I was bored, tired, and a little stressed, so I took some time to mess around and create this web app to show both Earth time and that of Solaria from Isaac Asimov’s The Naked Sun.
I used 00:00:00 July 1, 2025 as the starting time for Solaria’s 00:00:00. Why July 1, 2025? Just because I felt like it.
The app shows Earth time in three different ways: a 12-hour clock, a 24-hour clock, and a decimal clock. Then it shows Solarian time as described in ethe novel with one tweak explained below.
You’ll notice the Solarian clock displays decads (the equivalent of hours) and centads (the equivalent of hours). Those are canonical because that is how the time system for Solaria is described in the novel. The Solarian clock also shows myrads (the equivalent of seconds). That’s my addition. I suppose logcially they should be called myriads, but I didn’t like the sound or look of it, so I went with myrad.
Right now, it’s set to show my local time for Earth time in Beijing. I might get around and change it to show GMT.
It’s not a mind boggling accomplishment. It’s just something I did for fun.
I am cooking a chicken and vegetable pie for dinner. It should be ready in 12 centads, Let’s hope that your clock is accurate, it’s all that I have to go by.
Thanks. I expect that day length is one of the many variables that would turn a hospitable planet into an inhospitable one, and vice versa. Mars has a similar day length to Earth but is too small and cold, and Venus has not only a much longer day, but rotates backwards.
The Spacers must have searched many solar systems to find such a hospitable planet.
Curious fact; as a child, I met one of the actors who played a robot in the BBC production of The Naked Sun, most of the 1960s he was playing Daleks, but he also had a bit part in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
Does the world of Solaria not have time zones? Or daylight savings? When communicating with Earth (was that something they did?), which Earth zone did they reference, if any?
And do they have to correct for relativistic effects between the two worlds?
If I recall correctly, Asimov didn’t go into that much detail about time zones in the novel. He did reference the fact that different estates–essentially each Solarian was a sole occupant of their own county or occupied the estate with their spouse, seeing the spouse in person very rarely–were either at night while Bailey’s location was day, or the meal a person at another estate was eating was a different meal (breakfast, etc.) than Bailey’s.
Throughout Asimov’s fictions, I don’t think he ever addressed the issue of relativistic effects. I do recall the robot I mentioned above beginning to state the time of arrival on Solaria would be at some particulre time in “Galactice Standard Time” when Bailey interrupted him to ask about local time.
Also, if I recall correctly, in this novel or it could have been the sequel, Asimov wrote that Solaria was the last Spacer world colonized and it was colonized directly from Aurora.
As you could have guessed, I just started re-reading the novel so my details may be off as it’s been quite some time (sorry) since the last reading.
I never read it Was just curious about how the time differences worked in his fiction.
I worked a lot with syncing different earthbound clocks in web apps (which has its own numerous challenges, as you’ve already seen), but never across planets… it’s a fascinating problem that I never really thought about.
I found this Wikipedia article pretty interesting, for others who may be new to this problem: Timekeeping on Mars - Wikipedia. The problem there is simplified somewhat since we share the same sun and the planets are similar enough in size. For a planet outside our solar system, which may be much bigger or smaller or have a very different orbit, the timekeeping difficulty would seemingly increase substantially (as far as I can tell).
No problem! I’ve been playing around with various things to keep grounded. Since I was reading this again and the robot mentioned the longer Solarian day, I figured why not make a clock converter. It’s silly, but that’s why it’s fun!
The Spacers hated Earth, and had as little contact with us as possible, and Solaria, specifically, hated Earth even more than the others, and wasn’t even very fond of the other Spacer worlds. It’s only because the Spacer robot Daneel had had previous contact with the hero that he was invited to come, and even that was only possible because his host was dead (the hero was a homicide detective, and they didn’t have any of those on any of the Spacer worlds, because murder was impossible on any of them).
I couldn’t force myself to use myriad for the Solarian equivalent to a second because of the word’s meaning in English. I figured myrad is close enough and it even sounds cool to my ears!
Later on, I’ll add an option for GMT (Galactic Mean Time?) or user’s computer time.
Was just curious about how the time differences worked in his fiction.