Can Technology Evolve in a Fantasy World?

If the only reason the dragons are a threat is because NO ONE ever thought of new tactics or weapons but SWORDS can kill them it's no longer a threat it's a group of mentally challenger cosplayers fighting big lizards. Again, FF7, ATLA, Warhammer Fantasy...not a huge stretch.

 

Do you feel traditional fantasy stands out in this respect compared to other genres - like post apocalyptic fiction, gunslinging westerns, zombie horror, or modern romantic comedies?

 

@Bone2pick
Post Apocalyptic fan here, but there is no real "standard" for PostApoc stories. Mad Max, Waterworld and Mortal Engines are ALL PostApoc (and all fantastic btw) but so different it's impossible to list al the differences. Likewise I could list a dozen different zombie apocalypse stories with WILDLY different themes and settings (compare I Am Legend to World War Z) and romcoms and westerns are usually set in the real world and so bound by genuine laws and physics.

Even then, I could list a romcom that turned into a GHOST MOVIE halfway through and westerns set in steampunk futures.

So yeah, imo, fantasy is kinda strange in how "samey" it's become.

 

The fantasy genre was, originally, a response to the early twentieth's centuries social and economic issues. Tolkien hated industry, doubly so industrialised warfare( after having fought in WW1), and then Robert E Howard, authour of the Conan series, spent his youth travelling from town to town during the oil bust, watching as various industries started to collapse under their own weight. After that you had the cold war, where the western world was rather anxious about being wiped out in nuclear bombs, resulting in more lingering issues about technology. A world where none of this took place was appealing both to conservatives, who could take hold of the social norms presented in the works, and with more liberal groups like hippies, who wanted rid of a lot of industry and technology.

However, it also worth noting that Tolkien's world is very much intended to be our own, as was Howard's. Neither of these worlds were actually in medieval stasis.

Guess who's doing their dissertation on this subject.

 

My tentative theory for ASoIaF would be that the underlying plot requires a broad history--enough time to get fuzzy about the threat in the North, enough time for a specific creature to deteriorate across many generations, etc. So he needs to go far into the past. And he wants medieval technology in the present. Hence: Stasis. That is, that's the author's reason for wanting it. It doesn't make it plausible.

Now, there is "winter". And the Little Ice Age knocked Europe around for about five hundred years. So one could argue that all those winters resulted in a history of development, followed by collapse, repeatedly. The little multi-year winters could just be the small part of the cycle; there could be multi-century winters. But that's not the vibe of the books--as I think you've pointed out, they don't include a history of regular mass starvation. They don't have everyone, during the summers, focusing on pilling up long-storage food.

And that doesn't explain other books, of course.

 

It's worth pointing out that the only tales that date back that far are about hugely momentous events (the First Men arriving in Westeros, war with the Children of the Forest, the coming of the Others and the Long Night, their defeat and the erection of the Wall). It makes sense that stories about them would persist over millennia.

It's not a perfect comparison, but there are Native American legends that seem to chronicle their arrival in the Americas, though in pretty figurative language. That was, what, 8,000+ years ago?

For another example of the momentous event angle, we can look at the Great Flood narrative. The Epic of Gilgamesh--which is around 4100 years old--contains a version of that story that is almost identical to later Hebrew accounts. It's within the realm of possibility that this is a common memory of an earlier catastrophic event. The Black Sea deluge hypothesis or an asteroid impact in the Indian Ocean are leading theories on what it's referencing.

I also doubt that we're supposed to take the current tales as told by the bards at one hundred percent face value. There's implications to this effect in the books themselves, and it's all but outright stated in in-universe texts like a World of Ice and Fire. The latter mentions that the raising of the wall is sometimes dated to 6000 years ago, other times 8000. It also notes that some bards tell of a figure from the Age of Heroes being a member of the Kingsguard, even though that institution wouldn't exist until the Targaryens came along millennia later. So the bards might get the broad strokes right (the First Men crossed a land bridge and fought the Children of the Forest, the Others exist, etc.) but they get the details hopelessly wrong.

There's also definitely not technological stasis in ASOIAF. The First Men used stone and later bronze tools and had wooden hill forts; their Wildling descendants still do. The Andals learned iron working and brought it with them to Westeros. "Modern" Westerosi use steel tools and have stone fortifications. There's progress, even if it's slower than our own. And that is probably thanks to their screwed up seasons.

 

@X Equestris Do you imagine the average fan of ASoIaF needs/needed to observe technological progress throughout the history of Westeros in order to enjoy and immerse themselves in said series? Because I don't suspect so.

 

I really like the term "medieval stasis." That's perfect.

Your fantasy world has its own rules. Of course, there are certain conventions when it comes to specific genres or subgenres. I believe most readers look for certain elements and to bring something new requires the audience to take a chance. And new [sub]genres pop up all the time. We have sword and sorcery, high fantasy, grimdark, and more. I would say anything goes, but if you're looking to publish you may want to consider genre as certain publishers are looking for a certain types of fantasy/science fiction that fit their "brand," or fit in with the other stories they publish.

I see no reason otherwise that technology couldn't evolve over time in a fantasy series. That's a cool idea. It follows the same train of thought as an "It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia" creator, Rob McElhenney. He said something along the lines of "why doesn't a character's appearance change over the course of each season. If you watch the show, you will see the character he plays, Mac, cultivates mass (i.e. gets fat) at one point. The actor literally put on weight; no fake fat whatsoever. That goes against the typical show where a character's physical description/appearance is static throughout the course of the show. Most shows don't even address the apparent change in an actor's age over the course of a 10 year show. Going along the lines of the "medieval statis" concept, it's like creators/writers are not only trying to please publishers and include the elements of exisiting genre conventions but also preserve what works rather than take risks. So why can't a novel or short story series evolve over time in non-traditional ways? I love it! Great topic to think about!

 

I don't know. I think the fairytale/folktale 'gene' in us goes back a lot further than any of these others, and maybe deeper in our cultural psyche. Maybe to the extent that we kind of forget we have it. They feel closer to mythology than to entertainment. Stories that re-state reasons for why the universe does what it does? Without worrying about believability. That sounds contradictory, but not if you think of folktales as parables, rather than coherent scenarios that could almost be real. We KNEW they weren't real. That's why we called them 'fairy tales.' They didn't make sense, but that didn't matter. It's as if that wasn't what they were meant to do.

There's something about a medieval world linked to fantasy stories that has been around in western culture a long time, and we tend to feel comfortable there. I know one of the things that sucked me straight into Tolkien was the utter familiarity of the setting. I read this back in the 1960s, when it was just gaining popularity in the USA. It was hugely unique at the time (hard to believe now!) There was nothing 'like' to compare it to in the world of books I'd read ...except the fairy/folktales of my youth. Of course it was derivative of Norse sagas, etc, as well as Shires ...but there you go. Norse sagas had much of the same things going on. Medieval trappings. Swords and sorcery, primitive dwellings in darkly wooded areas, chosen 'ones,' etc.

I don't do zombies at all. For me, as a trope, these stories leave me untouched. I'm 69 years old, and don't remember zombie stories being around at all when I was young. I think the first I'd heard of one was the movie Night of the Living Dead. Which I never saw, by the way.

Apocalyptic fiction is interesting, but there is often a return to a medieval-style environment, isn't there? One touched with the remembrance of something 'other,' but still quite primitive. Most apocalyptic fiction is about 'starting from scratch.' So 'scratch' is where we are.

Gunslinging westerns are an interesting format to study, and in fact I was just reading about how they developed only last week in David Dary's non-fiction history about 500 years of raising cattle in the New World, called Cowboy Culture. Gunslinging Westerns developed as a reaction to the ending of the 'real west' as a frontier, and turning it into a myth that was instantly popular with people who had never been there. The gunslinging Western book largely grew out of fascination for Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show which was touring the country at the end of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th.

Authors like Ned Buntline, Zane Gray, Owen Wister, and later Max Brand etc took the essence of these shows and produced a formula from it that people enjoyed reading. That formula carried on into the days of movies and TV shows, and has become embedded in the collective mindset as 'the old west,' when, in fact, it only touched on certain aspects of reality, and made the rest up—in the fashion of the day—into romantic stories of derring-do. These stories are only just over a hundred years old, at most. While they have become immensely popular, I don't think they're quite as much a part of our cultural DNA as the fairy/folktale is.

Westerns were created almost overnight, to satisfy the reading public. These were not stories told in halls, huts and around winter campfires for generations by people who didn't know exactly where the stories came from. The thing about most fairy/folktales is that nobody knows who wrote them. They are 'traditional' and collected by various people like the Grimm brothers. The brothers Grimm collected the tales. They didn't write them.

Romantic comedies? No, I don't see these as being quite as visceral or traditional either. They're pretty much a product of the movie/TV age, aren't they? A few that could possibly be counted as these are traceable back to Shakespeare and earlier, but again, they seem to have be created for public entertainment. I don't think they are the same thing as mythology, which folk/fairytales seem to stem from. ('Why the Sea is Salt,' etc.)

Interesting to think about, actually. What is the basis of 'story?' When did stories start? And why?

 

Like you, I am thoroughly done with zombie books/films... but I found an interesting twist to get them into my historical fiction. Since I employ some gothic supernaturalism in my WIP, and the undead are certainly welcomed guests, I decided that the convent of nuns in my story are caretakers of a leper colony. Lepers, especially in 1792, with little that could be done for them, are quite suitable as zombies (leastwise at first blush)... there's also something inherently biblical about lepers and it shows these nuns as true followers of Christ. Of course, these lepers turn out to be common folk who were just unlucky enough to contract a horrible disease. In the end, they risk their lives to help the protagonists get on with their adventure.

 

Nope, but it sure helps make it seem a little more realistic.

 

I think this is probably right. I'd add that, in a lot of fantasy, if the author allowed technology to advance at a realistic rate, they might run the risk of making their magic (the fantasy element) redundant. Silly example, but if they had i-phones in Gondor, Sauron would perhaps have found it more efficient to bend Denethor to his will with a targeted ad-campaign, rather than having spent so much time communicating with him via the palantir stone.

 

@jannert Interesting reply. It wasn't what I expected, but I enjoyed it all the same. You appear to have a solid understanding of the origins of genre fiction. So, kudos for that.

This comment, specifically, is what I hoped you'd clarify. Do you believe/feel fantasy is more "samey-samey" than other genres?

 

No, not at all. But it makes me wonder WHY it's often so samey-samey. Considering fantasy is supposed to be the one genre where a writer can do anything they want with anything they want. Any subject, any plot, any setting, any kind of characters. Yet what we get so often is a Tolkien-GRR Martin-influenced saga. (Elves, orcs, chosen ones, quests, dragons, magic talismans, good people/evil demons/witches/warlocks/trolls, etc.)

There are some excellent medieval fantasy sagas out there, so this isn't any kind of criticism. I enjoy them myself, and used to imagine them myself. But it is odd, when you think about it—odd that so many of our writers' imaginations seem to take this turn, even when they COULD imagine anything they want to.

That's the issue I was trying to address ...and I'm wondering if that's because so much of what we imagine stems from our culture's background of folk/fairytale stories. Which are also quite predictible, and often take place in a quasi-medieval setting. We're comfortable with that, it appears. Fantasy writers usually try to make more complex stories and adultify them ...but they seem to come from the same base as our folk mythology does.

 

I actually have perhaps a more on-point question.

Instead of "defending" the seeming medieval/ancient times stasis of fantasy, lets turn that question around: WHY SHOULD it be this way, like what about medieval times or ancient Rome or whatever makes it so seemingly "appealing"? Why can't the dragons on the hilltop be fought with nukes, why can't we have knights in power armor like Master Chief or towering castles sitting at the heart of Mega-City One? Like what precisely about this "medieval stasis" makes it so much more "fantasy" as a setting as opposed to the actual fantasy elements? How is, say, Twilight any less fantasy than LOTR because it's set in modern times, or how is Warhammer FANTASY less of a fantasy story because it has cyborgs, giant robots and machine guns despite the fact it also has dragons, dwarves and elves ripped straight from the headlights of Tolkien? How is that in any respect less fanciful than, say, the Ultimate Marvel series from back in the olden days where they had interdimensional gods, time travel and LITERAL magic but wasn't set in the Viking Age and never advances past that?

WHY make it stuck in a set era with NO advancement whatsoever beyond that? Why is that considered "more fanciful" or "more escapist", when by all definitions that makes it more stock, more samey, more staid than other types of fantasy-driven fiction like Superhero Fiction or, hell, Science-Fantasy like Star Wars?

 

Or how about this:

Wild Guns, a video game series set in a Steampunk 19th century, with steam-powered interstellar travel, cyborg gunslingers and dogs with steam-powered robot Familiars...how is THAT any less fanciful or escapist than, say, Game of Thrones?

 

@jannert
My best guess? Honestly, like 98% of fantasy stories are ripping off Dungeons and Dragons, and 98% of D&D was ripping off Tolkien. I know that seems...insulting or combative but that's your answer. It seems samey and staid because it is, because with a few exceptions like, say, Game of Thrones most of these stories are people saying "Look mommy I read Lord of the Rings once!" when in actuality what they mean is they played D&D with their friends once, years ago, in High School and in between Mountain Dew chugs and chatting about how they want to screw Britney Spears...Christ I miss the 90s...

Anyway where was I? Oh yeah, it's people whose whole exposure to fantasy is either Dungeons and Dragons, the Lord of the Rings, or some combination thereof. So it all looks the same because it's all become the same.

 

I don't see it as odd. That's the nature of genre fiction—serving an audience's (and often the writer's) expectations. Most of us acquire a taste for certain familiar stories: zombie horror, gunslinging westerns, modern romantic comedies, sports movies, and yes, epic medieval fantasy. Swords, dragons, castles, and wizards. We continue to return to those tropes and era because we love them.

Is the fantasy genre more than the medieval era and Tolkien's influence? It undeniably is. But I'm not surprised that classic brand of fantasy is more popular than the others. It's a testament to its broad appeal imo.

 

A "realistic" rate of technological advance, taking all of human history into account, actually would be very slow. The breakneck profit-driven progress of the last century is very much an anomaly in historical terms--yes, there were new inventions and new ways of doing things during the classical, medieval and prehistoric eras, but they were slow to start and slow to spread. There were centuries where things were, at least from the point of view of the average working-class person, pretty much the same as they had been for their grandparents. Yes, a lot of the stuff seems obvious NOW, because we're standing on the shoulders of several hundred other generations and can skip the "error" part of centuries of trial and error.

Whenever this topic comes up, I think of a player in an old D&D game I ran, who was insistent that his (average intelligence, no skill points in craft skills) character could invent gunpowder because "you just stick three common ingredients together, it's so obvious!" and then fast-forward through a few centuries of firearms development to get himself a revolver.

 

@Bone2pick
There is a difference between matching up to your audience's expectations and never evolving as a genre, a slum modern High Fantasy is approaching.

@Azuresun
Well, magic can do even crazier stuff but they rarely if ever do. Again they have time travel, dimensional travel and flight but NEVER use it for ANYTHING.

 

I was thinking earlier about a fantasy series I just finished re-reading that isn't the Tolkienesque variety. That's Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials fantasy saga. It has some really unique ideas and is hard to pigeonhole. Some aspects of it are quite Steampunky, and there is a certain feel to it that occasionally seems like the stuff of legend. While it's been thought of as a children's story, I found it extremely adult ...although the main character is a child. There are all sorts of themes in it, including classic ones. And it's set in a world we almost recognise. It's extremely inventive, while managing to remain 'familiar,' and I enjoyed every word of it.

 

Azuresun, you make some good points - I agree with most of it. I was only trying to say that writers might tend to eschew technological advancement (in favour of medieval stasis) in their stories simply to avoid the issue of new technology interfering with their chosen fantasy element. I used the silly example because it was the first thing that sprung to mind.

There's been some good discussion about ASoIaF on the thread. Do you think that in 8000+ years (taking the setbacks of long winters into account) gunpowder would be an unrealistic advancement for a society like the one in Westeros? I don't (although I'm fine with it not being there). Can you imagine how much it would affect the use of magic in the stories? How would the 'wight army' fare against cannon, or even rudimentary fire-lances? Would dragons still be able to dominate a battlefield to such a degree? Would the Dothraki be formidable at all? I realise all these questions could be argued, but since the author decided not to allow his society the use of gun-powder, we don't have to and his dragon's can fly pretty much unchallenged.

As I was writing that, I had another thought. Do you think - if necessity is the mother of invention - that a society with magic would advance their technology at a comparable rate to our own when in so many fantasy stories magic caters to a lot societies needs? Is it reasonable in some cases to attribute the stasis to magic having usurped the need for technology?

 

Sure technology can advance in anything, but evolve? Well
that depends on whether it is sentient or not. For it to evolve
means that it was created by means of nature and not a person
or other creature of similar intellect. But in Fantasy you can
totally have a grill slowly evolve into a toaster, so long as it
changes like a flesh and blood creature and not aided by any
persons in that process.

Having said all that, have fun.

Interesting questions. Though I thought magic only fit the needs of the user,
not the society at large for the most part. Since it wouldn't be of much use
to someone who can't perform magic to begin with, but may find it useful
to employ someone who can from time to time.

As for you third question, that is complicated. Even in a non-magic advanced
society with incredible tech will only advance as far as the scientific understanding
of the society has, cause there are some laws that simply can't be built around in
a natural sense. Just as well that society could hit a technological stagnation point,
and may not advance beyond their current levels of tech.
However, using magic as a means of manufacture circumvents natural scientific laws
by it's very definition, and so can be virtually limitless. So if you have a society that
can magic up whatever on a whim without the need for a proper craft or tradesman,
why would they bother with any standard of technological advancement? More or less
why would they want to stop using something that seems far superior to that of a more
traditional means of getting the same goods?
Consider the replicators in Star Trek, if the blueprints are in the data bank, then you can
have anything 'magically appear' and you can use it/or consume it. That is why you don't
see a whole lot of people complaining about having to do simple things like making a shirt,
or cooking a meal, when they can just ask for it and it appears. Though given the ability
to ask for whatever they want on a whim, doesn't mean that if they choose to do things
like that the traditional way, that they can't, just that they rarely do.
So think of magic like a replicator with zero limitation beyond that of the users imagination,
and they can choose what they want to do by either using magic or doing it by hand/skill
in a more traditional sense. There would be no need to put any restrictions on it, in that
fashion.

 

In some stories this is definitely true. Also, you could say that an i-phone only directly benefits the user, but - if you take a step back - smart-phone technology has had an impact on society as a whole.

Is it reasonable to expect medical advancement, for example, to stagnate in a fantasy world (rather than advance as it has in our world) where magic users can heal diseases with a wave of the hand? Would we ever see modern medicine (as we would recognise it), or any of the developments between?

I think we're on the same page here.

I appreciate that we can think about magic in this way, but in a lot of fantasy magic does have (quite specific in some cases) limitations and it's not always the case that a wizard can conjure up any item they wish (or that magic users are sorcerers and sorceresses). How do you feel the Star-Trek analogy addresses the medieval-era stasis we see in a lot of fantasy?

Edited to add: Sorry Cave Troll, it occurs to me that your Star-Trek analogy may have been addressing the question in the OP, rather than the stasis question posed later in the thread. If so, ignore my last question.

 

I think stagnation for anything can occur as long as there is a
possibility for improvement upon it. So in a way using magic
that can fix any illness/injury with a hand wave is the final
end, cause how can you improve beyond that point?
So when you think about it, you can't really get a better form
of medical implementation than that. Besides where magic
can exist at the level, then why not make them immortal as
it would not be beyond their abilities to do so if they wished.

As for the real world, it takes time to research and understand
how to fix these things, along with having to deal with the new
bugs that crop up. So we haven't stagnated on that front, but it
takes more time to make advancements due to the fact that in
reality not everything works out 100% of the time. Cause one
cure may work on some, but not on others. Boils down to the
complication of being genetically diverse, and that affects how
each person will respond to a given treatment. Though medical
science would be leaps and bounds farther along, if we only had to
worry about fixing a single shared genetic instead of the many that
we currently have.

Overall I think we will always recognize modern med, for the most part.
It is an ever evolving science, that makes small advances over long periods
of time. Hence why their are no definitive experts, but practitioners. While
it would seem like magic to someone say a few hundred years ago, it is still
on the trial and error side.

See Fantasy has an advantage of being either in a Medieval time period, or actually be
in distant point in the future where things have reverted back to a simpler way of life
after some kind of catastrophic event that has forced us to kinda regress technologically speaking.

I think where I made the comparison between magic and the replicator, is that they
are the ultimate advancement in their own ways. And yes they both have limitations,
though not too many. If information gets destroyed or lost, then they would be severely
limited to what can be remembered. So if you have magic users without any real knowledge
on how to use it, or share that knowledge, then things would go backwards a bit.
On the other end, where you can have whatever you want whenever you want, then they may
not see a need move beyond their current culture or state of living. Though it all falls down to
the rules/laws that govern the magic in a given universe. And I don't think anyone would actually
just let it run amok to the point where they can just pull whatever they want out of thin air,
cause it would make for a kinda simple problem solver for everything that they come up against.
And that would be pretty lame as a story, but in a real world application would be kinda nice.