morlac wrote: ↑Wed May 22, 2019 7:42 pm
Magic recently became rare. For most of the last 6,000 years it very much effected society just maybe not in a obviously direct way.
I only know of the main book series and the show. If increased and more readily available magic is in other materials, that might change things.
morlac wrote:Plus just in the tv series we saw (book has even more):
Blood Magic
Pyrokenesis
Necromancy
Shadow Magic
Greensight
Warging
Bran stuff
plus:
Dragons, Giants, Direwolfs
Us: A. I need to invent a way to see what the enemy is doing a few miles away. Invent: camera, plane combine into spy plane. And all the inventions that lead up to those.
Wildlings: B. "Timmy, why don't you warg into that there bird and uhh go fly over those hills."
What's the incentive to get to A if you can just get on with it and do B?
But this doesn't help your argument. All of these forms of magic are exceedingly rare (and I don't know whether you can call direwolves and giants magic) and unavailable to the average person. If magic were to obviate the need for technology, as you propose, then the magic would necessarily need to be more readily available to the populace. Take your warging example. This ability is exceedingly rare (and often hidden, IIRC), so it's not like the ability of a few Starks to warg made the Lannisters or Freys decide to not bother seeking any scouting techniques.
If anything, the rareness of magic might lead to more innovation. We see this the reintroduction of dragons (which may or may not be magic). This led to the extremely rapid development of mysteriously accurate crossbow technology. Those without magic (99.99% of the population) would need technology to keep up.
morlac wrote:Feudalism has worked for them for over 6,000 years. Id be surprised if we last half of that before self destructing. That being said not sure why you keep comparing them to us, we aren't playing by the same set of rules.
It's worked for a few elite families, I guess. It's hardly worked for the farmers who have their children forced into armies to fight the wars of those elite families, or for the hordes of slaves in Essos, or those suffering from diseases that could be eradicated with better science. But maybe we just have different ideas of what is working.
And I'm comparing them to us for the same reasons that people were comparing Dany's mental state to the our real understanding of mental illness. That's what we have as a comparison point. The people in Martin's world are clearly the same human beings we are, so it makes some sense to compare. Sure there are differences in the worlds, but that doesn't mean we can't take those into account when discussing the worlds (as we are doing here).
Holman wrote: ↑Wed May 22, 2019 10:59 pm
I thought I read a few years ago that GRRM had indicated in interviews that technological stagnation was of a piece with the long winters and various other realized mythic elements. Martin's background stories feel like ASoI&F no matter how far they're set in the past.
There has to be something holding them back. (Realistically, a civilization in which scorpions and green wildfire are physically possible is a society with practiced napalm artillery inside of a generation)
I'm all for hearing about whatever might be holding them back. I plan on reading the final two books in the series and I may watch some of the spin-offs, but I probably won't read much of the rest of the background materials, so I'll need to rely on you guys to let me know.