My second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, which Tor will be publishing in either late 2003 or sometime in 2004, is about quasi-Masonic societies of people whose primary alliegance to one another is that they all adhere to the same time-zone for sleeping and waking. Of course, fact follows fiction, and it was only a matter of time until jingoistic kooks seriously humorously proposed moving the Greenwich Mean to NYC:
Wars have been fought over religious calendars and millions of people have been
killed. We need a bona fide secular calendar, devoid of all religious
impulses. We need to bring an antiquated world into real time. We need to
bury much of the chronological past that really is no more than a
celebration of mayhem. We need modern measures and tools. We need a concept
of time that is no longer subjective. We need an American time. After all,
America is the center of the universe. We hold the power. Why not put the
world on the American clock.
(Thanks, Greg!)
