prokopetz:

Random thought: I suspect the reason that most nerds are terrible at fantasy worldbuilding – and I’m absolutely including myself in this assessment – is that we have a tendency to impute agency to technology.

That is, when we look at historical examples of societal change or upheaval that are accompanied by a technological paradigm shift, we tend to analyse that upheaval as an obvious and inevitable consequence of that technology; the social and economic milieu surrounding the event is considered, if not irrelevant, then at least of secondary importance.

It’s like we’ve recognised the inadequacies of the Great Man theory of history, but rather than adopting a substantively different approach, we’ve simply subtracted the Great Man, resulting in a historiography in which new technologies spring fully formed from the aether and work their will upon the world’s stage, with no acknowledgment that technological paradigm shifts are at least as much products of the material conditions of their development as they are drivers of those conditions.

Then we turn around and attempt to imagine a fantastical world by asking a series of questions of the form “how would this particular magical ‘technology’ change society?“, when we should equally be asking: “what sort of society would develop this kind of magic in the first place?“