And it's always a good idea to draw attention to the question of long fantasy voyages on horseback, which often treat horses as perpetual motion machines (they are not). There are a great many resources available for how to treat horses well in fiction, including Judith Tarr's work. Laura Anne Gilman's Devil's West books have wonderfully realistic portrayals of horseback travel also.
Very few of us have a concept of what it means to have no roads. Travel takes an extremely long time. Kim Stanley Robinson's Shaman involves a trip during the ice age, and it's dangerous and slow. Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness also features a realistically portrayed voyage across ice fields.
Kat mentioned the "flatlander car culture" problem. If you live on the flats, travel is far more predictable in timing than if you live in a hilly area. In those areas, you need to think more about barriers. When there's a stop sign right at the crest of the hill and you are driving a manual-transmission car, you might wish you were an octopus! Different people might plan where to put their vehicle differently depending on whether they want to haul up or down the slope with a large purchase. Road traffic conditions vary widely, as do weather conditions. Minnesota has terrible icy snow in winter, and lots of construction when it's not winter. Californians tend to get in lots of road accidents during the first hard rain of the rainy season, because of oils getting lifted off the roads.
Even "no roads" doesn't always mean the same thing. No road across the tundra is quite different from thickets, forest, or jungle. If you follow animal paths, that might be easier, but it might also lead you to a mountain lion.
Cliff mentioned how in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, they had to travel on foot along highways for hundreds of miles. Cormac McCarthy's The Road involves cannibals that live on the road. The hobbits in The Lord of the Rings have to get off the road to avoid attracting Nazgul.
When there is a convention in the suburbs, there are often a lot of barriers to pedestrians. Fences and walls can cause problems. There can be a shortage of pedestrian crossings, or just tons of tons of cars. Sometimes, as in the Briar Rose tale, you can see your destination but you can't reach it.
We often speak in writing about the "Show, Don't Tell" rule, but it's tricky when there's not a lot to show. What do you do when you are stuck in the doldrums, or the road goes straight for eight hours?
Paul spoke of isochrone maps, which use color coding to show how far it takes to travel a particular distance. Changes in technology have led to compression of these maps, as the time required to travel the same distance has shrunk.
Cliff mentioned how space travel is influenced by our history of tales about the Age of Sail. For some reason, the time it takes to get from planet to planet is awfully similar to the length of time it would take to get from port to port. In real space travel, it takes three days to get to the moon. New Horizons probe took years to get to Pluto.
In action films, travel time has shrunk. In the original Star Wars film, the people on the Millennium Falcon played chess because they had to pass the time while they traveled. By contrast, in The Force Awakens, they seem to be zipping about in minutes.
In Star Trek the original series, sometimes they would be months' travel away from home. Although their ability to travel quickly went up in The Next Generation, Star Trek Voyager played with exactly the question of how long it would take to travel back if there were some mishap.
Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, he used a concept of Zones of Thought. Depending on where you were located physically in the galaxy, your ability to travel and your ability to think and innovate would change. Most people live in the Slow Zone, but there is also a zone called the Unthinking Depths, and another zone of maximum speed and complexity. It was a metaphorically very cool idea.
Kat mentioned that traveling physically might make you feel like you had traveled to a different time period because the rate of societal change in different areas varies widely. On the coast of the United States, a thing might be considered normal, but in another region that same thing might be considered futuristic. I have heard many people say they feel like going to Australia feels like traveling backward in time because of subtle differences in the way society works there.
There was a time when, if you traveled across the ocean, you weren't going to be able to be in touch with your loved ones except by letter. Communication distances have really changed as we went from telegraph to pay phone to easy long-distance to global phones in your pocket.
Stephen Baxter wrote a story where Earth developed fractured time zones. At altitude, time moved faster, while at sea level, it moved much more slowly.
The slow boat to China is gone. A voyage to Europe no longer takes weeks; it takes hours.
Phone calls are cheaper, but some people still cut off conversations. People adapt more slowly and lag behind technological change. Binge watching of shows has become possible only quite recently, but it is already starting changes in the way we tell our stories in visual media.
The time delay required for the sending of messages can play an important role in your plot. Ann Leckie presented situations in which people would receive messages about what was happening at a distance, knowing that whatever had happened was totally impossible to change because the message had taken hours to arrive.
Kat added that people watching things they can't affect is something that has happened many times in history. In the Napoleonic wars, there was no way to communicate across the field of battle. The existence of spyglasses meant you could see what was happening, but couldn't necessarily do anything to fix it.
Cliff mentioned that the plot of The Martian was based on travel times. The novel illustrated the concept of orbital launch windows, etc. and helped to drive the plot.
Time zones, as in the ones across the United States, have not always existed. We created the construct of "___ o'clock." We've developed a global culture of dividing time into certain units. This uniformity is not the same for distance. There are different ways of measuring time in different religions. Lots of religious holidays rely on lunar calendars.
Our time concepts are based on our planet and our sun. In space, though, those limits don't hold. If you are working on Mars rovers, you work in sols, or martian days. There's also a delay between a command being generated on Earth, and the Mars rover's response.
We often assume that travel will be smooth, but lots of accidents can happen. Flat tires, accidents, plane crashes, etc. etc.
In the book Hyperion by Dan Simmons, there was an instant-portal system of transport so successful that you could build a home that had different rooms on different planets. If that system shut down, then your family in the next room could suddenly be separated from you by light years.
Morgan noted that people aren't always anticipating the worst. If you drive a car, you are aware that you could run out of gas, but it's not always top of mind.
Kate said if she could do instantaneous travel, she would. Kat said if she could open a door and hvae fresh Meyer lemons, she'd be interested! Howl's Moving Castle also had a door that opened into different locations. Teleportation has been used in a lot of stories, both science fiction and fantasy.
Mohenjo Daro had no transit space, so all buildings were smack up against each other with roof hatches.
Kat mentioned a floating sampan culture where you would have to step on someone else's space to get from one place to the other.
In American Sign Language culture it's more rude to stop and wait for a pause in conversation before walking through the conversation space. Instead, people just say "excuse me" and walk through so they won't have to stand eavesdropping.
If you live in a habitrail culture you learn what not to look at, what to ignore and what to pay attention to.
Jet lag is a function of travel speed. If you travel slowly, your body simply adjusts as you go.
Kat talked about the age of caravans, and that during this age cultures changed slowly. There were intermingled spaces between culture, and no hard lines. The southern border of the United states is permeable. Carved dead spaces are not normal. She suggested the Age of Sail may have led to an increase in racism because you could travel a far distance without experiencing the gradual cultural change.
Kat said she'd like to see a near light-speed travel story mashed up with a fairyland Rip Van Winkle tale.
This week, Dive into Worldbuilding will meet on Tuesday, December 4th at 4pm Pacific to discuss Personal Space and How to Be Polite with your Body. I hope you can join us!
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