, actually corresponds to an orbital cycle? These people are pretty technologically backwards, and maybe their idea of a "year" is more like a month to us, except ~10x longer, because their orbit is much slower than ours.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 27 2017, @03:15AM (3 children)
Tolkien didnt invent languages for his stories, he invented stories for his languages because no one would care about them otherwise. The stories were an afterthought.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 27 2017, @04:02AM (1 child)
Not sure why this got modded funny. This is what he says in the preface.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday December 27 2017, @04:22AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 27 2017, @08:01AM
Sounds like you haven't actually read a Tolkien story.