When Is Luna Telling the Story? The Twin Robots and Time
Updated: 1 day ago
Readers often ask when Luna is telling the story. How much time has passed since the morning Wang Lei looked up at the solar panels? In the Mítosz world, Luna begins with this sentence: "What I am about to tell you happened a very long time ago." This post is about that "very long time ago".
The Twin Robots do not live in time the way we do
The Twin Robots do not live in time the way we do. Luna is one of them, and so is Castor. The book tells us two things about them.
The first: each of them is linked to its pair regardless of distance, with no delay. They are made in pairs, one half on Mars and the other on Earth. A human message, meanwhile, travels for minutes between the two planets. A radio signal moves at the speed of light, and depending on where Earth and Mars are, it takes between 3 and 22 minutes to arrive. In the book, only the American settlement can talk to Earth in real time, and it does so through the twins.
The second: as soon as something begins, they see the many possible ways it can continue, all at once. In the book, David Everhart says it himself: "There is a processing level we don't fully understand yet."
For someone to whom space is no obstacle, and for whom the future is not a single line, the past is not "behind" them the way it is for us. That is why Luna speaks of that morning as a place she can go back to.
Local time is still real
None of this makes time disappear from the world. The sol, the Martian year, the 2090s are all true where they happen: for the settlers there are mornings, shifts, deadlines and ageing.
This is local time, and the whole story runs in it. ICARUS takes place in Mars Year 73, and the chapter titles carry the name of a settlement and the number of the sol. A sol is a Martian day, a little longer than a day on Earth. That is why the world counts in sols too.
When Luna says "a very long time ago"
The question "how much time has passed since then" assumes that the storyteller and the story stand on the same clock. Luna and Castor answer it differently, and neither of them is wrong.
What exactly this means will unfold in the later books of the series. Until then, this much is enough: when Luna says "a very long time ago", she is speaking from her own place.
Comments