L.E. Modesitt Jr. discussion

I'm only on the fifth book in the series, Imager's Princeps. I love the series so far, but I have had one nagging thought that I just can't figure out on my own. I don't understand the time concept for this book series. I understand that a quint is a portion of a glass, and I'm assuming that they don't follow a 24 hour time scale like we do. I just can't figure out how many hours are in a glass, or what portion of a glass is the equivalent of a quint. For the sake of my own sanity, I've just been telling myself that a glass is an hour and a quint is 15 minutes, but I'm sure that's wrong. Can anybody help me out on this one? I've tried to just let it go, but I can't seem to get it out of my head every time I read a time keeping reference in the series.

I had some issues with it, too. In my review of the first book, I wrote the following, probably cribbed from Modesitt's web site.

There are five two-month seasons: Winter, Spring, Summer, Harvest, and Fall.

There are ten months, each thirty-five days long: Ianus, Fevier, Maris, Avryl, Mayas, Juyn, Agostas, Erntyn, Feuillyt, and Finitas

The week is seven days long and based on the French equivalents: Lundi, Mardi, Meredi, Jeudi, Vendrei, Samedi, Solayi.

An hour is termed a "glass", and roughly 100 minutes of our time. Each day has twenty glasses, with the tenth glass of the day being noon, and the tenth glass of night being midnight. A quint is a fifth of a glass, so 20 minutes.

Thank you Jim, I appreciate the explanation. Now I can read and make sense of the time scale.

You're welcome! I still occasionally have issues with time units, but this bit of research did help a lot. It probably would have been worth putting in to the front of the book. I'd rather have it than a cast of characters, at least.

I agree, at least one or two of the books should have the time units in the front of the book. It would make things much easier to understand.

From Modesitt's forum:

"Lmodesitt wrote:

A glass is longer than our hour, somewhere around 75 of our minutes,but measured in 100 units of Terahnar time, so the length of the day is roughly comparable, but Terahnar units are shorter than our minutes.

A quint is a fifth of a glass, or 20 units.

L. E. Modesitt, Jr."