Can pick and choose any popular fantasy or non popular fantasy. Song of Ice and Fire? They go 7000+ years. Lord of the rings, thousands of years.
It seems very common to have a medieval setting that never advances even though they should.
It always feels weird to hear people talk about things literal thousands of years ago..and its the same exact kind of setting as the current day..never changing.
Why is this so popular.
by Rydisx
9 Comments
I look at Star Trek and other Sci Fi movies/shows/books, they advance technology so far and move forward, why not do the converse?
Take Warhammer 40K, technology advanced so far and allowed for great improvements, fast forward a couple millennia and they’ve reverted to slightly more advanced than modern day. It’s a choice and I think it’s fun to see different angles.
Look up the word fantasy.
This is the thing I hate the most about most fantasy/sci fi. They all seem so completely reflective of the culture at that time – not the future, not a magical realm. And most sci-fi seems horribly dated just a few decades later.
Because one of the things about pre-modern times, you really could have centuries pass without significant technological advances. Alexander the Great and his arm vs. Henry the 8th and his army (divided by about 2,000 years) and I doubt you’d find many historians/military scholars who would place a bet on Henry the 8th to win. So one of the tropes in fantasy is that those kinds of settings can just… linger… in a steady state forever.
When you want to write a book or a series, you have a genre you want to settle. If you want to write sword and shield fantasy, you can’t have your people develop muskets. There’s a way to do it right (constant warring has killed off generations of men, limiting scientific advancements; a world-spanning civilization died off and the world has entered a dark age).
In sci Fi it’s different, as I believe there’s honestly a place where the advancements taper off. You have wormhole/hyperspace/instant travel anywhere in the universe, zero point energy for everyone, and have fixed the scarcity of resources problem, where do you go now?
because they’re written by [idealists](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism) with no understanding of social, economic, or technological forces, the pressures of nature that drive innovation, how knowledge is gathered and how technology is spread (or isn’t).
But excusing them with mere ignorance would be letting them off too easy: they’re people who actively want to freeze their world into a static snow-globe that cannot change. It’s their safe place, after all. That’s the problem: the emotional attachment, and the unease that their safe space could, under the right circumstances, develop into something similar enough to the world we currently have.
It’s why so many fantasy “aesthetes” have a violent allergic reaction to sci-fi-coded, technological things like guns or psionics getting into their “pure” fantasy aesthetic.
It’s curated. It’s curated by romantics who idealize a past and want to get away from the present. Tolkien is a great example. He really lamented the vanishing of the old world as capitalism and industrialization overtook it. Reminder that he’s lauded by conservatives as an [anarcho-monarchist](https://ordinary-times.com/2010/11/12/tolkiens-anarcho-monarchism/).
>Song of Ice and Fire? They go 7000+ years.
Literally the bronze age was about 4000 years after the stone age. In a stable age.
Lord of the Rings? They legit are in the Iron age… the age of Man? That’s almost the point
You’d like the Stormlight archive. Over the books technology and new uses for magic develops in interesting ways!
(It also explains why ancient civilization has better technology and why they lost it)
It actually was the norm for most of history