Discworld Timeline/Archive 1

Moved from here.

A timeline on the wiki

Gods no! I'm trying to write the Glorious Revolution and I've given up on Thomas's timeline. The internal inconsistencies are terrible, and the whole thing relies on the anniversary of the Civil War, which throws off everything recent by about 10 years. We need to develop a better one. (I can't think how to accumulate the info, of course. It needs an online database.) Old Dickens 15:15 EST 17 Aug 2006

The Discworld Timeline is terrible ;) It's not for nothing TP wrote Thief of Time, he needed an explanation for the inconsistencies. --Sanity 13:52, 18 August 2006 (CEST)

I couldn't say about the time line but what you say about needing an online databese is right. Things such as age having to be updated wouldn't be an issue, it could be all automatic. I am aquiring lots of data that would benefit greatly from a DB, alas I don't believe there is a plugin that will allow it. Before I found this Wiki I was looking at lots of options for this kind of thing and it seemed that a CMS (Content Management System) such as Joomla! would be needed. The thing is you would loose all the benefits of the Wiki system. What we need is a Wiki/CMS/DB application. :) --mikecook 22:37, 17 August 2006 (CEST)

I don't agree we'd need a database (though that would be nicest), it can be wikified which has the advantage of being able to be more "uncertain" as things can be in several years. It's a little harder to maintain but as a Wiki is all about being editable that shouldn't be much of a problem I hope. In the meantime, feel free to post data on years on their own pages like Wikipedia does (so http://wiki.lspace.org/index.php/1880 would have all the events of 1880) --Sanity 13:52, 18 August 2006 (CEST)

Excellent! Too obvious for me. It should probably have its own category. Old Dickens 10:15 18 Aug 2006.

I've made a few examples now but I'd rather wait before adding to them until I get a word from the Timeline maintainers. There's no problem in adding your own information of course, but as I don't have that all I can add is from the main site of LSpace. --Sanity 00:45, 19 August 2006 (CEST)

Update just agreed with Orin, who maintains the timeline, that we won't use the LSpace Timeline until he has updated in in a couple of months. I've protected the Timeline page so people won't try to be helpful and still copy it accidentally. I suggest that after we can use the data we replace "age" by "born" and wikify the links to years. --Sanity 12:17, 19 August 2006 (CEST)

That's into a third year now; it's starting to look unlikely...--Old Dickens 19:02, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

Benchmarking

...meanwhile, how about some opinions on a benchmark that might work? It seems to me that

TOT and NW are millennial, involving a near-disaster in time reminiscent of Y2K, so I like 25 May, 2000 (or 1999) for the destruction of the clock and the beginning of NW. That puts the Glorious Revolution about 1970, but causes a problem with Mort and Susan. I suspect Magical interference may be necessary to make it work. (I once tried a similar project with Sherlock Holmes, over a shorter period of real, Roundworld history. It can't be done, completely.) ...Old Dickens10:30 EST 19 Aug 2006

Magical interference has already worked ;). Apparently there's the University Calendar and the Ankh-Morpork Calendar already, so they provide benchmarks with 1 UC and 1 AM. Also, the AM Civil War occured on Grune 4 1688 UC according to the Discworld Companion. There's your benchmarks. It wouldn't work to slap on a realworld year and then start counting, because it'd go wrong soon. And it won't all fit because I don't think Terry ever really counted the years to see whether it'd be correct. --Sanity 17:22, 19 August 2006 (CEST)

Yeahbut - that's the premise of the DWTL, and it ends up squeezing most of the series into the `80s, although we know we entered the Century of the Anchovy some time ago. Sam would be very old now, and Carpe Jugulum e.g. is 1988 on the DWTL, although it dates itself in the C.of the Anchovy. So, how to make the ends meet? The best thing about the DWTL is the point that Cohen joined in the Lancre time-jump; maybe it had broader effects than we thought. ...Old Dickens 14:15 !9 Aug 2006

AFAIK it's not the premis of the DWTL but mentioned dates in the books. You can't have a timeline where the AM Civil War is not in 1688, that would be silly. With the mentioned 300th anniversary, it's not strange most books (which follow each other up) are close in time in the late 1900s. It would be very discworldly to start a century around '88 though. --Sanity 20:57, 19 August 2006 (CEST)

-No argument with the Civil War, I'm trying to account for the gap before the new millennium. Centuries starting on the eights would do it, only the calendar starts at 1. But then, the Civil War and the start of new Tyranny were 1688. Hmmm. ..Old Dickens 8:40 EST 20 Aug 2006

We actually have a few useful benchmarks, the only problem of which is the requirement of assuming certain books occur further from each other than one would assume. Those which occur to my memory now are;

• The dating of the AM Civil War to 1688, which places the events of FoC as occurring in 1988
• In The Truth, we are told Vetinari graduated in 1969. This places the events of Night Watch as being no later than 1999/1969, and suggests a birthdate for Vetinari of c.1951. It also limits how much earlier said book can occur, being as Vetinari is presumably NOT a new student at the Guild during the Glorious Revolution and so a date of 1992/1962 is probably too early.
• Soul Music occurs >16 years after Mort, where a Patrician celebrates his 10th anniversary of reign. Thief of Time occurs some time after Soul Music, and happens at the same time as Night Watch, which tells us that Snapcase came to the Patricianship 30 years prior. These facts does not allow enough time to pass for Snapcase to reign for any significant amount of time before Vetinari came to the Patricianship if we assume the Mort Patrician was Vetinari, ergo it must have been Snapcase.
• Aforesaid placements of certain books as occurring in the Century of the Anchovy. This suggests that, for instance, Carpe Jugulum may occur after Night Watch despite being published beforehand. Gothmog Dave 22:12, 29 February 2008 (CET)

Actually, we're told that Twurp's Peerage says that he graduated in 1968, opening various possibilities of misprint, incompetence or disinformation. Neither Sam nor Sybil questions the idea, though.

Carpe Jugulum should be a few months before Night Watch (the Century of the Anchovy approaches.)

Following the more indisputable points of the DWTL through the Watch books from 1988, Thud! needs to be 1990, at which time Fred Colon said it had been more than thirty years since the G.R. I have written elsewhere about 1957 as the date of the Glorious Revolution, so when a single contradiction to a coherent set of data appears, I'd rather doubt the quotation from Twurp's (I think it said 1968, actually.) I doubt that a timeline can be developed by giving every datum equal weight.

It could be that Vetinari's Grand Sneer was prolonged for a decade while he formulated his plans, returning to finish up at the Assassins' and taking over quickly after that. I wonder why TP doesn't want to tell us the story; I've never even heard of its being "in the works."

The one point that I can find no fault with is Sanity's suggestion that the Discworld {Krullian) named century has to to start after the double "8" (i.e. 1989 began the Century of the Anchovy.) This resolves some of the date issues and explains the Millennial feel of Night Watch and Thief of Time (temporal disasters as predicted for Y2K.) The Discworld year UC, then, is Roundworld year CE minus 12, or you may imagine some reason why it takes twelve years for the news to reach us across the multiverse. Same thing, really. --Old Dickens 03:07, 1 March 2008 (CET)

A Brief History of History

In the temporal disaster of Thief of Time, considerable time was lost. The most recent past may have been the most drastically affected. This left an unusual amount of recent history with very little time for it, with many events squeezed into 1988. Events of Hogfather, Jingo, The Last Continent, Carpe Jugulum and The Fifth Elephant all date to this short period, with considerable activity for three years before. This period starts just after Lancre returned to the normal flow of time after its fifteen-year jump. Hmmm. The History Monks are accustomed to re-writing history; they do it so that it's hardly noticeable.

But... if you are scrambling to avert the end of time, space and the whole damn thing, maybe it's not as easy to put a piece of time, or an event, where some meddling witches have made a disturbance already. Maybe you throw some farther back and compress others into the recent past. The date of the adventure of Rincewind and Eric Thursley falls in this gap. Maybe you just toss some randomly. Maybe recent history on the Timeline looks artificially compressed because it is. ..Old Dickens 15:55 7 Oct 2006