#but whenever people judge sf on real life criterions it's like why are you reading scifi?

[la-perfide-albion]

I won't defend wh40k (because really their timeline is fucked even when you consider that there are now super humans who regularly live for hundreds if not thousands of year, which should change the timescale, just not that much) but Dune does a really great job with its timescale.

There are numbers that are very much larger than what we consider reasonnable for human timescale, but the years passed absolutely dimmed the truth of those events. Very few prior events are actually referenced, and they are always vague and uncertain; we might know roughly what happened, but not how, or why, or who done it. You can see this after Leto's death-3000 years have passed and the events of the first books are basically forgotten by anyone who doesn't have access to Leto's memoirs. You could always make the argument that you don't need those big numbers, but at this point it's just preferring one arbitrary timescale to another.

Also it's quite disengenuous to pretend that our relation to history would stay constant through the ages; 10 000 years ago is very far from us, but what tells us that 10 000 in the future will be as far? We created so much information in the last century, more durable information too, is it really a fair assessment to say that as little of it will survive as the information from 10 000 years ago? Both of those franchise also introduce a technology plateau, which would flatten the timescale a lot too. So why should a franchise happening [x] years into the future have the exact same relation to our history than us?

starting an elite paramilitary black ops group who sneak into the homes of authors and cut one to three zeroes off any number of years given in a fantasy or sci-fi novel