"Why I Hate Technologically-Static Fantasy" now up on Fantastic Worlds
"Why I Hate Technologically-Static Fantasy"
© 2014
by
Jordan S. Bassior
TV Tropes is a lovely site, in part because it has terms for almost everything one encounters in fiction. One such term is "Medieval Stasis," which it defines as being
a situation in which, as far as the technological, cultural, and sociopolitical level are concerned, thousands of years pass as if they were minutes.
This describes much fantasy fiction. Whatever technologies they had a couple thousand years ago, they have now: this and no more. Whatever cultures existed then, with whatever artistic, literary and musical developments, are pretty much what they have now, with perhaps the specific elements having changed in a non-progressive fashion (some being forgotten and new ones devised). Whatever social and political systems existed then are what exist now, only the personnel having changed.
Such a situation is not characteristic of actual human history. While it is true that technological change was very slow before the invention of agriculture and the consequent appearance of towns containing many thousands of people who could easily exchange ideas, once the first towns did appear (no more than around 10 thousand years ago) human technology began to advance quite rapidly on milllennial timescales (if that doesn't sound like much, consider that during the preceding Paleolithic, human tool kits barely changed from millennium to millenium -- more like what one encounters in Medieval Stasis fantasy).
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Read the whole essay on Fantastic Worlds.
Comments are welcome, here or there.