Welcome to 2016. Even though my upcoming novel Cyan has been moved back to an April release date, some of the Cyan related posts are tied to the solar calendar. For example . . .

Why do we start our year on “New Years Day”? The Chinese don’t. Traditional Jews don’t. Islamic nations don’t. Our New Year might make some sense if it started on an equinox or a solstice, but it doesn’t.

Where does a circle – or an orbit – start? Silly question; it doesn’t. Yet we have seasons, and seasons make the year. Where we start counting the days of that year is arbitrary. And if there were no seasons, as on Cyan where there is no axial tilt . . .

Gus Leinhoff, one of the first explorers of Cyan, said:

The philosopher observes that the life of a man is like the passing of the seasons, from springlike birth, through the autumn of age, and winter’s death. In spring’s rebirth, year after year, the philosopher’s metaphor becomes the prophet’s revelation, as we try to see a new life for ourselves after the death that awaits us all.

What philosophies and religions might come out of this planet of endless springtime, and how will our children understand the briefness of their own lives without the endless cycle of seasons to provide a metaphor for their understanding.

Perhaps Gus worried too much. Humans are resilient, and the DNA evolved by a billion years on Earth cannot be reset quickly. Twenty years after the first colonists arrived on Cyan . . .

The long days and seasonless years had begun to seem normal, even to the oldest colonists. There was a whole generation of Cyan-born children, nearly thirty thousand of them now, who had known nothing else. The humans weren’t quite emulating a yeast culture, but they were multiplying fast.

Birthdays were artificial reminders of the yearly rhythms of old Earth. They served no practical function on Cyan, but they had become important rituals, just as the old, nearly abandoned holiday of Xmas (or Christmas as some extreme purists still called it) had been revived to mark the end of a year. An Earth year, that is, which was the only kind of year anyone memorialized.

A trip around Procyon where nothing changes can hardly be called a year.