Clocks vs gun

[CarburetorThompson]

I don’t think I’ve made much of an effort to hide my love of guns in fantasy stories. That’s not really what this thread is about. It’s more of me pointing and laughing at how many things much more technologically impressive then black powder weaponry show up in fantasy stories.

I just think it’s kinda hilarious looking at all the medieval fantasy stories that have things like, to list a couple.

Mechanical clocks, fountain pens, printing presses, large early modern era sized sailing ships, mechanical water fixtures with high psi, pocket watches, steam locomotives

And in certain high fantasy cases

Autonomous golem robots, flying air ships, instant transmission international magical communication, incredibly durable magical alloys, alchemists that make magical healing potions, but somehow can’t figure out how to make a powder that explodes when in contact with fire.

I just think it’s funny that all of these things exist in stories, but something the Chinese created several hundred years earlier is seen as setting destroying technological advancement.

Personally I think this is another tolkien hold over. All of these things are things that didn’t exist in middle earth, which was supposed to be a mythical pre-historic period. I think over time as more and more people played telephone with lotr inspired works eventually we have gotten to the point where most of this is forgotten and only big remaining concepts are elves, dwarfs, orcs, and no guns. But complaining about the stranglehold Tolkien‘s corpse has on the fantasy genre is a topic for a different rant.

Feel free to add stuff I missed, but this is mostly just a rant because I’m bored.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

Mechanical clocks, fountain pens, printing presses, large early modern era sized sailing ships, mechanical water fixtures with high psi, pocket watches, steam locomotives

Water clocks have been around for a LONG time. Spring powered mechanical watches (that kept poor time - or were house sized) are about 500 years old, give or take so may not be TOO out of place.
Fountain pens replaced the quill during the "Age of Reason" IIRC (around the 1500s).
Printing presses have been around a long time - it was the invention of movable type by Guttenberg that made the MODERN printing press possible, and that was fairly recent. They had to make new plates each time before his idea took off.
Water fixtures are problematic (check out Napolean Disentimed for one example on this).
Pocket watches - depends on how big and accurate. A small, accurate one? Yeah, not very believable. A bulky one that needs constant tweaking and even parts replaced regularly? Very believable.

And in certain high fantasy cases

Autonomous golem robots, flying air ships, instant transmission international magical communication, incredibly durable magical alloys, alchemists that make magical healing potions, but somehow can’t figure out how to make a powder that explodes when in contact with fire.

Golems are the literary and mythological precursors to robots (via perhaps the most infamous one of all, Frankenstein's Creature).
If magic exists, the first practical use, beyond labor saving stuff (just like with technology) would be for communication, and then for travel.
Magical alloys have been a "thing" since the Norse (Uru) and Greek (Adamantine) myths, at least so should not raise eyebrows; heck, Damascus Steel was considered a "magical alloy" for a few decades after it first surfaced!
Check out The Chronicles of Amber and Guardians of the Flame series for why gunpowder might not work - or might work but not as expected.

 

[AnonUnlimited]

 

[Seaspecter]

I had thought about introducing primitive guns into my novel and having my MC fall in love with them and carry them around much to the annoyance of the rest of her party but as the centuries pass, she's immortal, her guns start getting more and more effective.

 

[melchi]

Gotta make fireworks before guns.

 

[CarburetorThompson]

Gotta make fireworks before guns.

Average jp isekai mc, making fireworks but somehow never figuring out how guns work

 

[Splort]

Check out The Chronicles of Amber and Guardians of the Flame series for why gunpowder might not work - or might work but not as expected.

Charlie, you're as well-read as me, I guess. I was going to reply to the OP that it was far more than Tolkien. David Drake and others write of the slippery slope that is a technological breakthrough and how quickly it's applied to the battlefield. Zelazny (the Chronicles of Amber) and Rosenberg (Guardians of the Flame) wrote in two different eras (Zelazny in the late '50s/early '60s through early '70s; Rosenberg from '81-2018 or so) were good examples of showing what technology applied to a fantasy world not very advanced would do. I'll make a special mention of Andre Norton in a few paragraphs.

Joel Rosenberg, btw, was the GOAT Daddy to pretty much every litRPG author out there - pretty much anyone posting on SH is following his genre and lead.

@CarburetorThompson: I'd guess you're talking about a late-stage evolution of technology being replicated by magic instead. I'd submit for consideration that there are two types of this story: one where it's 'just magic' and the other is using the introduction of technology OR they're using the replication of the industrial revolution to drive the plot. The first type is, I'd think, more naturally associated with a character-driven story, the second is usually on a grand timeline, IMO. Your mileage may vary. There were a great many dead-tree authors who were published within either category, and some at different points in their career wrote stories of both types. Andre Norton is a classic example of this: her Dragonriders of Pern stories started with a 2200-year historical lack of understanding of the physical world (all their knowledge lost with the first Threadfall) and the need to somehow protect against Thread, an orbital wide-area damage dealer, by bonding telepathically with fire-breathing, flying dragons. The series kind of ends ~55 years later (she died, but her kids are carrying on the stories/having her unpublished work published), with the re-establishment of technological dominance and the ability to make orbit and destroy the Thread.

Anyway, these 'magic as replacement for tech' stories have been around a while.

 

[Cipiteca396]

 

[CharlesEBrown]

That was last century. Now it's "Amiricans: Wait - what are the local statutes on defending my home? Quick, do a google search while I try to remember the code to this gun safe and hope the burglar takes his time in the rest of the house..."

 

[aToTeT]

I don’t think I’ve made much of an effort to hide my love of guns in fantasy stories. That’s not really what this thread is about. It’s more of me pointing and laughing at how many things much more technologically impressive then black powder weaponry show up in fantasy stories.

Mechanical clocks, fountain pens, printing presses, large early modern era sized sailing ships, mechanical water fixtures with high psi, pocket watches, steam locomotives

Autonomous golem robots, flying air ships, instant transmission international magical communication, incredibly durable magical alloys, alchemists that make magical healing potions, but somehow can’t figure out how to make a powder that explodes when in contact with fire.

I just think it’s funny that all of these things exist in stories, but something the Chinese created several hundred years earlier is seen as setting destroying technological advancement.

Feel free to add stuff I missed, but this is mostly just a rant because I’m bored.

As a person who features a gun (a bad gun too, made for dueling and one handed firing from horseback (and presumably, for the joy of the gun-making craft for which Samuel Colt is iconic)) in a fantasy litRPG for characterisation purposes:

There is an ever present undercurrent in mainstream view, that we are the most superior of all humans who ever lived, for we have flush toilets and softened wood chips with which to wipe our filth and put it out of sight and (hopefully) smell.

This is absurd. Yes, things are great relatively for those of us who get to wipe our bums with premium wood, or even better drench our rears with a bidet.

But our teeth are in a shape only defeated in foulness by those in the worst era of humanity: the first era, in which our ancestors teeth were cracked to bits by chewing on bone to get the marrow out in a time of mass starvation and widespread extinction which saw few of our sister species survive, and which we later murdered to death and likely ate by means most horrendous in a genuinely barbarous time — acting as required for us to survive.

Even modern humanity has been shaped by the sneaky, crafty, and cruel behaviours which necessitated our current existence:

Which we are not free of.

Invention is not anachronistic: it is human.

The mother of invention is not necessity: she is human.

Firearms are a brilliant invention used by brilliant men in a brilliant revision of combat that seems visceral and is horrible, but leaves wide sections of young men alive by the end of such conflicts (unlike tribal warfare, killing most of all combatants involved due to the trauma of blunt instruments in an even-sided fight), or even the wide time of the so-cultured Romans who viewed themselves much as we do (and lost an entire generation of young men to the sea: more than once)… we can have our talks of the great wars and all the many horrors of our recent past, but the projectile-warfare death equivalents which all the songs say butchered a whole generation: killed only ~13.5% of all active military participants involved.

That war was a hundred years ago, and we remember it as the bloodiest war ever; as if our last charges of the light brigades never happened, as if grapeshot was never inserted into cannons, as if triangular shaped bayonet wounds could be stitched back closed.

Humans have always shown an inventiveness for war, and a predilection for engagement in it: any person reiterating the history of when man first tamed horse will speak as if it is only normal that when man achieved such a feat: his first act with it was to massacre his neighbours over a wide area and claim all their women as his own.

The word ‘all’ is no accident, and can be seen in modern contexts, and from a terrible atrocity ~80 years ago.

The atrocity of humanity never ends: swords are cruel from point to tang, and cudgels flanged, and bows that loose barbed arrows aflame.

So I must ask: what human bothers with sparky powder when they have access to LASERs and fireballs conjured by their hands?

Is a gun or explosive device more effective, more directed, and more energy efficient than all of fantasy’s best devices?

Absolutely.

But while humanity was the mother who gave birth to invention: necessity was the father who supplied its seed.

I argue: guns in fantasy are fun, and people who don’t put them in fantasy are elf-lovers.

 

[melchi]

If a clock is combined with a gun would it be a glock?

 

[aToTeT]

I had thought about introducing primitive guns into my novel and having my MC fall in love with them and carry them around much to the annoyance of the rest of her party but as the centuries pass, she's immortal, her guns start getting more and more effective.

That sounds absolutely charming.

One day I’ll draw a big fuchsia revolver on my cover, and some dungeon signage.

One day.

If a clock is combined with a gun would it be a glock?

That’s some alchemical artifice if I have ever seen it.

Average jp isekai mc, making fireworks but somehow never figuring out how guns work

Don’t you be dissing my Princess Shrine Maiden of Thunder (or whatever she was called in Saving 80K Gold Coins For My Retirement):

That girl brought mercs to fantasy.

 

[Rezcore]

Printing presses have been around a long time - it was the invention of movable type by Guttenberg that made the MODERN printing press possible, and that was fairly recent. They had to make new plates each time before his idea took off

PreJoseon Korea had movable type. It just wasn't feasible to use with Chinese Characters. Something that would prove difficult centuries later when the Chinese imported printing presses

 

[CharlesEBrown]

PreJoseon Korea had movable type. It just wasn't feasible to use with Chinese Characters. Something that would prove difficult centuries later when the Chinese imported printing presses

Had never heard that but it does not surprise me at all (neither part - that they had it that early nor that it was impractical with the alphabets used)

 

[Jaicodonutsz]

I've introduce a revolver that have double-barrel in it (the recoil is worse than a anti tank rifle)

 

[Rezcore]

I've introduce a revolver that have double-barrel in it (the recoil is worse than a anti tank rifle)

I shudder because there is such a critter. I used to have one that was a .410, with 8 .38 rounds. Unreliable little shit

 

[Jaicodonutsz]

I shudder because there is such a critter. I used to have one that was a .410, with 8 .38 rounds. Unreliable little shit

I forgot to include that the gun have a little aoe (Area of effect)

 

[Seaspecter]

That sounds absolutely charming.

One day I’ll draw a big fuchsia revolver on my cover, and some dungeon signage.

One day.

I'm gonna go with ye olde hand cannon first.

 

[aToTeT]

I'm gonna go with ye olde hand cannon first.

Have you heard the new sensation that’s sweeping the nation?

Hellsing ultimate abridged did have a thing or two to say about cannons.

And in accordance, I naturally approve. Hand held or ship mounted; it sure is nice to have a cannon.

I've introduce a revolver that have double-barrel in it (the recoil is worse than a anti tank rifle)

… everyone must be watching Hellsing ultimate abridged.

Go revolvers! Fun little blighters shoot the air back in your face, don’t eject spent payload, and as a bonus: only hold as many rounds as there are chambers.

There’s maintenance, frequent malfunctions, and you can neither brace them nor hold the thing steady.

Or so it used to be, apparently. One of these days I will acquire a colt revolver just to see for myself if they’re actually all that unwieldy, and if there’s purpose to them beyond that time before we knew other better ways to rack another bad boy in the chamber and make him cry mama.

They sure look classy though. So many cowboy movies.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

I'm gonna go with ye olde hand cannon first.

I'm just waiting for someone to start with a head cannon... (doesn't matter if that's where it's mounted ... or what it shoots... or both...)