#aussie bookworm

The Watsonian answer is 10,600 AD, give or take a few decades/centuries. Some of my reasoning is spelled out in this post, but there’s also references to the barbaric ancient times in the distant past that is our present or distant future:

PRINCE: You can turn that function off, of course – everyone should be accorded some amount of privacy. (WITH A LAUGH) This isn’t the twenty-second century, after all! (Prince of Mars)

JUNO: I play a butcher in my local Y2K Faire. (Prince of Mars)

VICKY: We talkin gasoline-power ancient or… Grim’s Mask ancient? (Midnight Fox)

JUNO: Or, “murder is like comedy:both were responsible for three hundred deaths in the Vaudeville Massacre ofthe twenty-fourth century.” (Lesson Learned)

RAMSES: This city, this planet… they’re old, Juno. Barbaric, in a lot of ways. Without the infrastructural solutions to crime and poverty that have been invented in the millennia since Mars was colonized, some people will always be crushed here. (Stolen City)

Hyperion City has been around for millenia, and the various interstellar colonies have been around long enough that they have their own deeply-ingrained languages and cultures that are completely unintelligible from one another, and from their places of origin.

I think eight thousand years and change into the future isn’t all that bad a guess, all things considered.

The Doylist response is: Sophie and Kevin are going out of their way to not tell us the year.

The patreon supporters are by now aware of the special worldbuilding extras that supporters get: one of them was a wiki page on the Turbo series, and another is a wiki page on the Andromeda series. Despite there being dates on both documents, Juno’s annotations tell us that those dates are all wrong-- they’re entire decades off. How many decades? Which direction?

The point of that decision is that the year itself doesn’t matter. 

And I’m gonna be a little bit self-centered for a moment-- I think they’re doing it because of people like me.

Not because of me specifically, but because of people who sift through the episode scripts with a fine-toothed comb and make timelines and pay way too much attention to the most insignificant of details with the assumption that everything is a clue. 

People like me notice inconsistencies in the timeline, and that makes us twitchy (also see my internal response every time Juno is referred to as being 38 past season 1).

The truth of it is, writers are human beings, and not everything is a clue.

The thing is that when you’re writing a big long project like an ongoing podcast, you have to juggle every little fact and throwaway detail both past and future, and you’re inevitably going to forget some of them. Little tiny things slip through the cracks. And when you’re dealing with time specifically, one detail falling through the cracks can mess a lot of things up-- especially when your story is moving forward in time, and every “_____ ago” means something different based on your present moment. 

What I mean by that is Juno’s infamous “Seven months?” line makes perfect sense if Juno’s saying “seven months since the start of season 2″, but not “seven months before this moment in which we two characters are having this conversation”, and that discrepancy can cause a lot of headaches-- especially when episodes are written out of order.