bell notificationshomepageloginNewPostedit profile

Topic : Re: How should I deal with travel time in fantasy? I suppose this is more of a question of if its even necessary, but I'll just assume it is. I am currently writing an outline for a fantasy - selfpublishingguru.com

10% popularity

If you are creating the setting yourself, just figure out how much transit time you want between destinations, and locate them that distance apart. I actually have a setting I call "Small Earth" which I made just for that very purpose --I want geography similar to the actual world, but much smaller, so that transit times between destinations are more reasonable.

It's worth remembering that high speed transit effectively shrinks geography. The idea of the "Global Village" is that the whole world is now (in terms of transit times) the size of a single city during the era of foot travel. That means that locations that we now might think of as suburbs of a single city would have been conceptualized and experienced as separate cities in the past.

You can see this very clearly in the Bible's New Testament. Jerusalem is about 6 miles from Bethlehem, and both of them are around 80 miles from Nazareth. That could all likely be within a single greater urban area today, but during those times, traveling on foot, they were conceptualized as being very different regions of the country. At 3 miles per hour on foot, you're talking a minimum of 3 days travel. So the equivalent distance for someone in a car would be 1600 miles, which is longer than NYC to Orlando, FL.


Load Full (0)

Login to follow topic

More posts by @Kevin153

0 Comments

Sorted by latest first Latest Oldest Best

Back to top