Science uses the Red Shift to measure deep cosmic distances. But how to measure deep historic time? How aboutthe Saffron Shift.If history itself had a color, it is . . . like wood or bark, or living forest floor.Assigning hues to time periods, the sum total of history is saffron-brownbut the chromatic arc starts from blinding white (prehistory) to sun-yellow (Ancient Greece), then deepening to pale wood tones (Dark Ages) and finally exploding like an infinite chord into a full brown palette that includes mahoganies, siennas (Middle Ages), oak, sandalwood (the Renaissance), cherry, maple (Age of Reason), and near-black old woods (Industrial Revolution) for which there may not be names.As time approaches our own, the wood-brown palette fades to a weird glassy colorlessness, goes black-and-white for a brief span as you think of photographs of your grandparents, and then again fades until we get a clear medium that is the color of the world.And the present moment is perfectly transparent.It's only as you start looking into the future, that the colors start returning. The glass is turning silvery with a murky haze, and there is blue somewhere in the distance . . .
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About Vera Nazarian
Vera Nazarian was American novelist. Vera Nazarian is an Armenian-Russian American writer of fantasy, science fiction and other "wonder fiction" including mythpunk, an artist, and the publisher of Norilana Books. She is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) and the author of ten novels, including Dreams of the Compass Rose, a "collage" novel structured as a series of related and interlinked stories similar in arabesque flavor to The One Thousand and One Nights, Lords of Rainbow, a standalone epic fantasy about a world without color, the Cobweb Bride trilogy, and The Atlantis Grail books. Read more on Wikipedia →
Themes
- History — Lessons from the past and the arc of human civilisation