Great Year
Entry updated 17 February 2025. Tagged: Theme.
The Great Year or Long Year, whose seasons last for many normal Earthly years, generations or even lifetimes, features in a number of sf works as a kind of literalization of cyclic history theories (see History in SF) in the context of Planetary Romance. The Dark Ages are reified as an interminable-seeming winter and the Golden Years as an equally prolonged summer, though it is also useful to apply the term Great Year to situations where "normal"-length years change drastically over a fixed cycle. Special astronomical circumstances are generally invoked to account for such complications: like the forty-year hot and cold seasons (each dominated by an appropriately adapted intelligent species) in Hal Clement's Cycle of Fire (1957); or the taxing 200-year cycle inflicted on the planet Ragnarok in Tom Godwin's The Survivors (1958); and the 2500-years-long Great Year experienced by inhabitants of Helliconia in Brian Aldiss's Helliconia sequence. The planet Tiamat in Joan D Vinge's The Snow Queen (1980; rev 1989), with its 150-year summers and winters, straightforwardly orbits a Black Hole.
Further Great-Year worlds form the settings for Tony Rothman's The World Is Round (1978), where each day lasts 750 Earth days, Paul Park's The Starbridge Chronicles, opening with Soldiers of Paradise (1987), and the planet Miranda in Michael Swanwick's Stations of the Tide (1991). George R R Martin effectively transposes the concept into Fantasy with A Game of Thrones (1996) and further volumes of his Song of Ice and Fire sequence, whose Secondary World [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] seems to be moving from a long summer into what may be a ten-year winter. Eric Brown's Binary System (2017) is set on a planet previously undiscovered by humans (see First Contact), where the winters last many years, though the summers are short. [DRL]
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