"Why I Hate Technologically-Static Fantasy" now up on Fantastic Worlds

[jordan179]

"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,

Comments

[fenchurche]

Have you read the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson, yet? Really good fantasy with a very intricate magic system set in a medieval type setting... and he's started a sequel series (so far, only Alloy of Law is out) set on the same world a few hundred years in the future when things are a bit more on par with the 1800s as far as technology (in fact, it's pretty much steampunk set in his own universe). From what I understand, he's got other stories in mind that will be set in later eras too.

Somewhere there's an interview with Sanderson talking about just the sort of stagnation you are... and how it always annoyed him that authors would come back to their worlds hundreds or even thousands of years later and everything would be exactly the same.

[jordan179]

I have not yet read the Mistborn series, but I have heard of it, and Brandon Sanderson. And yes, I agree with him -- if nothing changes from century to century, in a culture which has cities and writing, there's something strange going on. Strange and sinister: such stasis is implausible as merely the way things happened to develop, it pretty much has to be imposed from the outside. And no race should be denied its chance at greatness.

[jordan179]

Here's my emotional take on progress, as expressed by Princess Luna Selene Noctis of Equestria, in her occasional bouts of sanity during her long possession by the Nightmare, from Nightmares Are TragicBeneath her the Earth slowly changed. She saw the old castle swallowed by the primal dark forest. One by one, the ancient fortresses of the noble families crumbled into ruins: new mansions sprawled, their designs dictated now by display and luxury, rather than the iron demands of feudal war. She saw the new city, by the palace on the mountain, grow. Forests fell, farms spread across the land, roads snaked between the cities. Traffic moved by wagons on the roads, by canal barges and river boats and sea shipping on the water. There was a new town south and then another one north of the old castle, and the forest fell back on its heart. Here and there, outside the new towns, smokestacks began to climb into the air. Palls of dirty black smoke coughed forth, like a foal’s lusty birth-cry

[kalance]

The thing that always bugged me about Mistborn's magic system was the use of steel. Steel is essentially iron with carbon mixed in it; and the author specifically states numerous times that "burning" metals with non-metal contamination causes severe adverse reactions.

Everything else I was willing t buy, but that always bothered me...

[jordan179]

The reason for it is that the writers are trying -- often secondhand by way of Tolkien -- to reproduce the world of myths and fairy tales. That world tends to be static because at the time they were composed, technological progress was sufficiently slow that its existence, and benefits, were not generally appreciated. Note that technological progress was in fact happening -- it just wasn't being noticed or if it was being noticed was actually being seen as a bad thing -- "modern laziness."

Tolkien explicitly disliked technological progress, though he (inconsistently) liked many of its fruits. So Tolkien tended to write a technologically-static world, and sometimes a Schizo Tech one (the Numenoreans, for instance, were occasionally said to have steam powered vehicles and ranged weapons capable of great destruction, while still remaining a Sword and Sorcery kind of civilization).

Tolkien used various devices to avoid the Dung Ages implications of technological stasis. He particularly gave all his viewpoint cultures (the Hobbits,

[kalance]

To an extent, you can see similar situations and perceptions in the modern world.

Blow guns were developed in the Pacific Rim area (SE Asia, Central/South America, etc) many centuries ago; but have continued to live on in even modern cultures. If only as sporting novelties. Even so, seeing a group using blowguns competitively wouldn't be very off-putting even in the most modern societies.

Conversely, those same people would perhaps be very dismissive of an Amazonian tribesman who whipped up an herbal tea to treat an illness. Even though it is very likely that the herbs contained in that tea would be the exact same plants whose extracts that we use to make our modern medications

[honorh]

This is why I've come to prefer urban fantasy, such as The Dresden Files, to sword-and-sorcery. To my way of thinking, it's more interesting to imagine how fantasy elements would interact with contemporary society. I also love Discworld because it specifically averts Medieval Stasis. It begins there, but technology such as the printing press, semaphore communication and even steam is gaining ground.

[akilika]

It's one of the things I initially really liked about the Anita Blake series, that it had some pretty cool thinking about the legal and cultural implications of fantastic things being real (although only recently believed to be so, which seems like kind of a cheat)... at the time I dropped it, it kind of seemed like it was done particularly exploring that, though. ^^;

[marycatelli]

Have you ever read Operation Chaos or Magic, Inc.? I think the Magitek worlds show it even better -- and much more plausibly. The excuses they fudge up for the magic's not being obvious are obviously ad hoc after-the-fact rationalizations, not reasons.

Except in L. Jagi Lamplighter's Prospero Lost, Prospero In Hell, and Prospero Regain. Where the order in charge of suppressing magic is not hereditary but recruited, and the reason they do it is to push people toward solving their own problems, rather than worshiping -- things best left unworshiped. But that's a rare bird.

[oronoda]

Jordan, stop giving me ideas. I already have my Welsh Princes story and my Urban Fantasy set in the Middle East to work on. D:

[marycatelli]

You do have to remember that oral history is unreliable after a century -- at most 150 years, if you have trained bards and the like. So people don't notice changes.

[jordan179]

Also the epics, unless they are really detailed like the Iliad, don't give crucial information. For instance, if an epic talks of someone "slaying with a sword," of course when it was composed everyone knew the poet meant a long-hafted bronze sword, and when it was written down, everyone knew that serious slaying was done with a short-hafted iron sword, and when we got the medieval version, everyone knew that the slayer was on horseback and wearing chainmail. So it's easy for people to assume that technology has remained static, or even gone downhill.

[kalance]

[marycatelli]

Some medieval illustrations of "Mars in his chariot" are quite -- interesting.