The problem is that there's basically no way to determine an age for Straylight that's consistent with its place in Shirithian history and with all the different aspects of a Duchy's development:
- The fictional history of the foundation of modern Straylight - a document which I've lost and do not miss since I would have to rewrite all of it anyway - places the building of the first Sanct not long after the War of the Wylthean Succession. Within the Apollonian tradition occasionally followed in Shireroth that one real-world day corresponds to one micronational year, that would make Straylight a bit over 1200 years old by now.
- The culture, for how much I've thought of it, should have taken maybe 300-400 years to develop. Straylightians are definitely patriotic and, in their own adhocratic anarchic way, traditionalistic. Some traditions have become distorted from their original form, and so on.
- Many of the Sancts still standing (floating?) were architected in the fictional history (which exists in scattered bits around my brain) by one person, Dante McCallavre (and yes, I know, that name is stolen from SimCity 2000), who was present at the foundation of the first larger Sancts. This would place an upper limit of maybe 200 years or so on the age of the Duchy, given some optimism. You can easily build a city on land and have it stand for 2000 years, but the sea is different. One day it becomes more economical to just empty a Sanct of people and scrap it completely than keep fixing it as the sea wears it down, and that day, the Sanct simply reaches the end of its life.
- The oldest Sancts were built using technology corresponding to the most modern things that the United States had in the seventies or so. Now, I find it quite likely that in the real world, technological growth will keep following the Law of Accelerating Returns, quite possibly up to a point where advancement becomes so rapid that the model becomes meaningless. As such, Straylight can't technologically be more than 60-70 years old - an, in fact, just trying to predict what kind of technology we would have on Earth in 2030 seems fairly difficult, so even that might be too much...
- The stories that I'm thinking of that would involve Straylight are even more intense in this respect, as a lot of their plots depend on unique technological developments that have to be kept hidden... TYWML takes place in a company that does bleeding-edge medical research and stumbles on... well, you'll hear more about that in January
. Anyway, I can't place those stories into a timeframe of more than maybe 20-30 years or so. There's simply nobody in Straylight with the resources to go more than a few dozen years ahead of the general technological state of the art without strokes of luck too extreme to justify even in fiction. The "solution" I've using so far is to just avoid ever mentioning the actual age of Straylight (except for setting the foundation at the end of the War of the Wylthean Succession). I've been fairly careful to always just use vague terms like "a long time" and so on. Now, however, it's just not cutting it anymore. I have to establish the age of everything, otherwise there's no way I can get anything to make sense.
Unless anyone comes forward with compelling arguments to change this, I think I'm going to pick approximately 400 years as the age of the Duchy of Straylight. Let's make it explicit... The day where the events of The Man that Mary Built take place is, in Straylight, exactly 400 years after the day Lacrymosa II took the throne. The Straylightians just happen to be really good at keeping old Sancts afloat and safe to live in, and while rapid technological development is the norm, some kind of invisible hand reaches in every 50 years or so and erases all the technology anybody's come up with to keep everyone from doing something rash like uploading everybody's mind into a computer
. Oh, and the rest of Shirithian history since the war? Well... we'll see where that can be fitted in.
