Is something wrong with time/history in GRRth?

[falcotron]

Well, magic certainly is good enough an answer for "how could the Wall stand for this long" at least.

Sure, but so what? There are multiple structures that are thousands of years old still in current use, and most of them don't look significantly different from structures built today. And that's just one of multiple related problems. So, saying "One of those many structures is magical" doesn't answer anything.

The same way Gandalf could be thousands years old.

Gandalf is a Maia. He's a being of pure spirit, and the form he wears in the seen world is like a cloak is to a man, not part of him. He doesn't have the Gift of Man, so he can't age or die. He was sent to Middle-Earth by Manwë, not to return to Valinor until his mission to ready the people against Sauron was complete, no matter how long it took. And so on. Tolkien worked this all out in great detail. So, not a very good analogy. (Also, he's not thousands of years old, he's timeless; he existed before the universe was sung into being, before time started.)

[Lord Freypie]

I have the ultimate explanation for datation : in a world with no regular seasons counting "years" is not that easy.

Their years must be an arbitrary number of days, or based on things like stars they don't understand the movement, or a moon that may not work exactly like Earth's one. Then they can make thousand years errors over time.

It's possible the method to decide how long was a "year" changed several times in the space of written history, but only a few specialist took attention to that (it's why some maesters have 2000+ years difference in their datations).

For the fact the number of Andal-named families is ridiculously low even in the part of the realm that were supposed invaded.

I think it's just that most families find more prestigious to pretend they were already there in the age of heroes.

Then as they have power maesters made it history.

Finally about buildings still in use : perhaps people repare them / they were wholly replaced over time like Winterfell, but for prestige reasons / because there's no carbon datation they prefer to date them from the time a first thing was built there.

All Asoiaf and all woiaf are subjective views after all, Woiaf maesters under powerful families influence propagand, and Asoiaf what PoVs having learned history from them think.

[Ferocious Veldt Roarer]

Sure, but so what? There are multiple structures that are thousands of years old still in current use, and most of them don't look significantly different from structures built today. And that's just one of multiple related problems. So, saying "One of those many structures is magical" doesn't answer anything.

Gandalf is a Maia. He's a being of pure spirit, and the form he wears in the seen world is like a cloak is to a man, not part of him. He doesn't have the Gift of Man, so he can't age or die. He was sent to Middle-Earth by Manwë, not to return to Valinor until his mission to ready the people against Sauron was complete, no matter how long it took. And so on. Tolkien worked this all out in great detail.

In "Silmarillion", which was published years later. In "LOTR", he was just a mysteriously old man.

[Arakan]

In "Silmarillion", which was published years later. In "LOTR", he was just a mysteriously old man.

Absolute non-value statement. Gandalf was a Maia in LOTR.

[Lord Freypie]

In "Silmarillion", which was published years later. In "LOTR", he was just a mysteriously old man.

In "Silmarillon" Tolkien started to write in the 1910s, decades before LOTR.

[Roddy Darwin]

So, sometimes I really hate posts like the one I'm about to start typing is going to turn out as, but I dunno, I'm feeling talkative and intellectually stimulated. Feel free to skip my shit and ignore me!

I am afraid I won't find the right words for what I mean to ask - hell, I am not even sure I know exactly what it is I want to ask, but I'm gonna try anyway.

Before I start on my ramblings, a couple things I want to say. First, great OP. I'm not sure I entirely agree that Valyrians must be behind the history stopping, but I really love how you take these kind of meta-arguments and then make it an in-world theory.

I really believe falcotron and all you guys agreeing with him are right in that the surprisingly long timescales are not just there because "it's fantasy lol" or "GRRM doesn't know lol". I know he said he didn't really give a shit about distances and timelines, and that we probably shouldn't either... But has he mentioned actual dates? As far as I recall, these SSMs were more about "how many months did Arya take to get to Braavos and how can this help us determine how many days passed between Jon's first breastfeeding and Dany's birth", than how many thousand years ago the Andal Invasion was. In fact, while one (precise timeline of recent events) is quite obviously voluntarily kept foggy in the books, the other (absolute dates and ancient history) is a recurring point of discussion among characters in-world.

(Don't get me wrong, I appreciate and love the work some readers are doing with the timeline, and I use it just as much as the next guy to do theorycrafting. Actually, I think GRRM kinda lied to us, and he does pay attention to the timeline - he just said he didn't so if he fucked up, we wouldn't bitch about it. The facts that we managed to get such a precise timeline and that there really aren't that many errors in it after all, and that some of us managed to find out neat little things using that forbidden timeline, just make his whole "stop thinking about this, I don't" not seem too credible to me. Geniuses gonna genius.)

Also, like some of you guys said, GRRM loves history, and has extensively studied it, and drawn inspiration from it. Don't tell me he doesn't know six thousand years is a whoooole lot, because he does. He might not have realized how fucking huge the Wall was when he put that number in, but that's not the same thing.
I'm pretty clueless when it comes to history, or distances. I learned some dates in school, sure, but I forgot them, and I really am a terrible judge of how long ago stuff happened beyond european XXth century history. When I read ASOIAF, I never blinked at the size of the Wall or the travel times or how far Braavos was or wasn't.

And yet, reading about how long ago the Andal Invasion was, ie how long ago written history started, how long ago first men invasion was, how old the maesters think the world is, all the ancient history in tWoIaF... Reading about that made me go "wait a minute, that's a loooong fucking time, isn't it?" I know we think Jesus lived about 2k years ago, mkay, that one I can remember.

I'm not picking up a ruler and calculating the distance from Dorne to the Wall using the Lands of Ice and Fire's maps and the length of the Wall, mind you, I'm using the date of the day to realize there is something very, very weird about history on Planetos. And again, I'm about as clueless as it comes, so if it tickles me, being written by a medieval history expert, I'm preeeeetty sure it was meant to tickle us.

And that's why I LOVE the idea of an in world theory that explains it, that's not just "yeah, long winters fuck things up, you know?" or "zombies and dragons".

Anyway, I digress, sorry, I came here to ramble about something else. Kind of.

OP, isn't your way of thinking a little... ethnocentric?

I'm pretty sure that word isn't exactly the one I want to use, but it's all I have in English so we'll have to stick to it. Hah, who am I fooling, I don't have a word for what I mean in my mother tongue either.

What I mean is: GRRM did say Planetos was bigger than Earth, so it's not Earth. You say biology works like it does in the real world, but I disagree, at least insofar as genes are concerned (some phenotypes rely on dominant genes, okay, but ain't nothing as absolutely dominant as Baratheon Black - I am pretty sure the Daynes still looking how they do nowadays, us not having the slightest clue wtf is up with that notwithstanding, would never work with Earth genetics either).

Yes, of course, we're still reading a story about humans that are very, very close to real world, Earth humans, but do you know what I mean? Some rules are slightly different, and I don't think it's necessarily bad writting or mistakes or anything, because, you know? We haven't yet observed any extraterrestrial intelligence, but we figure it is entirely possible that at least a species very analogous to ours could exist elsewhere. But that doesn't mean everything has to be the exact same though, does it?

What I am trying to say is I am not giving the usual, weak, "dude, dragons and zombies, so it's not the real world, so whatever can and does makes sense". Of course it makes sense to base our reasoning on the real world because it is similar to aSoIaF's, and yes GRRM's characters are so wonderful precisely because they're so deeply human, and stuff.

However... Our data is just one history by a human-like species (humans, as it happens, haha.). How are we sure things couldn't have gone entirely different if just a few things had been different? Hell, how do we know if we just loaded up a back-up of the state of Earth at the early onset of human civilization, and ran the whole thing again, things would play out roughly the same way?

Am I making any sense? It's a genuine question because again, I love your arguments and I get them, but still I can't get my head around that one thing.

In fact, my very basic understanding of early European history goes kind of like:

ancient greece was awesome and civilization advanced really quickly, but then stuff happened, and later it was the dark ages, and we basically killed ourselves in wars and didn't do much good science at all and kind of just stagnated for a few centuries, but then stuff happened, and woot renaissance and we became awesome again and now we can put landers on fucking comets (LANDERS on COMETS, my dudes)

I know it's not quite that simple, I know it's mostly just the Dark Ages we're talking about here anyway, and if Westeros' history is roughly analogous to our Dark Ages, then architectural stagnation makes no sense, but... In our very restricted sample of 1 draw of the "human-like species history" random variable, in pretty much the same region of the world, we had times were civilization advanced really fast, and times where it really didn't.

Is it impossible we were just lucky to move forward so fast, so far? Maybe we're weird, and sloooooooooow history spanning thousands of years with hardly any notable changes would happen more often if we could just observe human-like history repeatedly?

Again, I dunno if I made any sense at all. Thanks again for the great thread, and sorry about the confused ramblings and english and stuff.

[kimim]

...Well, it's believable of real-life South America (except Brazil), and they have much harsher separating geography (the Andes, the Amazon). Sure, they were invaded during historical time--but so was Westeros. And the Andals seems to have had technology not far behind 16th century Spain in general, and ahead of them in communication and travel. So, I can imagine that their language spread over the entire continent.

What's much harder to imagine is that it never diverged over 6000 years.

...

Well a lot of Central and South America speaks Spanish thanks to a conquest, and could have been all Spanish if the Portuguese didn't get a piece of the pie...

To both: Thank you! I forgot about that entire continent lol.

As far as lack of divergence, as falcotron says, GRRM is not a linguist, exceptions happen, and it's ridiculous to demand that an author be an expert on every aspect of world building.

[Greg B]

Except for the parts that are Martin's very narrow focus in the series, the rest of the world and its history is a static backdrop. Only the major events (the Doom, the Conquest, etc.) are painted on that backdrop. The big numbers, all the ages passed, are stylistic flourishes that give the backdrop the look and feel he wants. Looking deeper than that makes as much sense, in my opinion, as proposing explanations for why the "world" depicted at the back of the stage appears only to have two dimensions.

[Bright Blue Eyes]

The answer is actually rather simple: The science of history on Planetos is shit. That's it. It's rather common for the given technology.

The assumed dates for the Andal Invasion differ by 200%. People reference some outstanding technological advances in their field of knowledge, but project their own surroundings backwards in every other case. There are neither museums nor films.

Isn't the North alone the size of Germany?

More like Karhold on it's own being the size of Germany. The North alone is closer to the size of entire Europe.

What's much harder to imagine is that it never diverged over 6000 years. 400 years after the Doom of Valyria, and the Pentoshi bastard Valyrian and Meereenese bastard Valyrian are not mutually intelligible. (Which fits pretty well with vulgar Latin, which began diverging into separate Romance languages about 300-400 years after the fall of Rome.) So why didn't the same thing happen to the Andal language? That's one of the first questions I asked that led me to this thread...

That's probably largely because of the Maesters. Oldtown Westerosi instead of Oxford English. They are spread wide enough apart to teach the upper crust of the nobility and in opposition to Latin, it's the same language as spoken by the commoners. It drips down from there.

Sure, but so what? There are multiple structures that are thousands of years old still in current use, and most of them don't look significantly different from structures built today. And that's just one of multiple related problems. So, saying "One of those many structures is magical" doesn't answer anything.

Constant repairs and rebuilding. And stone structures are very long-living anyway. There is probably not a single stone from the original building still standing (unless it's been reused a couple times over).

What I mean is: GRRM did say Planetos was bigger than Earth, so it's not Earth. You say biology works like it does in the real world, but I disagree, at least insofar as genes are concerned (some phenotypes rely on dominant genes, okay, but ain't nothing as absolutely dominant as Baratheon Black - I am pretty sure the Daynes still looking how they do nowadays, us not having the slightest clue wtf is up with that notwithstanding, would never work with Earth genetics either).

Doesn't work on Planetos either. Case in point: Ashara Dayne. Brown hair.

[Melisandre's White Pubes]

I have the ultimate explanation for datation : in a world with no regular seasons counting "years" is not that easy.

Their years must be an arbitrary number of days, or based on things like stars they don't understand the movement, or a moon that may not work exactly like Earth's one. Then they can make thousand years errors over time.

It's possible the method to decide how long was a "year" changed several times in the space of written history, but only a few specialist took attention to that (it's why some maesters have 2000+ years difference in their datations).

For the fact the number of Andal-named families is ridiculously low even in the part of the realm that were supposed invaded.

I think it's just that most families find more prestigious to pretend they were already there in the age of heroes.

Then as they have power maesters made it history.

Finally about buildings still in use : perhaps people repare them / they were wholly replaced over time like Winterfell, but for prestige reasons / because there's no carbon datation they prefer to date them from the time a first thing was built there.

All Asoiaf and all woiaf are subjective views after all, Woiaf maesters under powerful families influence propagand, and Asoiaf what PoVs having learned history from them think.

There are multiple clues that time flows at drastically different rates in different parts of Planetos. You have hominids evolving so far that they are speciating from the ones in the rest of the continent (brindle men of Sothoryos, furry Ibbenese, both unable to reproduce easily with other humans), and nothing other than a little water to separate them from the general population, and at the same time technological progress remaining stagnant for thousands of years. The fact that the moon phase is almost ALWAYS WRONG when described (one exception in the entire series) indicates that time functions differently on Planetos - you can't have a crescent moon rising at sunset unless light is taking weeks to travel between the sun, planet, and moon instead of seconds. I think the Valyrians are related to it somehow, considering how Tyrion describes the Moon appearing distorted and bloated when he nears the ruins of Valyria - the effect seems similar to gravitational lensing or some other force warping space and/or the speed of light.

Since GRRM is primarily a science fiction author he has to realize the implications of some of the more science fictional aspects he's added to the series. I don't think it's a straight SF series masquerading as fantasy (though I will be tickled if Varys ends up being Haviland Tuf), there are fantasy elements that cannot easily be explained with science, but I think we have a situation like in The Magic Goes Away series by Niven, where magic is given rules and works in a logical (if mysterious to the characters) way, and this has science-fiction-esque implications on the world building.

[Knight and Dayne]

I'd also like to point out that, while politically and socially, GRRth is clearly European medieval, there's also a lot that's comparatively advanced. The maesters' medicine shows an understanding of disease that, in real-world terms, is 19th century or later. The use of ravens for communication is far better than anything we had up until the telegram. Wildfire is basically napalm.

[Melisandre's White Pubes]

I'd also like to point out that, while politically and socially, GRRth is clearly European medieval, there's also a lot that's comparatively advanced. The maesters' medicine shows an understanding of disease that, in real-world terms, is 19th century or later. The use of ravens for communication is far better than anything we had up until the telegram. Wildfire is basically napalm.

That aspect reminds me of the Witcher series. I really like how the magic users of that society have an understanding of genetics and germ theory, and it makes perfect sense within the setting - they have had the magical equivalent of powerful microscopes for centuries if not longer, of course they will have figured out that the little creatures that are invisible to the naked eye are causing disease and that the fancy double-helix molecules inside all our cells are the instructions for life.

[A Bastard Snow]

If I asked how the Others are able to raise people from the dead, or how dragons can produce fire from a reptilian digestive system, the answer would be, "Magic, duh."

But if I asked how Stannis lost the battle of Blackwater, or how the Mountain is able to use a hand-and-a-half sword in one hand, or why Tywin didn't respect Tyrion, or why milk of the poppy helps people in pain, the answer is not, "Magic, duh."

Outside of the handful of gaps filled by magic, everything else is grounded in reality. Psychology, biology, military strategy, mechanical physics, all of these things work the same way they do in our world--with a small number of minor changes, but those changes are mostly consistent and interesting in their own right. That's the difference between fantasy for adults and a fairy tale (or really bad Tolkien-ripoff fantasy...). Ignoring that and pretending this is all slapped together in one night with no attempt at believability is doing a huge disservice to GRRM, and makes me wonder why you'd bother reading these novels.

(And since A Bastard Snow made essentially the same point, but a lot more stupidly, and claiming things that are directly contradicted by the books to boot, I won't bother replying to that separately.)

Thanks for the backhanded compliment I suppose......

[Tyrell_like_Squirrel]

Martin's world is a fantasy one, and no matter how much its based on history, the world of Planetos is incomparable to our own. The castles are bigger, the wines are stronger, the battles are larger, etc. etc.

The point being, its useless to try and make it all fit. How does a house like the Starks survive for 8000 years, which is about the length of human civilization in the real world, and not have a million lesser branches? Or die out completely? The answer is it can't. It's magic.

You can analyze for days and re-analyze for years, but at the end of the day it will never fit with the real world, because it's magic fantasy, with a dash of weird fantasy. Think Conan the Barbarian. Martin is far more influenced by Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft then Tolkien.

[kimim]

I'd also like to point out that, while politically and socially, GRRth is clearly European medieval, there's also a lot that's comparatively advanced. The maesters' medicine shows an understanding of disease that, in real-world terms, is 19th century or later. The use of ravens for communication is far better than anything we had up until the telegram. Wildfire is basically napalm.

Wildfire is a lot like Greek Fire, which the Byzantines used in naval battles as it burned on water. Is there evidence that maesters know about the germ theory? Before the 19th century, people knew that some diseases spread, and knew enough to use quarantine. They also used mouldy bread, cauterization on wounds, etc., to prevent infection. Opium has been used to relieve pain for thousands of years. Using birds to send messages goes back a very long way, too.

[falcotron]

So, sometimes I really hate posts like the one I'm about to start typing is going to turn out as, but I dunno, I'm feeling talkative and intellectually stimulated. Feel free to skip my shit and ignore me!

Well, you've got some really interesting ideas here, so how about if I instead skip over parts of it and respond to other parts instead of ignoring the whole thing? :)

Before I start on my ramblings, a couple things I want to say. First, great OP. I'm not sure I entirely agree that Valyrians must be behind the history stopping,

That's a good point. I pretty much chose them just because they're one of the cultures that lasted for a significant fraction of that 6000 years, and they seem like the most obviously "magical" ones. But they don't fit perfectly--in fact, they're almost 1000 years too late to fit perfectly. And I'm not even sure that some kind of "history stopping spell" is the best explanation in the first place, and under a different explanation there's no reason to suspect Valyria at all. And your arguments below... well, I'll get to them below, but I think they're good.

Actually, I think GRRM kinda lied to us, and he does pay attention to the timeline - he just said he didn't so if he fucked up, we wouldn't bitch about it. The facts that we managed to get such a precise timeline and that there really aren't that many errors in it after all, and that some of us managed to find out neat little things using that forbidden timeline, just make his whole "stop thinking about this, I don't" not seem too credible to me. Geniuses gonna genius.)

I think it may be a little more than that. Didn't he once respond to a question about someone's age being off by a year by saying that he keeps notes by year rather than year and month because it's much easier that way, and that means occasionally someone's age will be off by one year? I think he really does want to allow himself to make mistakes like calling Gendry 15 instead of 14 (that's a made-up example, because I can't remember whose age he actually may have gotten wrong), but we shouldn't extend that to assuming that maybe Gendry is really 40 instead of 14.

OP, isn't your way of thinking a little... ethnocentric?

Before I get to your actual point, let me respond to one I think you only made by accident, if at all. :) It is ethnocentric to assume that Valyria must be involved. Why not Asshai, Leng, or Yi Ti? Or, hell, even some culture on the other side of the Sea who realized the Westerosi--and, with them, the Others--were about to discover them and did something Hammer-of-the-Gods-ish about it. And I don't really have any defense against that.

What I mean is: GRRM did say Planetos was bigger than Earth, so it's not Earth. You say biology works like it does in the real world, but I disagree, at least insofar as genes are concerned (some phenotypes rely on dominant genes, okay, but ain't nothing as absolutely dominant as Baratheon Black - I am pretty sure the Daynes still looking how they do nowadays, us not having the slightest clue wtf is up with that notwithstanding, would never work with Earth genetics either).

Well, that one, GRRM has actually called a mistake. But there are similar cases that clearly aren't mistakes. As I said, there are some intentional differences to our world, which are themselves internally consistent and usually interesting. Often, when things in ASoIaF are different from on Earth, it's because they're more like what medieval people incorrectly believed. And you can fit the "genetics mistake" into that if you don't want to call it a mistake.

However... Our data is just one history by a human-like species (humans, as it happens, haha.). How are we sure things couldn't have gone entirely different if just a few things had been different? Hell, how do we know if we just loaded up a back-up of the state of Earth at the early onset of human civilization, and ran the whole thing again, things would play out roughly the same way?

Well, for one thing, there are some commonalities between different cultures in different parts of the world, and at different times. Civilizations as disparate as Minoan Greece, Mayan Central America, and Polynesian Easter Island collapse the same way. The Dark Ages in medieval western Europe, and warring-states China have many commonalities. And so on.

The one big thing we don't have any other examples of is the current global, technologically-driven, post-Renaissance civilization. Obviously that only happened one time, one way (unless there are Silurians living underground like on Doctor Who or something). Even there, you can get a bit of contrast by looking at how different not-quite-as-advanced cultures (the Arabs, the Chinese) got sucked into global civilization and how they've adapted it to themselves since then, but it really is still just one civilization. But I don't think that's relevant to ASoIaF. There are a few hints of early-renaissance flowerings beginning to happen in the era of the novels (Braavos is clearly on their way to becoming golden-age Amsterdam, Dany's campaign to end slavery is very 18th century, a handful of people like Littlefinger and at least the show versions of some Qarth characters seem to think about money in a post-feudal middle-class sense), but they're not inventing railroads and steamships and colonizing Sothyros with industrial mining.

Is it impossible we were just lucky to move forward so fast, so far? Maybe we're weird, and sloooooooooow history spanning thousands of years with hardly any notable changes would happen more often if we could just observe human-like history repeatedly?

Maybe I've just read too much Ray Kurzweill, Vernor Vinge, etc. in my life, but it's hard not to see the progress of humanity the way they see it. If you plot a curve with advancements in transportation, ability to kill or feed people, ability to store records, population density, production capacity, etc., from Sumeria to America, it's a pretty smooth exponential curve. (Of course until the late 20th century, there are actually a bunch of separate curves, merging as time goes on, but you just put them all on top of each other and select either the maximum or the population median and you get a single curve.)

There are dark ages that dampen the individual curves locally, and there are also inflection points that go the other way (many of them pretty easy to understand in retrospect--the invention of writing, saddles, indo-arabic numbers, clocks, movable type, or computers), but the global effect on the single curve doesn't look nearly as dramatic; it's just a few jaggies on the overall curve. There really aren't any long periods where nothing changed. Sure, castles, armor, and bows, or the relations between vassal and liege, didn't change much between the 6th century and the 7th in Europe, but they did change, and they generally changed more in each succeeding century. (Kurzweill compares the rise and fall of Rome with the dot com boom and bust and shows they had about the same net effect--the blip is visible, but the ultimate shift in the curve is negligible.)

There are some really bad dark ages in there, as with the Greeks and the Mayans, where civilization basically collapses completely and has to start all over again. But notice that the Greeks could borrow ideas from neighbors who hadn't been too far behind them, so they got right back up to speed, while the Mayans just stopped being a factor in overall human progress. A worldwide dark age would be a different story--but then you wouldn't have continuous historical records across a worldwide dark age.

There are different ways to look at things. Jared Diamond's books (especially Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse) explain why renaissance Europe conquered the world without recourse to Kurzweill's Law.

But even without thinking in terms of exponential growth: There are very few periods in history where any civilization really stagnated for long--and, when they did, there was always a neighbor to exploit that. Why wouldn't the same thing be true on GRRth, where they clearly don't have a global civilization, but competing states just like ours? If, for example, Westeros stagnated for more than a couple centuries, why wouldn't someone from Essos easily conquer them? (As, in fact, someone from Essos eventually did--but why would it take 5700 years?)

I suppose you could make a case that Valyria was so far ahead of their neighbors when they stagnated that there was no one able to take advantage of them. But that almost sounds like my "freezing history" idea in non-magical disguise, doesn't it?

[falcotron]

As far as lack of divergence, as falcotron says, GRRM is not a linguist, exceptions happen, and it's ridiculous to demand that an author be an expert on every aspect of world building.

You're really twisting what I said.

GRRM clearly knows enough about linguistics to make bastard Valyrian diverge the same way as vulgar Latin, on the same timescale. (Not to mention other things--e.g., the way he uses Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon to construct Northern/Wildling names like Joramund and Flint instead of calling them X'qz'zrt shows that he's at least a reasonably well-informed dilettante amateur.) So he definitely knows enough to know that the Andal language remaining unchanged for 6000 years is so wildly improbably as to be impossible. Exceptions happen, but not exceptions on that ridiculous of a scale.

[falcotron]

That's probably largely because of the Maesters. Oldtown Westerosi instead of Oxford English. They are spread wide enough apart to teach the upper crust of the nobility and in opposition to Latin, it's the same language as spoken by the commoners. It drips down from there.

Oxford hasn't prevented English from changing considerably in just 600 years. Shakespeare is close to the edge of intelligibility. French people can't understand Middle French unless they studied it in school. And so on.

Constant repairs and rebuilding. And stone structures are very long-living anyway. There is probably not a single stone from the original building still standing (unless it's been reused a couple times over).

If that explanation works, why don't we ever see the same thing in our world on anywhere near that scale?

[falcotron]

There are multiple clues that time flows at drastically different rates in different parts of Planetos. You have hominids evolving so far that they are speciating from the ones in the rest of the continent (brindle men of Sothoryos, furry Ibbenese, both unable to reproduce easily with other humans), and nothing other than a little water to separate them from the general population

Thanks, I didn't even think about that, but that's a huge piece of evidence (even if not for my theory, then for something).

Also, the Ibbenese didn't even have that little water to separate them through most of their history. Their likely ancestors were neighbors to the Andals, and possibly the invaders who destroyed the first settlement at Norvos; later, they repeatedly built settlements near mainland cities like Lorath and Sarnor; until the Century of Blood, they controlled Ifequevron; etc.

But one possible explanation is that they'd speciated well before that time. For example, maybe humanity arose in Sothyros (paralleling our world) or eastern Essos (paralleling Tolkien's), and came to western Essos in successive waves separated by tens of thousands of years, giving them plenty of time to speciate in between.

At any rate, it's definitely an interesting question.

The fact that the moon phase is almost ALWAYS WRONG when described (one exception in the entire series) indicates that time functions differently on Planetos - you can't have a crescent moon rising at sunset unless light is taking weeks to travel between the sun, planet, and moon instead of seconds.

When I noticed this one, I chalked it up to a mistake--but if it's a mistake GRRM makes almost completely consistently throughout the books (which I hadn't noticed), and about something he's actually talked about, and it fits in with a wider pattern, you're right, it must mean something.

I think the Valyrians are related to it somehow, considering how Tyrion describes the Moon appearing distorted and bloated when he nears the ruins of Valyria

Interesting. I'll have to reread that chapter. Thanks again!

Also, are there multiple connections between Valyria/Targaryens/dragons and the moon? I remember the Qarthian myth that dragons hatched from a former second moon, and a couple of the Targ dragons had moon-related names (one in Common and one in Valyrian, IIRC), and didn't Bloodraven say something about being out of sight of dragons and the moon?

Since GRRM is primarily a science fiction author he has to realize the implications of some of the more science fictional aspects he's added to the series. I don't think it's a straight SF series masquerading as fantasy (though I will be tickled if Varys ends up being Haviland Tuf), there are fantasy elements that cannot easily be explained with science, but I think we have a situation like in The Magic Goes Away series by Niven, where magic is given rules and works in a logical (if mysterious to the characters) way, and this has science-fiction-esque implications on the world building.

This conclusion, I'm not as sure about. For other reasons (which I won't get into here, but I've mentioned them elsewhere), I think part of what he set out to do is to show that if you're going to have magic, it shouldn't work like either religion or science, and people who practice it should be wrong whenever they think they understand why it works because it's not actually systematic and susceptible to reason in the first place. Also, didn't he unfavorably compare The Magic Goes Away to Vance's The Dying Earth on a closely related question? (I may be misremembering here, so if he didn't, please correct me.)

All that being said, your basic idea still works: even if magic doesn't have any rules at all, the fact that magic is relatively rare in his world means that the effects of magic will themselves be causes of science-fiction-esque effects, and those are effects GRRM seems like he might want to explore. In fact, half of his series is about exploring the non-magical effects on history, strategy, etc. of the one-time-only Dany dragon birthing magic. (And, possibly more relevantly, he seems much more interested in the long-term effects of there no longer being a land bridge to Westeros than he does on whether the legendary Hammer of the Gods actually happened as described.)

[falcotron]

Martin's world is a fantasy one, and no matter how much its based on history, the world of Planetos is incomparable to our own. The castles are bigger, the wines are stronger, the battles are larger, etc. etc.

The point being, its useless to try and make it all fit. How does a house like the Starks survive for 8000 years, which is about the length of human civilization in the real world, and not have a million lesser branches? Or die out completely? The answer is it can't. It's magic.

You can analyze for days and re-analyze for years, but at the end of the day it will never fit with the real world, because it's magic fantasy, with a dash of weird fantasy. Think Conan the Barbarian. Martin is far more influenced by Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft then Tolkien.

I disagree. Certainly, Martin is more influenced by Howard and Lovecraft (and Clark Ashton Smith and Fritz Lieber) than by Tolkien. But I don't think he's trying to write a Conan or Swords. He's aiming for a realistically-grounded medieval setting as an intentional counterpoint to the faux-medieval setting used in so much bad modern fantasy. He's clearly not just throwing in random differences for the hell of it, but picking differences and exploring the effects they'd have. How would the Norman Conquest or the Anarchy play out differently if the key element of superiority were dragons instead of castle-building techniques? What happens when avian communication and naval technology get so far ahead of land travel? What would be the political implications of a religion that differs from Christianity in certain key ways? What if Hadrian's Wall were a giant magical wall built to keep out magical zombies instead of just raiders? What happens if you impose a deeper continental-style hierarchy on England instead of the looser system of most barons and earls being directly under the King? These are questions you can't explore in Cimmeria or Hyperborea, but you can--and he does--in Westeros.