I bet this never happens to people who write LotR fic...

[edenfalling]

After long and serious thought, I have settled upon an idea for my NFE fic. I have my main character, I have my time period, I have my general plot.

But.

I am still in the middle of some canon research, because Lewis's statements on the subject in question are brief and scattered through several books in the series.

They also make no sense.

Ye gods, why was Lewis such a lousy, inconsistent, illogical, slapdash, incompetent world-builder? WHY?! Do you have any idea the kind of weird anti-scientific (and anti-common-sense!) contortions I will have to do to force his casual pronouncements into anything that even vaguely resembles a functional system? DO YOU???

I could just scream.

But no. I will persevere. Because the end product will be worth it, and also by this point I need to find some kind of handwave just for the sake of my own sanity -- the inconsistencies are starting to keep me up at night, they are that irritating.

*retroactively slaps Lewis upside the head*

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ETA: If you want some specifics about the issue that is driving me nuts, go read this comment here. Basically Lewis + astronomy = EPIC FAIL, but I need to systematize his idiocy because of Reasons even though it's not directly the subject of my fic. Argh.

Comments

[lady_songsmith]

well now I am very curious! (I basically wrote HHB off with the 'way they tell it later' excuse because characterizing Rabadash was driving me mad) Can you say more about what details you are working with?

[edenfalling]

This will probably give my fic away entirely, but whatever, I need to vent.

First, the part that is driving most completely bugfuck crazy is the way that, as the Dawn Treader sails east toward Ramandu's island, Lewis says: And every night they saw that there rose in the east new constellations which no one had ever seen in Narnia and perhaps, as Lucy thought with a mixture of joy and fear, no living eye had seen at all. Those new stars were big and bright and the nights were warm. Which is completely ludicrous because the stars rise in the east and set in the west, just like the sun -- Ramandu himself explicitly says, later on, that "And when I have become as young as the child that was born yesterday, then I shall take my rising again (for we are at earth's eastern rim) and once more tread the great dance." -- so even though the world is flat, the visible constellations should only be different from north to south, not east to west. Basic logic! ARGH!!!

Second, the stars are also apparently different from summer to winter, since Coriakin shone in the southern winter sky according to Ramandu -- he specifically mentions the season -- though the Narnian world is flat and is circled by its sun rather than vice versa. But I can handwave that by positing that the stars cycle their rising and setting at a slightly different speed from the sun, so that over the course of the year they go from rising exactly with the sun (and thus traversing the sky invisibly) to rising just after the sun, to rising opposite the sun, to rising just before the sun, and so on. (But I shouldn't need to handwave it, grrr!)

Third, I am annoyed at the apparent existence of planets (as per Doctor Cornelius's lecture in PC) that are specifically brighter than and distinct from normal stars. If the world is flat, then what the fuck are spherical celestial bodies doing there at all, and if all the stars move around (since Ramandu mentions the constellations changing over the history of the world), then what makes planets different and why do they have a specific name, and also why are they not mentioned as being different when the stars are born in MN or come down to earth in TLB??? Nrgh. I mean, okay, the latter two annoyances I can kind of write off as myth-inconsistencies, but I swear to god, it's as if Lewis was thinking of Narnia as a spherical world in PC and only decided later that it was a flat world because that made for a cool gimmick in VDT. *thwaps him*

Fourth, the Narnian world has a North Star, which Lewis specifically mentions in TLB. It's called the Spear-Head and he points out that it's brighter than Polaris. Given that Narnia is a flat world rather than a round one, there shouldn't be a spot in the sky where the stars seem to stand still... unless that star just kind of permanently sits in place 24/7. But Jill can canonically work out the Spear-Head's position from the other constellations, which do move, so what exactly is going on there? Also the constellations of Narnia in TLB are apparently identical to the constellations of Ettinsmoor and points north in SC. There is no accounting for lattitude difference. Furthermore, they have not changed at all in the several hundred years between Rillian's day and Tirian's, which can match either Ramandu's canonical statement that the constellations have changed since his day or Lewis's extracanonical timeline, but not both. If both Ramandu's statement and Lewis's timeline are true, then the constellations ought to be changing noticeably over just a couple centuries, and also the Pevensies ought to have noticed the differences during PC... though again, that's probably Lewis having a neat idea while writing VDT and not bothering to think if it contradicted stuff from previous books.

Fifth, given the apparent size of the sun as the travellers approach the edge of the world in VDT, there is no way Father Time should have been able to reach it, let alone squeeze it in one hand at the end of TLB -- unless the sun actually and literally changes size rather than changes its distance from the earth as it travels through the daytime sky -- but I can kind of handwave that as Aslan directly and magically fucking around with the established order of things. The other stuff, not so much.

In summary, Lewis + astronomy = EPIC FAIL.

[speaker_to_customers]

For a flat world to reproduce the conditions we experience, and the views of the heavens we see, on our round world requires epic re-jigging of the laws of physics. For Terry Pratchett's Discworld he's even had to chop the speed of light down to approximately the speed of sound - because otherwise dawn happens at exactly the same time all over the planet. And you don't get a latitude difference in the visible stars on a flat world.

Basically flat worlds are idiotic and only the most superficial of thinkers, or people with the scientific knowledge of a Neolithic hunter-gatherer (or of an American creationist), could think otherwise.

[edenfalling]

Mmm, yeah, you're right -- you should always be able to see all the stars from north to south; they'd just be at slightly different angles depending on where you were standing. Well, and depending on how close you were to any particularly tall land features. Mountains will do nicely for creating a closed-in horizon whether the world makes a normal horizon or not.

I wonder whether the Narnian world is actually sort of lens-shaped, so that it has definite borders -- those damn mountains of Aslan's country -- but also mimics some of the physical characteristics of a round world, given that (aside from the "new, eastern stars" bullshit) things seem to act more or less the way they ought to on a round world. Of course that would make the distribution of water in the Eastern Ocean completely nonsensical, but... argh. *beats head against table*

Hell, maybe in the Narnian world there really IS a crystalline sphere of the heavens that spins around and has a fixed point somewhere just above the north horizon. Also, there seems to be winter and summer, and the southern lands are warmer than the northern ones, so clearly the sun is moving around somehow, and... and... Oh, it's a mess. But I will bash it into something vaguely approximating functionality somehow. (Or at least something a bit less dysfunctional than Lewis left it.)

[speaker_to_customers]

Actually I've always felt that the silliest thing of all about the Narnia books was how, in TLTWATW, in Narnia under the rule of the White Witch it was 'always winter and never Christmas'. How could there be Christmas there anyway? Shouldn't it have been Aslanmas? And how could Santa Claus have turned up?

[edenfalling]

I assume Frank and Helen imported Christmas from England to Narnia back at the beginning of the world. I'm not sure why they didn't also import Easter, given that Frank was apparently religious enough that his first instinct, upon being stuck in darkness with a bunch of strangers, was to say that they ought to sing a hymn to pass the time (and he knew one off the top of his head), but either they couldn't explain it properly to the Talking Beasts (who had no context for it) or it fell by the wayside and/or turned into a generic spring festival over the years, just as Narnia's version of Christmas seems to have become a firmly secular celebration without overt religious significance.

As for why Father Christmas is in Narnia, I'd say that makes as much sense as Bacchus being in Narnia, which is firmly established as canon in Prince Caspian, so... mythology stew, anyone?

[lady_songsmith]

Oh, the stars in the east thing, argh. That drove me nuts even as a small child. I think you're probably right that he was thinking of a round world until VDT; everything is consistent with one until that book screws things up.

As for Father Time, though, I would totally go handwavium on it; world-destruction mythos doesn't need to follow the laws of physics (because really, giants squeezing balls of burning gas?)

[edenfalling]

The only way I can make any sense out of that eastern stars bullshit is to say that they are NOT, in fact, the stars of the Narnian world -- they are the stars of Aslan's country that are becoming visible as the ship draws near the sweet-water zone and the travellers are somehow seeing beyond the world's edge. Which is STILL nonsensical, but at least makes a vague nod in the direction of acknowledging that it's nonsensical and says "but magic!" instead of trying to pass itself off as functional astronomy.

Practically everything in the end of TLB (when I acknowledge that book at all, which I generally prefer not to) is Aslan magically handwaving (paw-waving?) physics, because yeah, not a single bit of that makes any sense at all otherwise. (Most of it doesn't make sense even with that stipulation, but that is me speaking as someone who abominates the religious points Lewis is trying to make in that book. YMMV, obviously!)