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Retrofuturism: Sandalpunk and Candlepunk
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7037378" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>I don't think you can reference DiVinci without moving the setting out of the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. DiVinci's stuff is the basis of clockpunk, and if castlepunk is a thing it can't (ought not?) be just more clockpunk. The man you would be looking for is a guy named Guido da Vigevano, and with him and maybe some dramatic realization of the cause of disease, perhaps you can avert the Black Death and begin a Renaissance at the beginning of the 14th century. Or you might be able to find some other earlier figure unknown to me. And that's reasonable, because really, the seeds of the Renaissance are planted back in the 13th century High Middle Ages, and the only reason (arguably) the 'European Miracle' is so late in coming, is that the promise of the 13th century is crushed by the horrors of the plagues of the 14th. </p><p></p><p>Then you could start asking how this version of Europe is different than the real one. It's cleaner - without the Black Death, the Europeans don't stop bathing. It's more religious - without the Black Death, the Catholic Church is a stronger institution. It's less Pagan. Without the collapse of Medieval culture, people are less eager to look back to Rome and Greece for answers, and feeling that they've surpassed the ancients occurs sooner. Perhaps technologies we expect to arrive in the 15th or 16th centuries start arriving in the early 14th - the printing press, the crankshaft, perspective drawing, etc.</p><p></p><p>But I really think that to a large extent, this is barking up the wrong tree. We can roll back to an earlier moment when this could have happened, by shifting our perspective a little as you suggested.</p><p></p><p>We can go back to the 11th century if we start looking further afield for answers - to the Abbasid's for example that you mention. Taken as a whole, Islamic world was this amazing engine of compilation and literacy the like of which the world had never seen. The Islamic scholars were compilers. They made encyclopedias of things. They wrote down oral knowledge and the translated disparate technological traditions into a common language. And all the world's separate inventions are brought together for the first time - math from India, paper and gunpowder from China, arches, crankshafts and waterwheels from Europe. By the 11th century, all the tools were in place to produce all the great leaps of technology that we associate with the European High Middle Ages and Renaissance. Baghdad is so technologically sophisticated at the time, that it seems a place of magic and wonder to the rest of the world. </p><p></p><p>Only, as with the scholars of Rhodes back in the 3rd to 2nd century BC - nothing comes of it. There is a great political crisis and purge, the Jewish, Christian and progressive Moslem scholars are thrown into ill repute and often just killed, and Islam by and large turns its back on that era. The area descends into sectarian fighting, so that when the newly economically powerful Western Europe counterattacks in the 1st Crusade, it's caught completely off guard - it's armies away fighting other Islamic armies at a critical juncture. The Crusader in turn, take this collected knowledge back to Western Europe and it contributes to the explosive growth of knowledge the previously dark world of North Europe is experiences. You could have an alternative history where the Renaissance occurs in a Mesopotamia - the logical expected place for it to happen given human history to that point - rather in the "unexpected" backward West and North of Europe. Islam doesn't fracture, comes down philosophically in favor of rationality, brushes aside the pathetically small and disorganized armies of Western Europe, and everything we associate with the "European Miracle" happens 300 years earlier in the heartland of human civilization. Islamic scholars of little note to (Western) history, are now positioned to be the heirs of this revolution. That's a world that really can have "punk" sensibilities, because in the real world, it really did have a tension between the conservatives (who in the real world won) and the progressives (who in the real world lost), you have a real industrial revolution, and you can have rebels on the fringes of this great revolution being left behind or exploited. </p><p></p><p>Heck, I think I can even write the plot of the novel.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7037378, member: 4937"] I don't think you can reference DiVinci without moving the setting out of the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. DiVinci's stuff is the basis of clockpunk, and if castlepunk is a thing it can't (ought not?) be just more clockpunk. The man you would be looking for is a guy named Guido da Vigevano, and with him and maybe some dramatic realization of the cause of disease, perhaps you can avert the Black Death and begin a Renaissance at the beginning of the 14th century. Or you might be able to find some other earlier figure unknown to me. And that's reasonable, because really, the seeds of the Renaissance are planted back in the 13th century High Middle Ages, and the only reason (arguably) the 'European Miracle' is so late in coming, is that the promise of the 13th century is crushed by the horrors of the plagues of the 14th. Then you could start asking how this version of Europe is different than the real one. It's cleaner - without the Black Death, the Europeans don't stop bathing. It's more religious - without the Black Death, the Catholic Church is a stronger institution. It's less Pagan. Without the collapse of Medieval culture, people are less eager to look back to Rome and Greece for answers, and feeling that they've surpassed the ancients occurs sooner. Perhaps technologies we expect to arrive in the 15th or 16th centuries start arriving in the early 14th - the printing press, the crankshaft, perspective drawing, etc. But I really think that to a large extent, this is barking up the wrong tree. We can roll back to an earlier moment when this could have happened, by shifting our perspective a little as you suggested. We can go back to the 11th century if we start looking further afield for answers - to the Abbasid's for example that you mention. Taken as a whole, Islamic world was this amazing engine of compilation and literacy the like of which the world had never seen. The Islamic scholars were compilers. They made encyclopedias of things. They wrote down oral knowledge and the translated disparate technological traditions into a common language. And all the world's separate inventions are brought together for the first time - math from India, paper and gunpowder from China, arches, crankshafts and waterwheels from Europe. By the 11th century, all the tools were in place to produce all the great leaps of technology that we associate with the European High Middle Ages and Renaissance. Baghdad is so technologically sophisticated at the time, that it seems a place of magic and wonder to the rest of the world. Only, as with the scholars of Rhodes back in the 3rd to 2nd century BC - nothing comes of it. There is a great political crisis and purge, the Jewish, Christian and progressive Moslem scholars are thrown into ill repute and often just killed, and Islam by and large turns its back on that era. The area descends into sectarian fighting, so that when the newly economically powerful Western Europe counterattacks in the 1st Crusade, it's caught completely off guard - it's armies away fighting other Islamic armies at a critical juncture. The Crusader in turn, take this collected knowledge back to Western Europe and it contributes to the explosive growth of knowledge the previously dark world of North Europe is experiences. You could have an alternative history where the Renaissance occurs in a Mesopotamia - the logical expected place for it to happen given human history to that point - rather in the "unexpected" backward West and North of Europe. Islam doesn't fracture, comes down philosophically in favor of rationality, brushes aside the pathetically small and disorganized armies of Western Europe, and everything we associate with the "European Miracle" happens 300 years earlier in the heartland of human civilization. Islamic scholars of little note to (Western) history, are now positioned to be the heirs of this revolution. That's a world that really can have "punk" sensibilities, because in the real world, it really did have a tension between the conservatives (who in the real world won) and the progressives (who in the real world lost), you have a real industrial revolution, and you can have rebels on the fringes of this great revolution being left behind or exploited. Heck, I think I can even write the plot of the novel. [/QUOTE]
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