On Wed, 8 Jan 2003, Philip Hart wrote: > On Wed, 8 Jan 2003, Andrew Lias wrote: > > > >From: Philip Hart <philiph at SLAC.Stanford.EDU> > > >now I finally understand why Dragaerans have not > > >(despite 200k years of recorded history and near-human intelligence) > > >developed technology - it's a quality-of-life issue... > > > > Near-human? Ha! I'd love to see Sethra's reply to that! > > She might admit that the only Easterner she knows (ever knew?) is clearly > smarter than her (v. Orca) and her friends (v. Issola etc). > > > > Actually, I would contend that the Dragaerans not only have technology, but > > a rather high technology, it's just that their technology is based for more > > on Sorcery than on mechanical devices. Certainly their science (e.g., their > > knowledge of genetics) is comparably advanced to our own. > > I don't see Aliera being that much beyond Mendel in genetics - e.g., > Dragaerans aren't anywhere near being able to change their bodies from > one house to another or we would have heard all about it in Jhereg and > elsewhere. Aliera is well beyond Mendel. The study that reinstated Norathar as Dragon heir is something that we would not have been able to do more recently than about 1990 or maybe a little earlier. > > > > I would place modern Dragaeran society at a 20th century level of magical > > technology, with certain variations. The biggest thing that they lack is > > anything analogous to computers but, by the same token, we don't have > > anything like their teleportation technology or the ability to put large > > permanent structures in the air (e.g., Castle Black). > > The Orb of course is a computer/router/... Zerika I managed to create > such a complex object from scratch but her empire was relying on exploding > sticks millennia later - this puzzles me. > > Plane travel is pretty close to teleportation - consider its effect on > human digestion... If I was an architect I'd argue that > steel/elevators/skyscraper design technology is equivalent (in effect if > not quite in aesthetics) to the magic behind (below) Castle Black - > including its unfortunate vulnerabilities. > > Anyway, it's hard for me to understand the lack of guns, electricity, > what have you in the pre-modern era - esp. given that the empire trades > with an island where sorcery doesn't work. Perhaps electronics is impossible in their world. I see that they have developed their sorcery in the ways possible. In FHYA, there is some reference to unsuccessful experiments in teleportation, probably about the level of people jumping off mountains with wings tied to their arms. Presumably, in the centuries between the reinstatement of the Empire and the days of Vlad, these experiments finally yielded successful and routine teleportation, just like we have had flight for the past 100 years. One difference is that teleportation is individual and they don't have to go through airport inspection. You should no more expect them to have electronics (and all the rest, guns, nuclear weapons, etc.) than you can expect us to have teleportation. In fact, I think that they way their sorcery develops instead of remaining static (as in virtually all other sword and sorcery literature) is one of the more interesting ideas that Brust has had. > > - Philip >