Saturday, January 9, 2021

People in the Past Weren't Dumb

 I am not obligated to talk about current events, and this will not be a post about politics, but I do want to say: I have seen quite a lot of commentary on both sides of the rift (certainly not an aisle at this point) and most of it is bad. But as I said on Tumblr: I would be a lot more sympathetic to a group of protestors storming the Capitol Building and demanding Congress be held accountable if they weren’t marching on the orders of a madman they worship demanding that he remain in power.


Anyway I read 1634: The Baltic Wars and I have Thoughts.


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People in the Past Weren’t Dumb


I have some issues with 1634: The Baltic Wars, mostly related to Ann Catherine and Oliver Cromwell, but overall I like this story and I like the Plot and I like the optimism of it. The author set out to tell a story that he thought was optimistic about the human condition, despite starting off in what was one of the worst wars in history.


One thing I especially like about this series is that the author is strongly of the opinion that people in the past weren’t stupid.


Let me rewind and explain a bit. The first book in the series is 1632, in which in the year 2000, a small West Virginia town named Grantville is transported to what would become Germany in the year 1632 by what they call the Ring of Fire, an event that has not been, nor is ever likely to be, explained. If you know your history, you’ll know that in that year they’re in the middle of the Thirty Years War, a vicious conflict which all-around sucked.


Of course the Americans, once they get their bearings, have the tactical advantage--they have better guns, for starters, and vehicles, and electric power. And once they start making alliances and enemies they’re happy to start sharing their knowledge with the people they’re friends with in this time. Once the United States of Europe gets rolling, technology starts spreading. It’s not all 21st century at first, because they don’t all have the means for that, but it’s moving a lot fast than 17th century.


Of course, Cardinal Richlieu has thoughts about this little town popping up, and he starts doing his best to learn this new technology and new historical information. He gets his spies on that ASAP, and before anyone can do anything about it, there are copies of the history and science books from Grantville’s libraries circulating around Europe.


And as 1634 shows, the people of 17th century Europe are starting to learn a few things. No, they don’t have airplanes yet (though one French officer realizes how good it would be for them start making them), but the French have worked out how to make percussion caps by studying the science books. And the Danish start working out how to counter the ironclads that the Americans are starting to build. They don’t quite get there, but only because they don’t have enough time yet to build all the mines and torpedoes that they want. But given the opportunity, they would have.


The people that lived in the past weren’t stupid. They don’t have all the resources we do right now, but that’s not because they were stupid, it was because the times were different. One of the things that bothers me with a lot of speculative fiction, mostly fantasy, is that we see people or creatures that are used to the past are utterly overwhelmed when it comes to thinking outside of their own times. I absolutely hated this aspect of Salvation War--the angels and demons attacking Earth don’t have a clue about how to actually fight humans, using Bronze Age tactics and being completely off guard when that doesn’t work. Heck, Uriel’s psychic attacks that are supposed to kill thousands are shrugged off by equipping everyone with tinfoil hats.


To be clear, there are thematic, and in-universe reasons for this, but it still feels really, really silly and dumb, when the only angelic character that knows anything about modern warfare is Michael, who is sabatoging his own side for his own benefit. There are no studies of human weapons, there are no figuring out ways to counter them. There is just throwing more force, and hoping that it works this time. And the audience cheers because the good guys are humanity, of course, but it’s still a rather boring antagonistic force if it doesn’t understand anything but sheer force and is baffled when that doesn’t work.


[Again, there are thematic reasons which might work for some audiences, but the more I think about it the more it bothers me. That and other things.]


Compare this to Dresden Files. Yeah, the supernatural beings have some trouble with humans, but they understand human nature, and they understand strategy. Maybe they don’t have guns, but they can hire humans or other beings that do, and will happily use them. One of the most horrifying bits in the series is when Harry meets up with his fellow wizards who have just escaped a battle, only to find that the vampires had hired mercenaries to gas the hospital that they’d been recovering in.


The supernatural beings who don’t care about things like guns and bombs are the ones who wouldn’t be bothered by them anyway. The skinwalker in Turn Coat is pretty hard to kill by anything less than an actual nuclear blast, and in Battle Ground the Last Titan takes several gunshots, explosions, and cuts, and just keeps going.


But going back to humans: yes, I think people in the past would be scared and bewildered by modern technology. At first. But soon they’d start to realize how it works, even if they don’t know all the details. After all, do you know exactly how all the components of your computer or phone work? Probably not. But once you get a handle on it, you can get pretty far.


There’s a season finale of the Spanish television series Ministerio del Tiempo in which King Philip II of Spain, upon finding out about what happens to his country in the future, and about time travel, takes some people with him and then proceeds to conquer all of the world and also history. Not to mention that Alonso, one of the main team members, adapts pretty quickly to modern semiautomatic firearms, despite being from a time period when muskets were the common guns.


People (or non people, if you’re writing fantasy/science-fiction) who aren’t up to date with modern technology would start working out how to use it, and how to match it. The people of France in 1632 don’t know how modern firearms work, but at the Cardinal’s urging they immediately start working on how to protect themselves from it, study how they work, and find ways to counter them. Because that’s how humans think. They work out how to adapt and survive, and fight back. Just because they don’t know as much about the science of how modern things work, doesn’t mean they aren’t willing to learn, or to logically work out how to deal with it.


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