Keeping fantasy at medieval levels for millennia

There’s a fundamental imbalance, that I blame entirely on Tolkien since he started it, in fantasy. On one hand, the world has been around for thousands of years without major cataclysms. (I haven’t read the Silmarillion, but the big battle towards the end of the Third Age only barely affects the vast majority of the population of Middle Earth.) On the other hand, technology levels have remained roughly unchanged.

If you want to have a long-lived 10th-14th century-type society, you’ve got some explaining on your hands.

As it happens, I’ve been reading up on this sort of thing recently - I finally picked up Guns, Germs and Steel, and I’m currently reading The Glass Bathyscaphe. And a couple of years ago I plunged my Feng Shui group into 1st century BC Rome, which of course meant working out what they could and couldn’t do with their knowledge of future technology. Charlie was a great help here, incidentally - he reckoned that the two main things they could do were invent black powder, and introduce double-entry book-keeping and limited liability companies. Oh, and zero. All of these things are “ah-ha” type inventions, and don’t require any other prior technology. My favourite factoid on technology is that the Europeans invented the wheelbarrow 1,000 years after the Chinese - just because they didn’t think of it.

So here’s a list of reasons why your society has been around for thousands of years but you haven’t had an industrial revolution (which is normally the cut-off for fantasy).

1. There’s not enough of you. Historically, technological development happens because people can specialise, with only part of the total population being responsible for feeding the whole, which leaves the rest of the population free to do other things. Stopping being nomadic hunter gatherers and instead becoming sedentary farmers is the standard way of specialising, so if you remain nomadic you’re probably not going to develop much in the way of technology. Or there might not be enough of you to develop technologies all by yourself. Unless you trade, of course, which leads to the second point.

2. You’re crippled. You might not have particularly productive soil or domesticable crops / animals. You might be cut off from your neighbours, or live in a climate sufficiently different from them that their seeds and animals just don’t thrive. You might be shunned, or significantly different that cultural cross-pollinisation just doesn’t happen. (This suggests that we’re not talking about a fantasy “empire” as such.)

3. You don’t get it. China developed an ocean-going fleet and discovered Australia, and then the next Emperor decided they didn’t need to know about the barbarians from abroad and nixed all further exploration plans. Similarly, Japan had firearms - indeed, was at one time the leading producer of firearms in the world - and then decided that samurai swords were nobler, and banned guns. All it takes is a powerful enough political or religious will, and technologies can be abandoned and forgotten.

4. Powerful opposition. Pretty much a conspiracy theory these days - see for instance the stories of the 200 mpg carburetor and the 100-year lightbulb. For some reason, powerful interests have organised - as a secret society, of course - to make sure that certain technological advances do not happen. In a world where priests have a monopoly on magical healing, for instance, they would look very askance at the growing murky tradition of “medical science”. (Arguably, if you consider western Christian traditions of miracles, priests would just lay on hands and ask their God to heal the patient, and wouldn’t have any knowledge of how the body actually worked. Anyone trying to understand things like circulation, germ theory and so on would be seeking to circumvent God, and thus be worthy of excommunication, or worse.)

5. Cataclysm: you used to have advanced technology, but something happened and you lost it. Fantasy is full of post-apocalyptic settings where the Old Ones built marvelous, wondrous things that nobody understands these days (and some people may have preserved that technology - the Prince In Waiting / Sword of the Spirits trilogy is a good example of this).

Hmmm. Looks like you’re going to be doing a fair bit of conspiracy stuff here.