While I won't spoil the details too much, a story I'm in the midst of writing at the moment involves a far-future, post-apocalyptic Earth settled largely by primitive societies. How far in the future, you may ask? Well actually, on the order of a million years.
Now I realize such a setting raises an obvious question - why hasn't society managed to evolve, i.e. to industrialize, over such a huge timeframe?
What we are referring to here is a trope commonly used in fiction called 'medieval stasis'. Tvtropes.com has an excellent article covering it here -
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MedievalStasis
In short, it describes the way how societies in fantasy settings, think Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones, tend to change surprisingly little over time. The lack of an industrial revolution, even after thousands of years of stable civilization, is the single most glaring question. Game of Thrones' Westeros, for instance, is said to have a known history going back some 13,000 years, while the world in Lord of the Rings is said to have been created more than 10,000 years previously. The world of Avatar: The Last Airbender is just under 20,000 years old, and Deltora Quest has seen the same monarchy persist for hundreds of years at the series' beginning.
Writers do this for a number of reasons. Like the real-world, to some extent fictional universes generally
should have a history going back some thousands of years. It also adds depth to the story, and can bring about a great sense of awe. The fact that the enemy overlord is holed up in a fortress that has withstood every besieging army for say, ten thousand years, emphasizes just how difficult a job the hero faces.
Now to those who criticize 'medieval stasis' and laugh at how a fantasy world can maintain a pre-industrial level of existence for so many thousands of years, I'd like to point out that medieval stasis is, in fact, the rule of history, not the exception.
'History' as it is understood, is widely agreed to go back some 5,000 years. This definition however is slightly strict. This timeframe, beginning around 3,000BC is widely cited as the start of
recorded history. It refers to a time when humans first developed complex writing systems, and began to actually record noteworthy things about themselves - think ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, which are some of the earliest examples. At around the same time, metal working (particularly of bronze - an alloy of tin and copper) became widespread, and the first large cities (with more than a few thousand people) began to form.
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| The Pyramids - Courtesy of 2,500BC |
Even then however, to say history began a mere 5,000 years ago ignores a lot of archaeological evidence from before that time. While the earliest written records don't start until then, many ruins betray the presence of complex human societies from well before that time. Copper began to be smelted in Europe from around 5,000BC, and as early as 10,000BC cultures in the Middle East started to farm the landscape and domesticate animals, settling in one place instead of living a nomadic lifestyle.
For a specific example - the town of Jericho (now found in the West Bank near the Dead Sea) is believed to have been founded as early as 9,000BC and been inhabited by two or three thousands people at its height. So in essence, for that region's inhabitants, medieval stasis did indeed last some 11,000 years, from the dawn of the neolithic until the 20th century.
Far longer than 'medieval stasis' however, is what we could call 'nomadic stasis'. Modern humans - ones genetically much the same as today, have existed for around 100,000 years, spreading out across the world over tens of thousands of years. The aboriginal cultures in Australia existed in a pre-agricultural state for some fifty thousand years. Certain cultures in Africa and Asia could probably claim periods two or three times that long. Who is to say that, left alone, they might have remained so for another fifty thousand years? Or even a million?
One can go back even further however. The Stone Age in its entirety - referring to the time period over which humans used simple stone tools, stretches back at least 3.4 million years. One should be aware that humanity is not the only intelligent species to have ever existed on Earth as well. While its hard to declare any animals but humans truly 'sentient' in our time, up until a few thousand years ago this was certainly not the case.
'Human' doesn't just refer to Homo Sapiens, but to all members of the genus Homo. There are believed to have been over a dozen different species of humans. All had brains roughly comparable to modern humans (as determined by measurements of cranial capacity) and could theoretically have developed agriculture and eventually had an industrial revolution in turn.
Neanderthals are the most famous example, inhabiting Europe until around 24,000 years ago. Another species - Homo Floresiensis, survived until as little as 12,000 years ago on the island of Flores in Indonesia. The longest lived however would probably be Homo Erectus, which existed between about 1.9 million and 140,000 years ago. Erectus could control fire and make simple stone tools, surely filling any reasonable definition of intelligence, yet even over the course of two million years or more they did not industrialize.
Looking at the other end of the equation, despite thousands of years of civilization it took an incredible mix of circumstance to finally produce an industrial revolution. The country most responsible for this would obviously be England.
Until as recently as 1800, the world had changed little over the past few thousand years. Aside from the settling of the Americas from the 1500s onwards and the gradual adoption of gunpowder weapons from the 1200s, the vast majority of the population lived in the same state of near-starvation that had prevailed since the dawn of the neolithic.
Machines, powered by fossil fuels and other energy sources (such as water, wind or wood) changed all this. They greatly reduced the amount of Labor required to produce food and perform other basic tasks. The effects of this are readily apparent today. Here in the 21st century, one man driving a combine harvester can perform the work of a thousand peasants armed with sticks.
This change freed up millions of people to devote their time to other tasks, such as learning to read and write. Within a few generations most of the population had become literate. Even in developing countries this change is rapidly nearing completion, with 84% of the global population literate as of 2013, up from 63% in 1970. With an ever larger pool of educated humans to draw upon, science has accelerated at breakneck speed.
Looking back at its origins in the 18th century however, early industrial England has a few unique characteristics.
Firstly, there was the real jump-starter of the industrial revolution - the availability of coal. After centuries of using wood as the primary source of fuel, coal began to be mined in readily available deposits, including ones near the surface and the coast so it could be shipped elsewhere.
In mining coal however, the problem of flooding by groundwater occurred. To solve this, pumps were developed to remove the water, but horse-drawn ones could only be of limited use. In the 18th century pumps and other machines running on coal began to be developed, with their use only spreading from there.
A democratic government (following the Glorious Revolution in the late 17th century) and a free market economy were also vital, allowing new ideas to be tested and new inventions developed. Scientists such as Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle made scientific breakthroughs uncensored by church or state. Literacy also spread, reaching 60% among men by 1750. This compares to estimates of 5-20% for other medieval European societies, as well as ancient Greece and Rome.
Britain also had a geographic advantage. Separated from continental Europe by the English Channel, it was relatively safe from invasion, with none successfully occurring after 1688. This reduced the amount the British had to spend on their army, and perhaps the extent of central government control as well. Conversely, it also allowed them to spend more heavily on their navy, with which they eventually dominated the world's oceans. This opened up new trade routes to British business interests, and made the island incredibly wealthy, further allowing investment in new technologies like steam engines.
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| The Richest Country on Earth - circa the 1800s |
This right mix of ingredients did not occur in ancient Greece or Rome, nor in China, India, the Middle East or Central America over thousands of years of great empires rising and falling. One wonders just how rare it really is. Was it a once in a thousand year mix? One in ten thousand maybe? Or more?
As for the story I'm writing I mentioned at the beginning, the background goes a little like this:
Ancient humanity (i.e. - us today) quickly industrializes and begins migrating into space. In the process great damage is done to the Earth's environment, with many species wiped out and trillions of tonnes of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels.
Over some thousands of years this melts the Earth's icecaps, causing sea levels to rise by about 70-80 meters. This swamps many human cities and causes the global climate to return to something resembling the Eocene.
The remaining peoples on Earth generally consist of 'baseline' humans who have rejected technology - think Amish, Luddites or native tribesmen. As the coastal cities drown and most humans migrate into space (and in time the galactic core) those who remain revert to a pre-industrial state, often a nomadic one as well. This state thus prevails for the million-year interval before the story starts. Society is prevented from industrializing by two factors in particular.
- The lack of fossil fuels (which were largely burnt by ancient humanity)
- Strong anti-intellectual religions (based around the destruction of the coastal cities by the last industrial revolution)
In this manner, humanity remains pre-industrial, and in most cases pre-agricultural, for hundreds of thousands of years.
I like this scenario as it creates a mechanism for maintaining medieval stasis more or less indefinitely. Humanity is likely to use up all of the Earth's easily available fossil fuel reserves over the next few centuries. These deposits - coal, oil and natural gas alike, take many millions of years to form.
In short - we likely have only one chance to get off this rock, and one chance only, one I hope we will not screw up.
After that, our descendants will be stuck here, unable to industrialize, or at least develop spaceflight, with mere wood-burning fuels.
More than that, I feel this far-future, post-apocalyptic world creates an ideal setting for many fantasy series. Not only do you have medieval stasis, but surely a rich mythology telling of god-like beings of the past (i.e. - us) along with the ruins of their ancient structures. Any devices from our time that might still be working would also be highly powerful and coveted artifacts - certainly worthy of being described as 'magical'.
Another thing are the long-term effects of us tinkering with our environment, particularly the genes of its species. At some point, someone is bound to try and grant sentience to other animals - apes and dolphins perhaps, or even dogs and cats. We could even try and resurrect (or merely recreate) dinosaurs and other extinct species. In this manner, there's a perfectly rational mechanism by which many fantasy creatures, from dinosaurs to talking cats, could become a reality. The recent reboot of the 'Planet of the Apes' franchise used this mechanism, with scientists accidentally uplifting apes while searching for a cure for Alzheimers disease, leading to this -
When it comes to tales of powerful gods and magicians in the present, furthermore, these could be referring to other factions of far-future humanity who have continued to advance. A casual visit by an interstellar starship could totally transform a medieval world, almost akin to divine intervention.
Anyway, in explaining all this, I'm really leading up to the conclusion that it actually makes much more sense for fantasy worlds to be set in the far
future, rather than the past. Perhaps Sauron's Ring was a mind controlling computer built by an advanced society, before it disappeared? Or the Doom of Valyria was caused by a nuclear war?
In other words - science is more magical than magic ever was.
