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

[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?