Time zones were apparently established because of railroads. Anyway it didn't matter before the development of nautical clocks, which I guess came with industialization. This is a bit speculative, but I think Dragaera is a technical preindustrial society - Aliera's array of skills are certainly technical - we see established techniques of investigation used in _FHYA_ - but there's no industry as I understand it in the Empire, not even a magical industry such as we see in Ford's Liavek story "Riding the Hammer", where magicians are part of road gangs building a railroad. Incidentally, since post-Interregnum there is teleportation, and the Empire is quite large, Dragaerans need time zones, or would, if the Orb didn't impose Emperor-local time. On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, Steve Hubbell wrote: > > Do technical preindustrial societies have "time zones"? > > >From: Philip Hart <philiph at SLAC.Stanford.EDU> > >I assert that no technical preindustrial society would be able to support > >a system with varying-length hours, not simply because of the difficulty > >of keeping time, but the horror of accounting for time periods in > >contracts, between time zones, ... > > > > _________________________________________________________________ > Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8. > http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail > >