Does it matter?

We wonder how careful a fiction author really needs to be.

Our astronomer was recently reading a novel (even astronomers are allowed access to fiction) and came upon a point that bothered him.  In the description of an evening, the crescent Moon was said to be visible in the east.  Well, this doesn’t happen.  A crescent Moon must be closer than ninety degrees to the Sun, and if the Sun has just set, must be in the west.

It didn’t actually have any bearing on the plot, being a sort of throw-away line while setting the scene.  (In fact it might have been just a slip of the pen; that particular author is generally good about details.)  It’s a good bet that very few readers caught the error, maybe none apart from our astronomer.  It’s similar to passages in other books where the wrong stars are put in the sky for the hour and season.  Some of those books have been enormously successful, and even count as literature.  The sky errors have had no serious effect, leading only to some scathing comments in introductory astronomy texts.  And they will be less important as time goes on, as a brighter sky means fewer people are familiar with the stars.

The wrong placing of the Moon would have been more damaging if it had some importance to the action.  “The rising crescent Moon silhouetted a Black Rider at the summit of Weathertop, due east of them.  ‘They are here before us,’ said Aragorn, ‘and the small Moon will give scant light this night.'”  [This is a contrived example!  Tolkien was excellent at details.]  At this point we think it really should be avoided.  We do offer a service checking for such things, but of course there are many other sources of information.  And it is perhaps unnecessary to go to quite the lengths that Kipling did in one of his poems.

But rather than concentrating on possible errors in one’s sky, we prefer to ponder how the right placement of the Moon or stars might contribute to your novel.  Perhaps it’s just a bit of scene-setting: “He could just make out the brilliant scintillation of Sirius rising before the Sun.  To the ancients this marked the beginning of the Dog-Days, the height of summer.  Well, the world had moved on, and nowadays the season was later, hastening toward the equinox.”  Or it might be a more important element: “This picture is of the north side of the house, showing it in direct sunlight.  That couldn’t happen in October.  The metadata file has been tampered with.”

There is one good motive we can think of for making an error in one’s sky.  It is to suggest in a subtle way that something, somewhere is terribly wrong.  We leave the development of this idea to any author who wants to take it up.  Unfortunately, there may be few readers who can or will take the hint.