(via, via Memories of Dallas)

From The North American Book of the Dead).

"I offered to use the moons of a gas giant [as a setting for my story]. ...I had to go back to the setting and work out the interactions of three moons, their parent planet, and the local star. ...the parent planet, a gas giant called Agamemnon, was big, and it looked big in the skies of its moons--about eighteen degrees in apparent diameter from the nearer moon, Orestes. ...the Oresteian day was 142.32 hours long...and Agamemnon eclipsed its star on a regular cycle, bringing a few extra hours of night in the middle of Orestes' long day. I already knew that a primary social issue in the novel [The Kindly Ones] was the existence of people who had been declared legally dead...I used that day/night cycle, and the eclipse at its center, to reinforce the division between the living and the legally dead 'ghosts,' deciding the legally dead could act legally only during the night and the eclipse." --Melissa Scott, Conceiving the Heavens (1997)