It occurs to me that I've spent an inordinate amount of my time in graduate school either doing similar re-construction, or studying the efforts of others to perform such re-constructions . . .

MKK

http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Corridor/8611/index.html

May I quote this, appropriately cited, in my upcoming presentation on editorial conventions and considerations in speculative fiction? Please?

Maybe I've worked on too many convention programs, but my first reaction to this was "Egad! A panel topic!"

http://www.pjfarmer.com/woldnewton/Pulp.htm

and pages linked therefrom, which speaks for itself well enough that little more can be said.

Feel free to add that the name of the workshop is Viable Paradise, it's held on Martha's Vineyard in the fall, and I teach exposition.

I absolutely agree with this thought of yours:

I think what we92re seeing is the operation of a particular turn of mind, like the ones that make you a copyeditor or a bibliographer. I think some readers automatically keep track of the implicit and explicit chronology. The reason I think it92s a turn of mind (as opposed to a meme, habit, or fannish enthusiasm) is that they can92t shut it off, even when it92s obvious that a narrative92s chronology is being driven by the needs of a sloppily contrived ongoing plot, rather than any underlying plan or logic.

For someone like myself, there's never been a way to shut it off at all. This is the turn of mind that has complled me to put together chronologies ever since I was a child, doing things like figuring out the year when The Handmaid's Tale should take place...

...and of course, it's what inspired me to create my website in the first place. I just knew there had to be other people like myself out there, who would appreciate the existence of a repository like this. (Entries like yours, and the comments here, happily vindicate this belief.)

More than just wanting to "reconstruct the author's working notes," though, I think people with this turn of mind (especially when they're fans of a work, but not only then) have a need for their fiction to have at least as much historical, geographic, and other consistency as the real world does. It goes beyond wanting to infer the world that lies within an ongoing plot--we need it to be a world in the first place, capable of inference.

On that note, I invite any recommendations for worlds not mentioned in this article that you'd like to see timelines for...I'm sure I can hunt some of those down, or at least include the recommendations on my site.

As for panel topics, I'm already planning to run a panel at this year's Worldcon on precisely this subject matter, so if you or anyone else are going to attend and would like to be drafted, I'd be more than happy to have you.

You are absolutely right about fans giving the subject more thought than the authors do, in some cases (I am reminded of the New Zealand fan who actually counted panels and calculated the percentage of sexual content in the book). We always found this particularly true in the anthropomorphic field. In transferring those aspects to another medium, I'm finding great fun in making them as invisible as possible. Heck, this bird flies, I'll do a radio script!

Well, originally, I'd determined that--based on the days of the week in the book (especially the date for Labour Day) and Offred's memories of being a child in what seemed to be the 1980's--the book should take place in 2014, with the 33-year-old Offred being born in 1981.

Some time later, though, I noticed that the days of the week are virtually the same in 2008 (except for it being a leap year, which doesn't affect the sources used). As such, you can also have it take place then, with Offred being born in 1975, although I think that makes her a little too old to have such vague memories of the US pre-Gilead.

The Epilogue, of course, which looks back on the events of the book from further in the future, has specific date references (the academic conference therein is occurring in 2190, IIRC), making chronological conjecture for that part unnecessary.

Personally, I don't think it would fit particularly well with Heinlein.

How's that? :)

Second, to address Kate Worley's points:

My concern is chiefly with internal historical continuity, and not so much with "how much x appears in y" (although I know people who do that, too :)). As such, I haven't found too much difference between fields or genres...once you have that frame of mind, you just apply it to everything. :)

The real question, though, is whether there might be an Omaha the Cat Dancer Timeline around that you'd be willing to put online... ;)