Re: Instances of "advanced" technology in fantasy that stuck out for you?
- From: IwillneverbeaJedi@xxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: 23 Mar 2006 14:36:08 -0800
r.rice@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On 22 Mar 2006 09:43:09 -0800, IwillneverbeaJedi@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
I picked up this DAW book from Peter Morwood in the public library.
The series was called
the Book of Years and this particular book contained the 1st 2 books in
his series - Horse
Lord and Demon Lord. Yeah the main character was essentially an
europeanized samurai
down to the pseudo-Japanese terminology applied to his status and
trappings. One thing
that stuck out to me was one particular weapon that he carried. It was
essentially a revolver
that used spring-action and small steel darts instead of
bullets/gunpowder. It was a weak
weapon with poor but shot very rapidly by the standards of that world
and was quite devastating against unarmoured targets. Other than that
the tech level of that world was your standard Dark Ages/Medieval
fantasy.
Still to me it made an impression, as over the years I've seen a number
of fantasy series
where despite the passage of many millenniums - there's been no
technological progress
even in world settings where sorcery is so rare (reliance on sorcery
often given as a reason
for stunted technological advancement) that even simple advancements
like a better
plow or somewhat less shoddy medical practices (say a jump to East
Asian experiential folk medecine) would be a huge boost.
Outside of that it's usually contemporary setting fantasy that employs
advanced technology
(whether sorcerous or scientifically based) and in those the standard
trope is that sorcery
and its ilk are intrusions upon the world.
So what instances of technology or a particular piece of technology in
fantasy really stuck
out in your mind? Doesn't matter what the medium is.
For me besides the above spring gun
-Nightlands: set so far in the future that the sun has died and all the
evil gods and creatures
it held at bay now rule the world. Humanity is reduced to living in
pyramids that tap into
earth energies that keep the monsters away. Sometimes the humans have
to do expeditions outside of their home and so they don body armor of
an super-strong alloy and wield giant electrically-charged pizza
cutters that are excellent at chopping down mutants while the
energy coursing through them keeps the minor spirits away. The humans
also have access to long-ranged telecommunications and an optical
system that allows them to observe any point on the planet. The main
character mentions that while they had the knowledge to design
long-ranged weaponry, it just wasn't practical. Their pizza cutters
were more than enough for the regular dangers they faced, building a
gun powerful enough to rival their pizza cutters would have been too
bulky and no one weapon they made had any effect on the gods other than
to piss them off.
-Iron Dragon's Daughter: when I was reading the first chapters of the
book and the factory that the kidnapped kids were working in, I thought
that the world would be steam-punk/industrial age. I was surprised
when the Iron Dragon's turned out to be not golems of some sort but
ultra-tech robots armed with laser-guided missiles, autocannons,
and flamethrowers plus certain mental manipulation equipment. The Iron
Dragons weren't
the only items, there was also use of bionic hell-hounds with
artificial teeth strong enough to bite through the armour plating of an
Iron Dragon.
-Mieville's New Crobuzon stories-man where do I begin-genetic
engineering/limb grafting,
A.I (albeit by punch card data), energy weapons, power suits, and of
course steam engines.
Then there were objects of an alien, other-planetary nature such as the
Might Sword. Also
interesting in the stories was that technology wasn't static and would
be further refined
as the stories so far spanned about a decade.
-Books of the New Sun-some of the events were hard to tell whether it
was magical or
brought about by super-science/psionics (the one that stood out to me
was the "wizard"
battle between Severian and that shaman when Severian was travelling
with little Severian). Much of the technology was medieval level but
you had space/time travel, dimensional corridors, robots, genetic
engineering, energy weapons and whatever else you could find in far
future sci-fi.
-Vision of Escaflowne-this animated series certainly had the looks of
fantasy but in a way
it could be purely sci-fi. The various "magical" occurences that
happened in the series was through extremely advanced super-science.
The world setting was what you'd see in a high fantasy- medieval/early
Renaissance tech, dragons, angel-like beings, plenty of princes and
princesses gallavanting around. The low end of the advanced tech
spectrum for that world was anti-gravity, giant power armour and even
the building of a WMD bomb. On the far end, well there was planet
creation, time/space teleportation, probability manipulation, reality
manipulation, psychic technology. While most of the world was either
stagnant in development or just really slow (their power suit
technology acquired by retaining knowledge from a much more advanced
civilization or trading for it), there was one particular culture that
was far more advanced than the rest and pressed hard to further their
progress. The huge factor was that they were led by a very famous
historical scientist/mystic and his scientific council. They only
showed a few instances of a city in their country but it looked like
something out of Blade Runner, mono-rails and hover-cars included.
Um.. and you are classifying these books as "fantasy" for what reason?
From the descriptions, I'd probably put them in soft SF or in that
very muddled middle region where the genres overlap.
Rebecca
Hi Rebecca, the descriptions I gave were about some of the technologies
that have been developed in their world either through scientific basis
or magical application. However I think the fantasy category stands
for them (at least for the most part).
P
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The first book mentioned, The Book of Years-well that spring gun so far
seemed to be the only bit of tech that's more unusual than the typical
swords & chain-mail bit. There's wizards, necromancy and demon
summoning. All the typical high fantasy tropes
The Night Lands would be more dark fantasy. It was either written in
the early 20th century or the late 19th (I can't remember). The main
character is a man of the 19th century who married his distant cousin.
She dies during childbirth (if I remember correctly) and he becomes
despondent, but one day he has a prophetic dream where he and his wife
reincarnate in a future where the sun has become extinguished. This
lets all kinds of foul gods, spirits, mutants and whatnot to rule the
Earth unchallenged. That's that (no secret weapon, no Dark Lord to
trick, or spirited charge by the chosen one). The pyramid where the
main character lives believes they're the last humans alive until one
day they receive a message from another pyramid - the one his wife was
reborn into. Unfortunately the stream of earth power ran out in that
pyramid and so the people there became little more than monster snack,
barring the wife who was rescued by the reincarnated man. Basically
this story would be like a old school romance set in a What If, Cthulu
and all the Lovecraft monsters ever written owned the Earth.
Iron Dragon's Daughter-the main character is a girl exchanged for a
changeling and is a factory slave until she encounters a nihilistic
crippled Iron Dragon. He's pissed at the world and wants to cram his
missiles up the supreme Goddess where the sun don't shine. The story
takes place in Fairyland, with a number of the supernatural trappings
associated but in a high tech Fairyland rather than the usual pastoral
pseudo-Celtic background.
New Crobuzon-there's spellcasting, demon summoning and other
supernatural tropes. Much of the most formidable technology of that
world was derived from that such as the limb grafting, genetic
engineering, AI/Golems and energy weapons. Otherwise, well it took
them 10 years to develop a revolver from black powder muzzle-loading
rifles and even those earlier weapons were still in heavy use as
semi-auto's were unreliable.
Books of the New Sun-this one is iffy as I said. Yeah the vast
majority had some super science/soft SF basis. However when part had a
wizard's duel where the main character almost had his soul stolen by an
evil shaman. Unfortunately for the shaman, the main character had an
artifact that tapped into the time/space warping powers of a White Hole
and wasted him. Besides that event, the main character had to fight
various monsters such as a living darkness that could not be harmed by
energy as well as a salamander that was always flaming. The Steve
Jackson GURPs game company once made a game module for the Books of the
New Sun and listed those especially Iffy events as
magical/supernatural. I assume they got the info from Gene Wolfe
himself but I could be wrong. But yeah all the other "magical" events
were purely science-based.
Vision of Escaflowne-this is probably the most SF of the batch
surprisingly. Essentially the people of Atlantis had in their hubris
at their advanced science not only changed their bodies to resemble
that of angels but had doomed their country and so they made a device
to create the planet Gaia for themselves to escape to. The planet was
shaped by their imagination and so there you got the dragons, animal
people and whatnot. So they fled taking what little tech and knowledge
they could. The Atlanteans scatter and lose the artifact while
fledgling humans tribes/civilizations appear on the scene. They
advance and grow in power until they become dominant while the
remaining descendants of the Atlanteans are seen as an accursed people.
Humans fight amongst themselves after that. Isaac Newton is dying
and on his death finds himself in Gaia where he's whole again. He
encounters one small kingdom that's under threat from bandits and helps
the kingdom drive them off. Made ruler of that country, his
exploration of strange phenomena of Gaia enables an explosive
scientific Renaissance of that country which in time becomes a large
empire. The current area of study for him is destiny and the control
of destiny. Eventually he's successful in peering into possible
futures and discovers that an obstacle to his conquest of destiny is
ancient battlesuit from Atlantis called Escaflowne. Sea Wasp can
describe this series much better than I can and he's the better judge
of what category Escaflowne falls under.
Anyways thanks all for the good comments. Good day
.
- References:
- Instances of "advanced" technology in fantasy that stuck out for you?
- From: IwillneverbeaJedi
- Re: Instances of "advanced" technology in fantasy that stuck out for you?
- From: r . rice
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