Photo by Biking Nikon SFO , via Flickr My husband and I were recently editing the first draft of his latest Y/A comic fantasy novel. 1 Because these books are being published in Britain, one of the minor, but besetting issues has to do with conveying measurements like height, width, depth, weight, and distance. When Britain entered the EEC in 1973, the government agreed to adopt the metric system. Since then British children have grown up using millimetres, centimetres, metres and kilometres in place of inches, feet, yards , and miles ; milligrams, grams , and kilos in place of ounces, pounds , and tons . The metric system works brilliantly in modern scientific and industrial contexts, including contemporary and futuristic fiction. However, if you’re writing a fantasy novel, the use of metric terminology seems incongruous, not to say anachronistic. When I read a sentence like The dragon stood twenty metres tall or The golden sword weighed three kilograms, the effect r...