I`m still working my way through the pulp novels of the 1930s and 1940s, and have just started in on Edgar Rice Burroughs.
He had a series of books about Pellucidar, the inner world that was actually the inside of our hollow planet`s crust. It had a miniature sun stationary at the exact center of the Earth, and as a result it was always noon in Pellucidar.
Burroughs makes a lot of use of the idea that there would be no sense of time passing with no day and night, and no seasons. So this is the Land That Time Forgot and so it`s overrun with stegosaurs, sabretooths, various prehistoric tribes and so forth.
My first thought was that people would inevitably create sandglasses, waterclocks, measured lengths or burning cord or candles, simply because it would be so convenient. Then I started to wonder about childbirth.
Without the signals given to our bodies by day and night, or lunar cycles, would women still have regular menstrual cycles? Would their periods be wildly erratic? Would pregnancy be unpredictable in its length? How could we know?
I suppose if we send a few female officers on a two year undersea mission on a nuclear submarine and deliberately got some of them pregnant, there would be evidence… but short of that, what would actually happen in a world of eternal high noon?
Since ERB was writing in the 30s and 40s, people didn’t GET pregnant. Babies were born magically and mysteriously, and behind the scenes. One didn’t talk about such things.
However, I have to assume that biology would be basically the same, even if the reckoning of time might not.
Oh, I dunno Dex. ERB got fairly specific when detailing the process by which the martian females laid and incubated their eggs. He mostly got it right.
One of the things I remember in Pellucidar was that the natives had a time sense which recognized sequence but not * duration*.
A male might go off on an adventure, travel across the landscape, overthrow the Mahars, and fight his way home years older while his mate might only feel that a few sleeps had passed. So, a pregnancy might only last as long as the mother felt it should.
Nitpick, though. “The Land That Time Forgot” was Caspak, an island in the Pacific, and its fauna was clearly not connected with Pellucidar.
I stand corrected on the actual Land That Time Forgot being Caspak; I skimmed through some Burroughs many years ago and am only now going through them in detail.
In TARZAN AT THE EARTHS CORE, there is a lot of incidents where the characters reckon sequence by how often they eat and sleep... which, of course, is different from each of them. And although one of the visitors from the outside world thinks he has strayed away for weeks, its actually only been a few days. But this all just perception.
My interest is in how time literally proceeds. If people and animals eat and digest, are born and age and eventually die, then there must be a clear sequence. If two babies are born at the same time in Pellucidar, would they hit puberty at the same time, grow old at roughly the same time? Or are we meant to think that the actually flow of time is somehow variable?
<< Or are we meant to think that the actually flow of time is somehow variable? >>
The presence of a library would make the flow of time more variable, according to Terry Pratchett. After all, the library contains books, which contain knowledges; and knowledge is power; and power is energy; and energy is equivalent to mass, and we know that mass can distort the trouser-legs of space and time.
Burroughs was a highly imaginative writer who sometimes crammed in more ideas per chapter than others used in an entire book. The details of time-passage in Pellucidar were shifting and vague, much like what the charactors themselves experienced! As for a woman’s biology and the weird environment, David Innes could possibly have gone on a trip and come back a week later to have found that he has a new 5-year old son!
Another conundrum: why did the egg-laying martian women have breasts? Now THAT’S some strange biology!
Loved your homepage! You seem to have grown up reading the same books I did.
