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 you have a really deep world you wanna construct, that’s something to think about. Things like literacy rates are huge, and those matter a lot to the tech level and vice versa. Like, does the ability to easily copy written records exist? How much does it cost to copy a book? **Chris:** Yeah, that’s the question is, how many people have books? Before there’s much printing, books are gonna be really expensive if you want big libraries and well-read characters. **Oren:** Right. And it’s not even just printing. Printing’s obviously a big one, but the material you make books out of is also really important. If you are writing things down on clay tablets, those are great for archaeologists ’cause they last a long time. But as far as societal record keeping, they have a lot of limitations that you might not have if you have something like, for example, paper, which doesn’t last nearly as long but is much easier to make at scale. And so with paper, that’s going to support a much more literate population. Still not literate to the extent that we have today, not by a long shot, but it will support a much more literate population just because it’s easier to write things down and to make records. **Chris:** Yeah, I mean, I do find it refreshing when writers have characters that actually don’t read or don’t read very well. ‘Cause usually we want all of our characters to read, and honestly, there’s lots of places in the story where for plot reasons you may want them to read a message or read a book or read something. Then it can be hard for us to imagine, okay, how did everything work when people didn’t write, right? It’s like, well, people probably didn’t travel very much either, so they don’t necessarily need as many, like road signs. They’re in their local area and they just know what everything is. But it’s very different, and certainly easier for us if our characters are reading to figure things out. But that’s always kind of interesting when people don’t do that. There’s a lot of things that are, like domestically, like infrastructure, like do we want electricity or do we want plumbing? Without plumbing, there’s chamber pots and people have to go fetch water, go to a well and get huge buckets of water, and then bear the water back— **Oren:** Yeah. **Chris:** —to the house. **Oren:** It should be noted that plumbing is a much older technology than electricity. Indoor plumbing is ancient. Now, it isn’t as capable as what we have now, but the ability to use the bathroom in your house is not new. It just used to be a lot more expensive than it is now. **Chris:** Yeah, I guess the question I would have about plumbing is, ’cause this seems like the kind of thing where it depends on who you are. So if you’re a tenant farmer, you’re a peasant, what are the chances that you have plumbing in comparison to a noble person, who probably \[are] a lot more likely to have plumbing in their house. **Oren:** I mean, if you’re a rural farmer, your chances of having plumbing only start to seriously go up quite recently. That’s a lot of infrastructure to lay out to a remote area. **Chris:** Then there’s electricity. Okay, so there’s this funny thing that I have to mention. So we watch this kind of Gothic soap opera from the ’60s called Dark Shadows, slowly making our way through it, and the vampire character, Barnabas, he decides to move into the family’s old house. And this house was built pre-electricity, so it doesn’t have any wiring, and he decides he wants to leave it that way. He doesn’t want any electricity in his house. So every time there’s a scene in this old house where the vampire lives, there’s just tons and tons of candles everywhere in the scene, just all of these candle holders everywhere. And he has one servant that something horrible happens to, so then he has no servants, and I’m like, “Who is tending the candles?” **Oren:** Yeah, who is lighting all of those candles? **Chris:** Who lights those candles? Who makes sure those candles don’t fall over and set the drapes on fire? Who is blowing the candles out? So many movies, even modern movies too, it’s like every time there’s a romantic candle scene, there’s just a billion candles. It’s like, did the character get a billion candles? We need to see the hour-long scene with the character just lighting candles one after the other to have their romantic date or something, or drink somebody’s blood, or whatever it is. **Oren:** Yeah. These scenes often end with, like, they’re about to kiss, and then no, something happens, and one of them runs off. I need to see that afterwards, that they have to take an hour to pick all the candles back up, right? Of course, if you do have electricity, that’s a pretty clear way that your house can be lit. But if you don’t, there are still many different options for lighting your house. Like, obviously, lighting a house with candles is probably not practical. Candles don’t give off that much light, and if you’re trying to light a large area, a candle is just not gonna do it. And even if you have the money to afford lots of candles, that’s a huge expense. You might be looking at lamps. Lamps are probably more common, and they are gonna burn some kind of oil. And of course, it could be whale oil, that one’s common, but there are many kinds of oil that lamps can burn. To say nothing about the fireplace. That’s gonna be a big source of light, or the stove. And of course, in pre-electricity era, often it’s just gonna be less done after dark, ’cause it’s just harder to produce light. **Chris:** Yep, it’s harder to produce light, so you get up at dawn and you start working, and you’re done working around sunset. Like laundry used to be super time-consuming. Before laundry machines, it used to take up a lot of time and be very labor-intensive. There could be a question of, how much work do you want your characters to be doing? **Oren:** Yeah, how much time do they have to spend doing laundry? That’s an important question. **Chris:** Yeah. **Oren:** Personally, I think we could do with more stories that have a Bronze Age aesthetic. There just aren’t that many of them. And to a certain extent, it’s not that different, because you’re still gonna have mostly melee weapons and bows and arrows, and food is still gonna be grown by hand. But if you’re basing it off of the Bronze Age Mediterranean, you still have these fairly complicated hierarchical states that could support very large populations, which is how they were able to build these giant monuments, because they had mass labor available. And that’s how they’re able to do it without advanced machinery, and that’s one of the reasons why the pyramids are built on such a grand scale, and then we wouldn’t build anything on a similar scale for thousands of years, because the capacity and the desire to do it did not exist. **Chris:** Because the labor was more valuable or scarce? **Oren:** Yeah, and for various reasons, ’cause after the Bronze Age collapse, Egypt doesn’t collapse, but it goes into a period of decline. And so that kind of labor becomes much harder to gather again. And it’s not like… I’m not gonna say that later civilizations couldn’t have done it. Like, I’m not gonna say the Romans couldn’t have built the pyramids if they wanted to. I honestly don’t know. But it’s a combination of, you know, you lose access to that level of labor, but then you also maybe don’t want to anymore because times have changed. There are different things you wanna build. **Chris:** We haven’t talked much about communication. **Oren:** Yeah, that’s another big one. **Chris:** We talked about literacy, but that’s a big one. I have been surprised by how easy adjusting to stories with cell phones in it has gone. I think it’s because as much as it can be inconvenient when your protagonists can always talk to each other with their phones, it also is very convenient sometimes for protagonists to talk to each other with their phones. And also phones are unreliable enough that it’s not usually hard to be like, “Oh, phone’s out of battery. Oh, I have no cell reception.” There’s so many things that can go wrong with them that it just hasn’t really been an issue that much whether or not there are cell phones. I mean, if you want characters to take longer to say things to each other and there to be a lot of miscommunication or missing information in your story, then earlier communication that takes longer or is more unreliable, of course, might be better. But in too many stories it hasn’t made that much of a difference. Mostly if you have protagonists that live far from each other, that’s when it becomes more of an issue. **Oren:** Yeah. The biggest problem with not even cell phones specifically, but that level of technology has had for stories is that it’s just harder for things to disappear. Like, it’s really hard to explain nowadays how you’re not able to find someone unless they’re living in a cave somewhere. If you’re determined, you can find them. You can go to a shady website and pay $50 and get their address. So that’s a bit of an issue. But in terms of characters being able to call 911 for help, it’s like, ah, there are a bunch of different ways to deal with that. I think it’s important to just think about, do you want communication to move faster than the speed of travel? Because for a long time it couldn’t. For a long time communication could move exactly as fast as a person carrying a letter could move. But eventually that changed, right? We developed telegraph lines, and then before that we have the Clacks Towers from Discworld. Those are based on real things. They’re not nearly as capable as the Clacks Towers, but they do have real world equivalents. **Chris:** You know, related to communication and travel and finding things, some stories depend on having some sort of isolated enclave somewhere, some untouched, undiscovered island or what have you. Undiscovered, of course, to the protagonists. We’re always gonna reveal that there’s people living there, so they are discovered. And that kind of thing is, again, just more plausible if transportation and communication are less advanced. **Oren:** Yep, that’s true. All right. Well then, I will simply end this with a plea to not introduce tanks into the middle of what I thought was a mid-1800s tech level setting. Looking at you, Six of Crows. Based on the Grisha TV show, I think maybe it was actually supposed to be closer to World War I level, but even so, the tanks just appear out of nowhere. **Chris:** I mean, Avatar: The Last Airbender also has tanks show up, and that’s one of the first times we see any kind of technology that’s sophisticated. **Oren:** Yeah, that’s a pretty big leap to, “suddenly they have tanks.” Oh, okay. **Chris:** Suddenly they have tanks. **Oren:** All right. Well, with that, we can go ahead and call this episode to a close. **Chris:** So we probably can’t become an old-timey radio show just because Oren can’t use the old-timey radio show voice all the time. But you can help free us from the cyberpunk dystopia by becoming a patron. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. **Oren:** You say that, but now I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then we have Kathy Ferguson. She’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week, folks. \[outro music plays] This has been the Mythcreant podcast. Opening/closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.