599 – Tech Levels

As everyone knows, everywhere in the world had exactly the same technology from 476 to 1453, which can be summed up as a “Medieval Tech Level.” Or, wait, maybe that’s not true at all. And maybe technology doesn’t advance along linear paths like we see in 4X strategy games. So, what even is a tech level, and why are worldbuilders so concerned about them? Fortunately, we have some answers.

Show Notes

• Kardashev Scale
• NASA Tech Level 
• Roman Steam Toy
• Rome Was Not Going to Industrialize 
• Plate Armour 
• The Lies of Lock Lamora 
• Victorian Pharmacy 
• Age of Resistance 
• Ibn Battuta 
• Bret Devereaux 
• History of Literacy
• History of Plumbing
• Dark Shadows
• The Bronze Age Collapse 
• Clacks Towers
• Six of Crows

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Phoebe. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.

[intro music plays]

Welcome to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris.

Oren: And I’m Oren.

Chris: What if instead of being an internet transmission in a cyberpunk dystopia, this podcast was an old-timey radio show?

Oren: [vague Transatlantic accent] Well, golly, I’d say that’d be right swell. Now pay attention and listen to these messages. There’s a new kind of toothpaste that’s barely got any lead in it.

Chris: I did not know that you were so good at imitating an old-timey radio show.

Oren: Well, you see, I’m pretty good at this caricature of early radio time shows. This is not what they actually sounded like. It’s just what people think they sounded like due to the amplification over time. [normal voice] All right, I’m not gonna do that anymore. Just wanted to make that clear.

Chris: Oh, man. So yeah, this time we’re going to discuss tech level, which is already a very artificial concept.

Oren: Yeah, what does that even mean?

Chris: So you mean societies just level up? You know, they reach level 10?

Oren: Yeah, now they have certain technologies.

Chris: I wonder how much of it is just based on the Civ computer game.

Oren: Yeah, just on video games.

Chris: Somebody was playing a lot of Civ, and we got this idea that technology just smoothly levels up.

Oren: And I mean, there have been various sci-fi and not sci-fi tech level related things. NASA uses the term tech level. They mean something completely different by it. To them, that refers to, like, the development of a mission is the tech level, because they need to build new technologies to make the mission work. But then, I forget what it’s called, but there’s that famous scale that is, like, zero, one, and two, and it’s like, okay, those are very broad categories. Like, zero is everything up to the present day. One is being a spacefaring civilization inside your own solar system, and then two is space opera. And it’s like, okay, those are very broad tech levels.

Chris: Yep. Technically, it’s not that technology has to progress in the same way. I mean, some innovations are based on previous innovations. So for instance, if your innovation requires factories and mass production, but there’s been no industrial revolution, how does that work? It’s just really hard to reason through how things would happen if the technology doesn’t evolve in the same way it has on Earth. Somewhere on Earth.

Oren: But when we say tech level, despite how arbitrary it is, it is still a useful term because it sets expectations. If you say medieval tech level, despite how that is a gross oversimplification, it gives certain associations. People know to expect swords and horses and castles and chain mail and farming by hand and, you know, not using any kind of automated machinery, even if that’s not strictly 100% true. And if you say age of sail tech level, people know to expect cannons and tall ships and frilly outfits, things like that, right?

And so this leads us to the big question people are always asking is, does the tech in my setting have to follow historical trends? Like, in the real world, first we had wagons, and then we had the steam engine, and then we had planes. Could it go in a different order? [“I don’t know” vocalization]

Chris: I mean, I think if you decide to do magitech, you might be able to be more flexible if it just works in a completely different way. Like, that list that you said there, while it seems really unlikely we would, because a wagon is so simple and a steam engine took hundreds of years or something, took a really long time to perfect, it seems really unlikely that any culture would end up with a steam engine before they had even created the very simple, humble wagon.

Oren: Technological innovation and advancement is incredibly complicated. It does not follow a straight line, but it does build on itself, right? Like, there are reasons why the Roman Empire was not on the verge of an industrial revolution, despite the fact that they had some steam-powered toys, because all of the other technologies needed to make the steam-powered industrial revolution happen did not exist yet. So those toys were novelties, but they did not have industrial power.

Chris: Yeah. I would love to see somebody who had done a lot of research come up with their idea of if the Industrial Revolution had not happened, how would technology and society continue to progress? Because the Industrial Revolution happened from a very specific synergy of coal and steam engines and mills.

There had to be a positive feedback loop where we needed the engine to take out water so we could mine the coal, and then we need the coal to power the engine, and then we needed some actual use where this could make money. It all had to happen at once, or else it would have never been able to mine and transport the coal, and we would have had nothing to feed the steam engine, or we would have had no use for the steam engine.

And so those things all had to happen at the same time. And so I do find it very interesting. Well, what if those things hadn’t happened? Would we still be in a land-based economy? Like, that’s really interesting, but it is a lot more work and a lot harder, and unless your story is very much focused on that and that is your passion, it’s so much easier to just be like, “Okay, my society is 1600s France or whatever.”

Oren: Yeah. Or roughly equivalent. The thing is, is that the chances are good that if you are a writer, you are probably not also an expert on the development of pre-modern technology, and certainly most of your readers won’t be. So we can argue back and forth forever whether or not a certain thing is realistic. For most writers, the question is really going to be is it believable?

Chris: Yeah. Can you get away with it?

Oren: Right. And maybe you are going to put more constraints on yourself than your readers actually require. Like most readers, for example, are probably not going to know that the classic knightly plate mail armor is a later invention.

It doesn’t correspond with a lot of the other things we think of as medieval. It’s from the 1400s, and so it corresponds with the development of early firearms. And these are still very early ones, right? These aren’t machine guns. But usually in settings that have that kind of knightly plate mail, you don’t usually include matchlocks, even though historically that’s how those things would have developed.

But most people aren’t going to notice that mistake. Now, if you want to be a little more realistic and have early firearms, I don’t think anyone’s gonna be upset at you for doing that. I think that could be cool. But that’s one of those things that you can kind of massage that and no one’s gonna notice.

Chris: Or just if guns would be around already, but guns are absolute pain in stories, you can just delay the development of a gun a little bit. Nobody will notice.

Oren: Yeah. Although it does have to be a little bit, right? You’re gonna get into the Korra problem before too much longer. And I don’t know, maybe no one else noticed this, but to me watching Legend of Korra, one of the issues was like, okay, this technology is clearly all 1920s or more advanced.

It’s weird that there aren’t guns because they have a bunch of things that only would exist for guns. Like, they have fighter planes, but no weapons to put on the fighter planes except for bolas, which, why do you have fighter planes if that’s the case? And the battleships have big turrets with huge gun barrels, and it’s like, okay, the explanation for that is that a firebender is inside the turret shooting fireballs through the tubes. Is that an advantage? Like, does that make the fire better? It doesn’t seem to.

Chris: Yeah. I think most people also don’t notice that it doesn’t make sense to have castles if there is something in the setting that can easily knock down castle walls, like dragons or something. Just ’cause the whole point of castles is a defensive structure, and those walls are not supposed to be easily knocked down or destroyed. If they are like, castles take forever to build, then you just wouldn’t build castles anymore. They’re not worth it if you can’t withstand a siege for years in there or whatever.

Oren: Yeah, or at least they would look very different, right? As has been pointed out very often, at least in terms of military technology, something is not necessarily rendered obsolete because it can be destroyed, but it tends to be rendered obsolete because something else can do its job better.

And in the case of castles, what you would probably see is fortifications that are more similar to what exists now, right? Dragons are weird because, in theory, they can attack with impunity, and there’s not really a whole lot anyone can do about it. So what effect does that have on warfare? I have no idea. That’s weird. That’s a weird thing to think about.

Chris: Yeah. We can talk about, what are the advantages and disadvantages of different eras? What are some things that we might wanna think about as terms of, okay, what do we want for a setting? And what are the different tech levels gonna have? How are they gonna affect that? We talked about weapons. I think weapons is what everybody thinks of first.

Oren: Right. Those have the most obvious effect on an adventure story.

Chris: Right. If you have action scenes, a lot of people know whether they want there to be guns. The answer is no. Okay, yeah. Some people want guns. I mean, if you have early guns, they’re probably a lot easier to deal with than later guns. It’s just once you add guns, it’s so hard to make the fight good. It’s so hard.

Oren: I mean, there are definitely some stories where they were written where the author clearly was writing them with this idea that only makes sense if guns exist, like the Lies of Locke Lamora series, specifically the second one where they do a bunch of ship battles.

They describe stuff in terms that would make sense if these were 16- and 1700s era sailing ships with cannons, but they don’t have cannons.

Chris: ‘Cause they’re doing broadsides?

Oren: Yeah, I mean, they don’t use the word broadside because there’s nothing to broadside. They don’t seem to recognize that what they’re doing now is basically land combat on the water.

Chris: It’s like the fighter planes with bolas all over again.

Oren: Yeah, it’s very similar to that. Or a lot of stories will have catapults instead of cannons, and it’s like, all right, well, that’ll work as long as nobody in your audience knows how a catapult works, right? Then you might have some problems.

Chris: So a lot of people know if they wanna use a sword. I can definitely understand that if you’re doing vehicle fights, and vehicles normally have guns on them, and that’s how they fight, why it would mess with things if you did not have guns.

Oren: Yeah, it just gets weird, right?

Chris: But at a smaller scale fight scene with individual people, it is just hard to make gun fights interesting and good and last any amount of time without people being really bad at aiming.

Oren: I mean, it does put a little bit of a damper on if you wanna have exciting sword fights, you first have to explain what happens to everyone’s pistols.

Chris; Obviously, there’s weapons, but not every story has all of those fights. Healing medicine, this can also matter because do you want people to get injured, and then how well are they gonna get patched up again? Because before germ theory, doctors were not very helpful.

Oren: Yeah, I mean, most stories that I have read do not have anything period appropriate, to the extent that that term applies to a fantasy world, medicine. They just don’t because if you followed the kind of medicine that would correspond with whatever other types of technology you seem to have, that’s gonna be both really unhelpful a lot of the times and also kind of tragically comic.

A lot of pre-modern medical treatments were, to our eyes, just ridiculous. And of course, people back then had reasons for doing those things. I’m not saying people in the past were stupid, but they did have very limited understandings of things that we, even now, people who aren’t doctors, have a general understanding of, you know, unless you’re an anti-vaxxer. Then who knows?

Chris: It’s true. Like, I mean, this is also if you do have a fantasy story, this is where magic comes in helpful. Can you make the magic do the healing, please? I don’t want my doctor to come in and start bloodletting or something.

Oren: Yeah, I mean, it takes a very specific kind of story for that to work.

Chris: Or just, man, we watched this show talking about Victorian pharmaceuticals—

Oren: Oof.

Chris: —and they’re all laxatives. All of them. ‘Cause that’s how you get the placebo effect because this medicine was almost all completely ineffective. To convince people it worked, it had to do something, and so generally they were laxatives.

Oren: Yeah, I mean, it does do something. You could say it had an effect.

Chris: Man. Okay, so other ones. Transportation has a huge effect on the story. Do you want traveling to be challenging? This can be an issue if your characters fly, too. I still remember in The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance how we have a bunch of, the characters have wings, and then we’re like, “Oh, look, this big barrier. How will we cross it?” It’s like, well, characters have wings. Maybe we could fly across the barrier.

Oren: Yeah, I think we can figure it out. You know, we’ll get there.

Chris: Think we can do that?

Oren: Yeah, we’ll get there eventually.

Chris: The other thing is that transportation used to take tons of time, right? If we want a character that is seriously globe-trotting and going to lots of places, and it’s just like, in this story, the character is gonna collect the five jewels in the five different corners of the world. This world is shaped like a star, apparently.

Oren: Sure.

Chris: And we don’t really want to be like, “Okay, now I’m gonna summarize the year the character spent traveling to the next corner of the world,” then maybe we want transportation that’s a little faster.

Oren: Yeah. It just takes forever to get anywhere, and it’s really hard. I mean, you can look at the casualty reports for a lot of these early long-distance expeditions that we have records for, whether those are European sailing expeditions or the various travels of Ibn Battuta, who just walked everywhere. And a lot of people died on those journeys, too, ’cause they were really grueling and hard. If you wanna get into the deeper world building, well, first just go read Bret Devereaux’s blog. Just power read it, and that’ll teach you a lot.

Chris: Admittedly, I do wish he had a TL;DR. I’m never going to ask an LLM to summarize his work ever, but I do kind of want the CliffsNotes sometimes. Because he’s like, “Okay, to answer this question, we’re gonna do all of this math.” And it’s like, okay, I trust you to do the math. How about you just do the math and tell me your results? Do I have to read about your entire mathematical equation and all the factors that got into it? Can I just—give me what’s a reasonable answer. But no, he has tons of unique, valuable information. His specialty is the Ancient Greek and Roman period, the Mediterranean, but he’ll also talk about other periods.

Oren: You can get really deep into this if you want to, right. You can think about, okay, does the farming technology exist to support the size of city that I want? And in most cases, most of your readers are not gonna ask that question, and as long as you aren’t super specific about how the farms work, even people who know the answer are probably not gonna ask. But if yo