Androxine Vortex
Archmage
So in many fantasy stories centuries and thousands of years can go by but still cultures are locked in a medieval theme. How have you handled this in your works? How can you justify this by still being believable?
Hi,
I'm going to have to agree with Penpilot - do we need to justify it at all. The Chinese had gunpowder thousands of years ago - writing too as well as paper and many other advances. They didn't really progress it to an advance society. Steel's been around in the west for several millenia, the bronze age began 3,500 BC. But the Industrial revolution didn't happen until three or four centuries ago.
Progress in technological advancement is slow. By and large it happens in incremental steps, with every so often a big leap being made. But so many cultures on Earth never made those leaps for any number of reasons. Scarcity of resources. Lack of patronage of the technologist's art. Or someone just didn't have that spark of genius.
Why do you have to explain that something didn't happen?
Cheers, Greg.
While I am all for non-materialistic advancements and valuing other cultures...the three field system does produce more crops consistently, stirrups do make it easier to ride a horse and the printing press does make mass literacy much more likely.
The human mind does like to improve and enhance things. If there is a culture that does not show technological advancement over time, I think your world needs an explanation for that. Even the period that used to be called "the dark ages" had significant technological and scientific advances.
I'm afraid you've rather missed my point. What good is the three-field system to a non-agricultural society? What use is the stirrup to a society without horses? And why would a printing press be needed by a society that relies primarily on some variety non-written communication? Any given problem typically has multiple solutions, and different societies with different values will arrive at different answers. And that's assuming they even have the same problems and questions as our Western societies do, which they might not. All I'm saying is, this is fantasy. We can think outside the box. Cultures will change over time, there's no doubt about that. But they don't have to change in the same ways that Europeans, or any Earth culture for that matter, did. Especially since magic is a thing and can make a multitude of technologies unnecessary. Would a race of eidetic telepaths ever conceive of writing anything down? What use does a race of natural pyrokinetics have for fossil fuels? What if a culture values knowledge, in the abstract, for its own sake rather than for its practical applications? Even your relatively high-technology societies may have completely different technologies than we do. With all the possibilities available in a fantasy universe, I see no reason to fall back on the tropes of Western Europe.
Hi X,
But only one culture in all of Earth's history developed beyond the medieval. All progress throughout the rest of the world is based on them spreading their wings and their technology. So where would we be now if Europe hadn't gone through an industrial revolution? And all that had to happen was for a few discoveries not to happen. If they hadn't happened in that one culture would it be beyond believability that that the medieval state would still be the most advanced technological society on Earth?
Cheers, Greg.