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Technological Advancement in Fantasy


Stubby

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And in any case, that doesn't justify the situation of humanity in the Malazan world. Perhaps it explains the plight of the Jaghut and the Tiste, but Malazan humans explicitly evolved; the Imass and the Eres precursors are shown to have extremely primitive technology. Somewhere between their time and the First Empire, humanity reached a technological state very close to that of the modern Malazans and Darujhistani (minus the Moranth munitions and the Malazan swordsmithing techniques of Richard RahlBarathol Mekhar), and soon thereafter spread to cover the entire planet.

And then nothing more happened for 150,000 years, barring perhaps whatever Kallor's people came up with a hundred thousand years before the story.

You can accept an Eddings-style story where a people leaps fully formed into existence from the mind of their god, and a Jordan-style world where civilization has been overrun and destroyed, but that's a very different thing from an evolutionary, technologically innovative world where all progress grinds to a halt basically forever.

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Uh we could reproduce the Pyramids, their architectural design is a geometric solid. I don't think anyone wants to. It'd be expensive, and pointless.

I should say rather, we cannot reproduce the pyramids with the technology THEY had. It is still somewhat of a mystery as to how they were built without several inventions that would come later. The pyramids are a feat of engineering that when put in context of their current society have never been equaled.

The Reformation was AFTER the Renaissance

True, and while the renaissance is mainly responsible for the reformation, the reformation is in turn responsible largely for the printing press, which is in turn largely responsible for much of the technological advancement to follow. I did say the reformation was one of many factors. THe point wasn't which was more important, rather that historical events precipitate advancement/crumbling of society.

If the Cold War ended in MAD, we'd all be dead. Not backwards in tech, dead.

It's typical to assume that somewhere someone would survive a nuclear war. And those remnants of society would indeed be greatly inferior to societies before them. It'd be very unlikely to kill everyone on earth.

But regardless of the state of Europe, pre-Renaissance, the Chinese, Arabs, and Indians would be very offended to hear you say no progress was made.

Obviously, but then I was focussing on europe. Every region has similar examples. The Hittites used iron 4000 years ago, whereas several Middleastern peoples to follow would not. At any rate, Europe is the best example because fantasy is typically based on a European world.

Mostly, I'm trying to point out that sticking a group of humans in a region, giving them enough time, and expecting them to achieve the same technological achievements is unfounded. Consider the advancement of Native American culture when compared to Europe. In some ways it was suprisingly advanced, in many ways terribly primitive. To assume a civilization in a fantasy book would follow similar advancement as ours have is not based on a lot of evidence.

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I should say rather, we cannot reproduce the pyramids with the technology THEY had. It is still somewhat of a mystery as to how they were built without several inventions that would come later. The pyramids are a feat of engineering that when put in context of their current society have never been equaled.

I think that might be an urban legend at this point. We do know how they built the pyramids - lots of people and lots of time, good grasp of geometry, no particularly stunning technological secrets.

Mostly, I'm trying to point out that sticking a group of humans in a region, giving them enough time, and expecting them to achieve the same technological achievements is unfounded. Consider the advancement of Native American culture when compared to Europe. In some ways it was suprisingly advanced, in many ways terribly primitive. To assume a civilization in a fantasy book would follow similar advancement as ours have is not based on a lot of evidence.

But most fantasy is based on a european model, and had medieval (even late medieval, usually) european technology...for millenia. Thats the problem. It makes sense for a thinly spread nomadic population to have different technologies from a settled urban one, or one with a collapsing society and volatile politics, but not for a stable, prosperous society to have windmills and galleons and widespread literacy but to never develop anything more advanced ever.

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Obviously, but then I was focussing on europe. Every region has similar examples. The Hittites used iron 4000 years ago, whereas several Middleastern peoples to follow would not. At any rate, Europe is the best example because fantasy is typically based on a European world.

Mostly, I'm trying to point out that sticking a group of humans in a region, giving them enough time, and expecting them to achieve the same technological achievements is unfounded. Consider the advancement of Native American culture when compared to Europe. In some ways it was suprisingly advanced, in many ways terribly primitive. To assume a civilization in a fantasy book would follow similar advancement as ours have is not based on a lot of evidence.

It is when said world is based on Europe. Humans went from being cavemen to building spaceships in 200,000 years. To be stagnant for more than a few hundred years is weird, to be stagnant for a few thousand is unheard of to be stagnant for over one hundred thousand is impossible.

I should say rather, we cannot reproduce the pyramids with the technology THEY had. It is still somewhat of a mystery as to how they were built without several inventions that would come later. The pyramids are a feat of engineering that when put in context of their current society have never been equaled.

We probably could, it would just take a lot of people.

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It is when said world is based on Europe. Humans went from being cavemen to building spaceships in 200,000 years. To be stagnant for more than a few hundred years is weird, to be stagnant for a few thousand is unheard of to be stagnant for over one hundred thousand is impossible.

Yes, I actually agree (although I do question whether we can assume that an alternate world would necessarily follow a similar pattern). I dislike stagnation as well. My original argument was that series like WoT and ASOIAF are set in periods of regressing technology, which to me is totally believable.

To be fair to the other side of the discussion, when I read WoT, I did actually wonder at why it was taking thousands of years to recover from the breaking of the world. Seemed a bit long. Of course, the majority of learning goes through the White tower in Randland, and as they all live like 300 years, it is not the same exactly.

I haven't read Malazan, but what little I did read was so unappealing you could tell me anything about it and I'd probably believe it. :P

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Regarding the OP, I think that the idea of a stagnant society is only so widespread in "high" fantasy and her gritty stepchildren, because other genres fo fantasy draw their narrative tropes from other roots. Regarding the roots of "high" fantasy, I do agree with rabbit that some roots of the fantasy genre in industrialisation have influenced the perception of technology, especially since the 19th and early 20th century had a very stagnant image of the middle ages. It was mostly believed that the conditions of living, the structures of the society and even the perception of the world remained the same for several centuries. If you look more carefully at the sources you can find something new in every century and even agriculture changes a lot between 800 and 1300 for example. I'm not so familiar with Asian or African history, but I would guess that the cultures that we percieve as stagnant for a very long time are much more dynamic.

I find the idea of 10.000 years of stagnation or the existence of a 8000 year-old institution as the Nightwatch very ahistorical, but it does amuse me more than bother me. The description of changing societies and the consequences of technological progress are very dear to my heart, though, but it takes a backseat to character development for me.

And just to nitpick:

True, and while the renaissance is mainly responsible for the reformation, the reformation is in turn responsible largely for the printing press, which is in turn largely responsible for much of the technological advancement to follow. I did say the reformation was one of many factors. THe point wasn't which was more important, rather that historical events precipitate advancement/crumbling of society.

It's the other way around, the existence of the printing press contributed to the success of the Reformation. That's how Luther or other could spread their opinions so easily via handouts. Previous attempts at reformating didn't have the technology at hand, even though the Hussites tried the handout approach in their late times with the older popular print techniques, and it did help them on some level.

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it always amuses me that they have the technology to develop da coolz weapons (crossbows, trebuchets, siege towers etc), massively designed castles and cities but never use the vast pool of knowledge these things require for any other aspect of the world/livlyhood/culture.

and gunpowder ist verboten. It's okay to kill a man with an arrow, or a bolt from a crossbow, but guns make everyone equal and that's just against the fundamental tenets of fantasy right there.

the problem is that humans are a greedy lot, and whether its magic or technology, someone's gonna observe it and say to themselves, "I'm gonna monetize the hell out of that shit by using it in this unexpected way no one has ever thought of."

It's typical to assume that somewhere someone would survive a nuclear war. And those remnants of society would indeed be greatly inferior to societies before them. It'd be very unlikely to kill everyone on earth.

Word, there were a couple hundred american POWs in an outside trench (their air raid shelter) in Nagasaki harbor a few miles from the center of the blast who survived the bomb, survived living in the area for another week or two, and who went on to live for decades. MAD is a different situation, of course, but simply being near a bomb when it goes off isn't an automatic or even short term death sentance for everyone.
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Obligatory disclaimer: Westerosi historiography is rubbish, about the only people thinking about it at all are Rodrik Harlaw and Sam and both are sort of busy at the moment.

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I don't get it. Why does the history thing and lack of tech advancement bug people so much, when we are so ready to accept other things more central to the story?

I'd guess that it's the same phenomenon as is found in SF: you can only have FTL or other interstellar travel, phasers and such-like if you get the basic physics right. An audience is prepared to accept gravity generators in spaceships only if the author demonstrates that gravity holds people to the ground, where there is a ground.

Think about the huge list of things we have to accept in order to enjoy reading any SFF book; why do we do it? We are willing to suspend disbelief in order to have a little fun for a few hours, but the mental ability to stretch one's credulity goes only so far. I wouldn't want to speculate why this is the case, but I'd guess it's something to do with the mechanism that helps us learn - a little at a time. (The recent "change only one fundamental thing about the world" precept in urban fantasy/near future SF takes this a little too far, IMO.)

Technological and social advancement and anti-advancement is something people know about, in the same way that they know gravity keeps things on the ground. A stagnant society, where a long historical scale is given, is just something too basic for people to accept unless there's a good reason for it presented in the tale.

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Technological and social advancement and anti-advancement is something people know about, in the same way that they know gravity keeps things on the ground. A stagnant society, where a long historical scale is given, is just something too basic for people to accept unless there's a good reason for it presented in the tale.

OK. Put that way it makes more sense to me now.

I'm still happy to put it aside for the sake of the story, but I can see how it can bug people. Thanks!

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And then nothing more happened for 150,000 years, barring perhaps whatever Kallor's people came up with a hundred thousand years before the story.

The thing about Kallor's people makes it even more mind-boggling, because they piggy-backed on hyper-advanced KCCM technology. Which is still lying around. And in a hundred thousand years, not one single person made use of that. It's just too big a gap, especially since we know more about what happened in the world before that gap than after.

It is possible that the Crippled God is influencing things to stagnate cultures, since it's explicitly mentioned on at least two occasions where stagnation is caused by other elements (Lether and the Edur haven't advanced because Gothos' ritual held things in stasis, with additional poking of the Edur by the CG - quite why that applies to the technological advancement of people there isn't explained but I can roll with that, and the Teblor were brought down by something which Icarium tried to fix by bringing them down and setting up their societies so they never advanced - and again, the CG later became involved in corrupting them. But if there's been a hint of this on a worldwide scale so far I've missed it.

Lack of advancement isn't a problem when there's a reason for it. The second poster mentioned Long Price- it's a theme of the books there and we know why. Likewise Steph Swainston's Castle series. And if the past is a vague thing that's kept to the background so we don't know much about it at all, Westeros style, or dates aren't really brought up, a lack of advancement doesn't throw itself into attention. But in a book like Malazan where millenia-old beings are involved in the story to the point of getting occasional PoVs and there are constant flashbacks and references to the past, you notice.

Although to offer some measure of argument for the defence, the argument that the humans are vanilla human doesn't quite stand. One race is blue, and several characters are at least a hundred years old with no magical help without anyone thinking this is in any way unusual - Laseen and Duiker for example.

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I know that Joe Abercrombie has said he might write books set 'much' later in his world with more technology. Sanderson has said that the second Mistborn trilogy will be set at a time when they have technology comparable to ours and the third will be when they have become a spacefaring civilisation.

Wheel of Time's technological decline and then the new renaissance during the books is slightly cheesy (the Illuminators kept gunpowder secret from the entire rest of the planet for three thousand years without a single leak? Hard to believe) but at least Jordan nods at it, plus the sociological conventions are more advanced (18th/19th C. rather than Medieval).

A Song of Ice and Fire is exaggerated but not stagnant. Westeros has moved from the Bronze Age (the First Men and their war with the children of the forest) to the Iron Age (the Andal invasion, which also introduced horses to the continent) to the late Medieval/early Renaissance period (in the books) with notes that knights weren't always around, the maesters researching science, medicine and technology have only really made progress since the Doom and the death of the last dragons (only 150 years before the books, in which time they've developed some pretty impressive potions and medical procedures). As I said in the other thread, ASoIaF is 'only' two thousand years slower than real human history, assuming the dates in the books are accurate (and we know they are not). Given the quirks of our own history - the Romans could have developed steam technology easily but never did, if the Dark Ages never happened and progress had remained constant we could have landed men on the Moon centuries ago - that is easily believable.

and gunpowder ist verboten. It's okay to kill a man with an arrow, or a bolt from a crossbow, but guns make everyone equal and that's just against the fundamental tenets of fantasy right there.

This is why Paul Kearney's Monarchies of God (and Sea-Beggars for that matter) is pretty good: gunpowder, arquebuses, cannons, mortars, land and naval battles etc. All great stuff and done well.

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I think lack of technological advancement tends to stem from the fact that authors want to set their stories in quasi Dark Ages or Medieval periods but at the same time want massive timescales to the past, for the epicness. With Erikson being the worst offender by far.

If you want to come across as believable you really need some advancement, or you need to trim the timeline considerably. Sometimes an author has specific reasons for not doing so, in Tolkien's case he had a somewhat emotional reason for wanted to avoid the introduction of technology.

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I have to say, this thread turned into a much better debate of time scales than the Malazan vs WOT thread, which devolved into a debate of Earth history with posters flinging around facts and figures, some accurate and some not (myself included), and really wandered far off point.

It is a point of contention, that's for sure. The over-long histories don't really bother me. I guess I just kind of roll with it and don't really dwell on the hows and whys. I don't have any any reasonable explanation for how human societies can exist for 100000 years without tremendous technological innovation, but I don't think it's impossible. Whether it's force of magic, or benevolent dieties, or what have you, I guess I'm just able to take it at face value. But I can see why it bothers some people.

I wonder if we could get two or three authors to debate the subject? Maybe on a web forum or something? It would definitely make a good topic for a panel at a convention.

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That said, what I enjoy about fantasy is precisely that it allows you to take impossible things and juxtapose them for symbolic and aesthetic effect. And I'd suggest that is what humans in any secondary world are, including humans in a static world.

Yep, nicely said, Matt. Lack of technological advancement isn't a problem for me if the story/setting is doing its "job" on different levels.

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The Middle Ages were not a period of technological decline. Maybe it slowed a bit, and went back in some places in Europe, but Gothic Architecture would disagree with decline.

I'd go beyond that and say that it's false that the Middle Ages were a period of technological decline - they were not. This was a period full of innovations (particularly after the 9th century), like the heavy plow, various types of mills, and so forth.

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The problem, as I see it, is that none of these authors is Terry Goodkind, who has stated on several occasions that in his books, magic is a direct analogy to technology. The result of Goodkind's radically brilliant approach is that worlds he creates are very plausible- not to mention richly drawn and fascinating.

Time and again in Goodkind's fiction (Fiction!? Gadzooks! It seems a crime to use that label on works of such beatific profundity. Rather let us call his oeuvre Philosophical Adventure Treatises!) darksome collectivist forces stroll onto the scene main, intent on alarums and excursions, their purpose no less than the complete and utter eradication of magic!

These plots mirror the history of our own world when the many grim, hydra-headed aspects of Communism tried to destroy technology. At the core of the debauched works of Marx and Engels is a hatred of technology and human advancement. So pervasive and utter is the collectivist reverence for antiquity that they seek to smash the symbols and tools scientific progress and imprison man forever within the chains of an idealized past. The raison d'etre of despised socialism is technological iconoclasm.

Collectivist technophobia is why you will never come across a communist on the internet- they are unable to overcome their vast loathing of microchips and assorted other electronic doodads.

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The problem, as I see it, is that none of these authors is Terry Goodkind, who has stated on several occasions that in his books, magic is a direct analogy to technology. The result of Goodkind's radically brilliant approach is that worlds he creates are very plausible- not to mention richly drawn and fascinating.

Collectivist technophobia is why you will never come across a communist on the internet- they are unable to overcome their vast loathing of microchips and assorted other electronic doodads.

Not to mention that they can't overcome their hate of moral clarity, which is necessary on the internet.

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Interesting, so the last 1000 years in which we moved from living in shit to building orbital stations is somehow the standard against which all the other epochs should be measured. What about the Mediterranean civilizations of antiquity which existed virtually unchanged, except for an occasional massacre, for at least 2000 years prior to the first Medieval Renaissance, which by the way was cut short by the little ice age. Also one brilliant scientist is not enough to make something work; the Greeks new how to make a steam engine, but never went any further than a novelty toy simply because there was no need for it. Maybe if brilliant scientists like Aristotle and his likes instead of talking and writing bullshit about natural world actually paid attention to it and invented Calculus and the laws of preservation of impulse and energy in closed systems we would be zipping around the stars by now, or more likely poor bastards would be burned as sacrifices to some god or another because people of the day didn't want to know that shit. Hell if Pope of the day didn't take pity on Galileo Newton and Leibniz wouldn't finalize Calculus and all the technological advancement of the last 300 years would be spread over a much longer period of time.

The point is technology is about time, place and people willing to use it. If you have a fireball toting wizard who doesn't want development of gun powder, I know I wouldn't want it if I was one, there will be no gun powder. No gun powder means those alchemists would be still trying to transmute lead to gold by sprinkling it with mercury instead of experimenting with different formulas for making boom as a byproduct of mass black powder production and early artillery arms race, no artillery arms race means no push to hand held boom sticks, which leads to no research in metallurgy to make those things stop exploding, or at least explode predictably, which would stop all things of military nature at the level of charging knights. Also no gun powder weapons means no ballistics research means law of gravity would never be formalized simply because no one would give a damn.

Also if technical progress depended on the size of population chinese and hindus would be terraforming Venus by now instead of making crappy copies of someone else's products.

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it always amuses me that they have the technology to develop da coolz weapons (crossbows, trebuchets, siege towers etc), massively designed castles and cities but never use the vast pool of knowledge these things require for any other aspect of the world/livlyhood/culture.

and gunpowder ist verboten. It's okay to kill a man with an arrow, or a bolt from a crossbow, but guns make everyone equal and that's just against the fundamental tenets of fantasy right there.

I can think of two series that defy this basic premise.

The Imager Profile has a magic based economy and guns. The imagers actually seperate and purify aluminum as an income source.

The Multiverse Series has a technological society come in contact with a magic based society. The tech society was nerfed to steam age. But the interplay between the two groups and their differing origins was compelling.

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