Worldbuilding – Page 7 – Prose Poetry Code

Magic and tech: weapons

It’s a given that, no matter what the setting, many people will want to know the available methods for hurting someone. In RPGs (whether video games or old-school pen and paper), that’s especially true, since combat is such a major part of the most popular role-playing games. Even written works require conflict, and military conflict is the easiest and most familiar form.

Weapons go back almost as far as humanity itself. Any culture can make spears and knives, even before the advent of metalworking. (And don’t neglect those older materials. Mayan obsidian blades could be sharper than any contemporary European sword.) Bows, bolas, blowpipes, and a hundred other “ancient” weapons can be used in a perfectly mundane world, and there’s no reason why they wouldn’t also exist in our magical realm. But they won’t be the only options…

The true path

Not everybody used swords. I know that’s a common trope in fantasy, but it’s just not accurate. Swords were expensive, requiring skilled craftsmanship, quality materials, and more than a bit of time. It might be feasible for a company of 100 men to all be armed with swords, but not an entire army.

Spears are a good alternative. They’re cheap—nothing more than a point on a pole. Unlike swords, which you needed at least some training to use (“Stick ’em with the pointy end” only gets you so far), spears are user-friendly. And, in a pinch, a pitchfork or spade can fill in. Something like a spear would form the backbone of a mundane army. There would be swordsmen, of course, but they’re more likely to be officers or other leaders.

Most other melee weapons are situational. Pikes are great against cavalry, for example, but cumbersome when fighting foot soldiers. Axes, polearms, and all the other nifty items in your favorite RPG’s weapons section have their own ups and downs. They’ll have their uses, but they won’t be widespread. However, armies of this era were anything but regular. Even trained forces could end up using weapons they weren’t overly familiar with, and the peasant rabble might turn up with whatever they could find.

On the ranged side, things aren’t much better. Bows are ubiquitous, particularly in medieval Europe. (English longbows, as we know, were a game-changer.) Crossbows are another option—and they go back a lot further than people think—but they have the problem of being slower and more complex. Other choices, like slings, have situations where they’re useful; a bit of thought should help you come up with something.

And don’t forget artillery. The catapult, trebuchet, scorpion, onager, and so on all have a long history. Every single one of them has been wholly obsolete since the first cannon, but most fantasy is set slightly before the invention of gunpowder, so they’re all you’ve got. Some are siege weapons, intended to wreak havoc on a walled city, while others are what we would now call anti-personnel weaponry.

And the other side

With magic, more efficient and deadly means of attack are possible. We’ve already decided that there aren’t mages running around throwing fireballs, so that’s off the table, but all that means is that the magical weaponry will be more subtle, yet no less devastating.

Magical energy in this setting, as we know from earlier entries in this series, can be converted to force. We’ve used that to great effect to provide motive power, but we know how force scales: F = ma. The same energy that pushes a magical “car” up to a few miles per hour could send a tiny ball of, say, lead, to a seriously high velocity. Who needs gunpowder when magic can do the same thing? That one was almost trivial, and mages worked it out a while back. Now, every regiment has an assortment of what we might consider magic-powered guns. They’re too expensive to be given to every common soldier, but they’ve all but replaced crossbows, and longbows have been relegated to sieges. (Unlike the real world, where cannons mostly came first, the rules of magic mean that handguns are much easier to make.)

But it doesn’t stop there. Magic helps with humble bladed weapons, by means of sharpening and endurance enchantments. Artillery gets an extra oomph from magical power, but its true value there lies in shot varieties. Burning and smoke are a cinch for the greenest of mages; in a catapult, the effect is better than any boiling oil or barrel of pitch. And, of course, any soldier can benefit from a stamina boost.

What does all this do to the battlefields of our magical setting? For the full answer, we’ll have to wait and see the other aspects of fighting, such as defenses. We can say quite a bit now, though. In general, our magical kingdom’s battles will tend to resemble those of a couple hundred years later. Think more Late Renaissance than High Middle Ages, except without the cannons.

Not everyone has guns, so the largest part of the fighting will still be hand-to-hand, with swords and spears and all the rest. In place of a contingent of archers will be magical gunners, armed with ever more powerful dealers of death. They won’t match today’s high-powered rifles, but they wouldn’t be out of place in the American Revolution, in terms of their effect on the enemy.

Artillery will look more medieval, but there are a few differences. With magic replacing the…ancillary supplies for shot, artillery forces will be a bit less exposed. That means they’ll be free to take more risks, to advance more quickly. Oddly enough, they won’t be as much use in a siege, at least until they get right up to the gates. Circumstances converge to make artillery very good at distance (because it’ll still out-range anything else) and up close (because it can do the most damage), but not so great in the middle.

Other uses

As we know, weaponry isn’t limited to the battlefield. Personal weapons are a feature of any culture, as are the rules governing them. For everything except the magic-powered guns, little will change in this regard. Openly carrying a weapon is still a symbol of ill intent, drawing it more so. Hidden weapons will be harder to find, because they can be smaller or disguised as something innocuous, but mages can point out magical items.

Assassination is easier in the magical kingdom. That’s unfortunate, but not unexpected. With the greater power available, not everyone will see the need for greater responsibility. It’s almost self-balancing, since everyone knows how easy it is, sort of like Mutually Assured Destruction. Blood feuds can erupt into a war in the streets, but that’s not too different from the real world of that time.

The original use for many weapons was killing animals, and this is only helped by magic. Ask any hunter: guns are far better than bows. That’ll be true even when the bullets are powered by the invisible force of magical energy. (This could have environmental issues—hunting to extinction is much easier—but that can wait for a later post.)

All told, adding magic to weaponry has nearly the same effects as adding gunpowder. The world becomes more dangerous, but many new possibilities appear. New avenues of research open up. To fight the growing offense, the mages will be asked to create new defenses. And that will be the subject of the next post in the series: how to protect oneself.

The future of government

This year of 2016 is, in the US, an election year. For weeks we’ve been mired in the political process, and we’ve had to suffer through endless debating and punditry. The end isn’t near, either. We’ve got to endure this all the way to November.

It’s impossible to not think about government right now. As a builder of worlds and settings, I’m naturally drawn to the idea of government as a concept, rather than as its concrete implementation today. Churchill is usually quoted as saying that democracy is the worst form of government, apart from all others that have been tried. We know what others have been tried: republic, monarchy, communism, theocracy, and so on. Looking at the list, maybe it’s true.

What about the future, though? We’re in the midst of a technological revolution that shows little sign of stopping, yet it seems that little of that has paid off in the political sphere. (If you look at some of the computerized voting systems in use today, you might even think we’ve regressed!) But that could be a transitional thing. In the far future, when we of humanity have moved outward, to the rest of the Solar System and beyond, what will government look like then?

Status quo

It’s easy to think that the way things are is the way they will forever be. Conservatism is a natural thing, because it’s the path of least resistance. And in the near-term, it’s the most likely outcome. Barring some major upheaval, the US will remain a federal republic, China an authoritarian, communist regime, and most of the Middle East an anarchic disaster.

There will be a few slight changes, for sure. The Commonwealth nations are always talking about dissolving the monarchy; it’s reasonable to assume that, one day, talk will beget action. The same with most of the other Western monarchies remaining. As jobs are increasingly given over to robots, socialist tendencies will only increase, as they are doing right now in Europe. Something will eventually bring stability to Iraq and Syria. (Okay, that last one is awfully far-fetched.)

But the advance of technology will open up new avenues of government. And if we do manage self-sustaining colonies beyond Earth, then “self-sustaining” may eventually become “self-governing”. A well-settled Solar System means ample opportunity for new nations to spring up, a breeding ground for new experiments in government. So what might those look like?

Direct democracy

One possibility that isn’t that hard to imagine is direct democracy. As opposed to a democratic republic—like most democracies today—a direct democracy dispenses with the elected officers. It is literally of, by, and for the people. Everybody gets to vote. On everything. (Within reason, of course.)

We can’t really do this today on anything higher than a local level, because nobody would have time for anything else! But a few special situations can arise that would make it palatable. Small colonies are the obvious place for a direct democracy; they work just like towns. A very well-connected and well-educated society could bring direct democracy to a larger populace, but likely only on a limited scale. Mundane things might be left to the elected, while serious matters are voted on by the public at large.

The chief downside to direct democracy is that it relies on the knowledge and wisdom of the masses. It requires faith in humanity, not to make the right decision, but only to make an informed one. And, as I said, it’s also too easy to overload the populace. Partisan voting seems like a major trap here, if only because choosing a party is easier than voting on each individual issue.

Techno-socialism

By 2020, a mere four years away, millions of people will have lost their jobs to robots, and it’ll only go downhill from there. A few decades out, and half the world’s population will be looking for work in the ever-fewer fields left to living humans. There are some things computers can’t do, but not everybody has the skills necessary for them.

One solution to this looming employment crunch is already being tested in parts of Europe: the universal basic income. It’s nothing more than a monthly stipend, a kind of all-encompassing unemployment/welfare check. Combine this with the possibility of technology ending the “demand economy”, and you have the makings of a true socialist state: a planned government and economy designed to create and uphold a welfare state. Most people would live on the basic income, with their needs met by government-provided facilities, while those who can have jobs are a cut above, but there’s always the chance of moving up in the world.

This one’s big flaw is human nature. We’re greedy, and we don’t really trust other people to know what’s best for us. This kind of techno-socialism doesn’t remove either need or want, but leaves it in the hands of a (hopefully) benevolent government, and it easily falls prey to a pigeonholing “everyone’s the same” mentality. For the “have-nots”, basic income is enough to provide for, well, basic needs, but not much else. The “haves” would be able to get more in the way of amenities, but the high taxes they would have to pay to provide the public services are definitely a turn-off.

AI autocrats

If you believe the AI singularity folks, advanced artificial intelligence isn’t that far away. The day it surpasses human ingenuity might even be within our lifetimes. It’s only natural to put faith in a higher power, and the AIs might become higher powers, relative to us.

There’s two ways this could go: computer-controlled utopia or tyrannical killbots. Those, however, are two sides of the same coin. Either way, its the AI in charge, not us. If artificial intelligence reaches a point where we can no longer understand it, then we won’t know what it’s thinking. At that point, it’s almost like a “direct” theocracy.

We might willingly put ourselves in such a situation, though. How alluring would it be, the idea of handing control to somebody, something else? You don’t have to worry about anything anymore, because The Computer Is Your Friend.

An AI-controlled society all but leads itself to being planned to the point of ruthless efficiency. It might even work out like an extreme version of the techno-socialism above, except that an even smaller fraction of the populace is gainfully employed.

Corporate oligarchy

Corporations already control most governments from behind the scenes. At some point in the future, they might come out of the shadows. If land rights in space are granted to private firms—under the Outer Space Treaty, they can’t be claimed by nations—then we may see a revival of the old “company town” idea. You work for the Company, you live in its houses, you buy its food, and so on. They’re in control, but you can always end up as one of the shareholders, or make your own corporation.

In practice, this form of government isn’t all that exciting. It boils down to a kind of neo-feudalism where the corporations are the lords and their employees are the serfs…with one exception. Corporations try to maximize profits. If they’re allowed to openly run the show, that will be the number one goal for everybody.

This kind of oligarchy can work, especially if you’re one of the higher-ups, but it’s not without its faults. All those people need to be employed somehow, not to mention fed, clothed, educated, and protected. The ideal corporatist system would have all those needs met by private industry, of course, but automation means there’s only so much work left to be done. Still, for a small society, it might work.

Other possibilities

The imagination can run wild here. The only limits are in the mind. But people are going to be people—unless they’re transhumans and cyborgs—and human nature is one of the strongest forces we know. Most importantly, we won’t change overnight. There will be transition periods, no matter what form of government we eventually reach. There’s even the chance that, given some sort of apocalyptic event, we’ll revert to the tried and true methods of the past. A town in the middle of a disaster will, by necessity, be authoritarian, even dictatorial. With years of peace, though, new ideas can find their footing. With time and space, they may even have their moment in the sun.

Building the pantheon

In fantasy worlds, unlike our modern, Western one, monotheism seems to be quite uncommon. Maybe it’s a way to show the “otherness” of the story, or a method of inserting larger-than-life characters into the world in a way that they can interact with the protagonist. Perhaps the intent is to illustrate a “war of ideas” in a metaphorical way. I’m sure you can think of plenty of other reasons, but they all end with the same result: a pantheon.

Now, there are two different concepts at work here. First is the “traditional” polytheism, like the Greeks, Romans, Norse, and Egyptians. In all of these cases—and others from around the world—you have a multitude of gods. They all have their own niches (Aphrodite, goddess of love, for example) and they have a body of lore surrounding them. This is the idea we’ll be exploring in this post. The other is pantheism, which you’d expect to be related to the word pantheon. It’s not; “pantheism” isn’t the belief in multiple gods, but the belief that (roughly speaking) God is everywhere and everything. From a worldbuilding perspective, that doesn’t offer too much, so we’ll stick with polytheism. We can live with the minor etymological confusion.

The pantheon

As usual, the best way to start creating something is to look at similar things that already exist. Most early cultures in history were polytheistic, and a few have left a large amount of mythology. That’s the key to polytheism: the myth. With dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of gods, stories are the way to keep them straight. Stories bring them to life, bring them into the world. They show why these gods should be worshipped…or even how.

Polytheistic gods, unlike the solitary God of monotheistic religions, are, in a very real way, superhuman. They wouldn’t be gods if they didn’t have some sort of supernatural power or ability attributed to them, although heroic humans can be, and often were, deified. (Castor, Imhotep, and Guan Yu are all examples here.) But gods of a pantheon are unlike a single God in another way: they can be flawed. Zeus is well-known as lecherous, while Hera was the personification of jealousy, and Loki would, today, be a troll in the Internet sense. A far cry from the perfect divinity of the Judeo-Christian God.

This humanization of the divine means that gods can be characters in a literary sense. They can have conflict, both with each other and with outside forces. They can walk the mortal world, interact with living people in more than just visions. But they’re still gods. They can just as easily be unseen, nothing more than the intended recipients of prayers and pleas and sacrifices. They can work behind the scenes as easily as on the stage. And if they’re never visible, then you get to pose the interesting question: did they ever truly exist?

Creating the creators

Of course, no matter how you use the pantheon, you’re going to need one. This doesn’t have to be too elaborate. A list of names will suffice, maybe with a note as to the purpose of each one. If you want to go deeper, though, you can.

One question you don’t have to answer is “how many?” The trick with polytheism is that there doesn’t have to be a set number of deities. You can have two, or twenty, or twelve hundred, and it won’t matter much. If you have a small, set number, it’ll be easier to enumerate them all, but you can always leave room for expansion.

In a way, creating a pantheon is dividing up the universe, decomposing it into its fundamental parts. The exact criteria will depend on the culture—a typical medieval fantasy people won’t have a god of computers, for instance—but a few things are near-universal. Remember that the more gods you have, the less each one has to do. With a vast array of deities, you can get into some pretty fine distinctions.

Creator gods are probably everywhere. Naturally, monotheistic faiths only have (exactly) one of these, but polytheism gives you more authorial options. Creators can be distant, aloof of their creation. Alternatively, they might prefer to be up close and personal with their masterpiece. Maybe there are multiple creators, each given a different element; one god created the land, another the sea, for example.

The creation of the world can be extremely interesting in its own right. Perhaps there was a great battle among the gods. Or the world could have been created by more primordial beings, with the gods as their children. Or maybe the world is a song given physical form by the highest of gods, while the others merely inhabit and protect it.

Local gods exist in many pantheons. These are typically small-time guys, possibly deified humans. Ancient, half-legendary rulers or wise men are good candidates. But it’s also possible that the local god is a “spirit” of a place, like the Roman genius loci. Another possibility is a more powerful god who is intimately connected with a city, such as Athena. Any way you look at it, local gods will have the center of their worship in a particular area. Their greatest shrines or temples will be there, and outsiders may not even consider them true gods.

Elemental deities make up another common type. These are your gods of fire and water and weather and the like. In larger pantheons, especially early on, these will form the bulk of the roll of divinity, if only because older cultures, lacking modern technology, had less control over the natural world. Everything that man couldn’t control, almost by definition, the gods could, so one of them would be given an elemental role. Plenty of overlap is possible here; creators can be elemental. Local gods can, too, especially if a type of weather is strongly associated with a certain place, like snow on the highest mountaintop.

Patron deities come to the fore as a polytheistic civilization develops. Eventually, they will begin to outnumber the elemental gods, Patrons can be of a craft (Vulcan and smithing), an act (Ares and war), or just about anything else. Like some theological Rule 34, if people can do something, there will be a patron for it. (We see this even in monotheism, with the Catholic patron saints.) This is a place where the fine divisions of a vast pantheon come into the spotlight. Why have a single god of agriculture, when you can have one for grain, another for fruit, and half a dozen for different kinds of trees? Patrons can be creators, too; art and fertility work well for these. (Why? Because these are both acts of creation.) Local gods, by contrast, are often patrons of those things the local place is known for.

Antagonistic gods sometimes exist. These don’t necessarily have to be evil—look at Loki—but they can be: Titans, frost giants, etc., feature in many myths. Nor is the god of death necessarily an antagonist. Still, the idea of a god or set of gods opposing the primary pantheon appears very often. Myths are stories, and stories need conflict. Someone with godly power can only be truly rivaled by another such being, and a dedicated foil is quite handy. Any of the gods can fill this role, as can any other being with power approaching godlike. (In many forms of Christianity, Satan has practically become an antagonistic god. This, combined with the elevation of saints, the hierarchy of angels, and so on, might even provide a glimpse of monotheism in the process of becoming polytheistic.)

Family matters

Once you have a sizable pool of deities, they can be related. Greece shows a nice portrait of the extreme end of this: the Olympian gods are one big, unhappy, inbred family, a very model for the European aristocracy of later centuries.

In a pantheon, gods can marry. (Whether they remain faithful, however, is another story. Or a lot of them, in the case of Zeus.) They can have children, and these will likely be gods in their own right. Some of the deities might be brothers and sisters. They may become lovers. They could even be all of these at once, since gods don’t necessarily have to play by mortal rules.

This fooling around can also extend to the inhabitants of the world. Every culture with polytheistic leanings has a story about a god (almost always a man) having relations with a mortal (nearly always a woman). Sometimes this is simply for love. Other times, it’s out of lust. In a few cases, it’s neither. The many lovers Zeus took are well-known; there are so many of them, we still haven’t run out of names for Jupiter’s moons. But everywhere you look in polytheism, gods and men are coming together.

And these unions, in mythology, often lead to children. A child with one divine parent might also become a god. Usually, there’s a tale as to why they are or aren’t fully divine. They could also be relegated to a separate rank of demigods, immortal beings with less power than the highest deities, but far more than any normal human. These might then go on to develop their own myths, like Heracles. (And don’t think this is limited to polytheism. A divine child is sort of the central figure of one of the world’s major monotheistic religions.)

The more gods a pantheon has, the more opportunity for relation. And the stories become endless. Not only that, but they can also echo the world itself. Children may follow in their parents’ footsteps, taking on similar roles, as with Aphrodite and Eros. Or they could become a blend of their two parents; the son of a sky god and a sea goddess might be the patron of the trade winds…or bringer of hurricanes. A forsaken child may become an antagonist. A city might choose to worship a demigod believed to be the offspring of a god and a local priestess or seer. The only limit is the imagination.

The story begins

Any way you slice it, polytheism has a reason for its popularity in fantasy. In real life, pantheons came about naturally, through centuries of cultural evolution. Fantasy creations didn’t. But they’re fun to think about, and they add a dimension to a world and its peoples. From a storytelling point of view, there’s not that much to be said of an omnipotent deity. But a hundred lesser beings, human in their flaws and faults, breathe a kind of life into a story’s religious backdrop.

That doesn’t mean you should go wild with the idea, though. Unless you’re writing a “mythic” story, where mortal and divine regularly intermingle, multiple gods should probably be just like one—out of the way. But they will leave their mark, everywhere from the calendar (Saturday) to place names (Athens) to any other facet of life. Any kind of religion shapes a culture. In the worlds you create, how they do it is up to you.

Magic and tech: power

One of the great drivers of technological innovation throughout history has been the need for power. Not military power, nor electrical, but motive power, mechanical power. Long before the Industrial Revolution transformed the way we think about power, machines were invented. Simple machines, complex machines, even some that we don’t quite understand. But every machine requires an input of force to get things started.

Power

Today, we have electricity, obtained from a vast array of methods: solar energy, fossil fuels, nuclear fission, all the way down to wind and water. Many of our modern forms of power generation, however, are, well, modern. They rely on technology developed relatively recently. Man-made nuclear reactors didn’t—couldn’t—exist 80 years ago. Although the mechanism that makes solar panels work was worked out by Einstein, we need present-day electronics to actually use it.

Go back not all that long ago, and you miss out on a lot of ways to generate power. Solar and nuclear are less than a century old. Coal and oil and natural gas have only been used in industrial capacities for two or three times that. For a large majority of our history, power was hard to come by, and there weren’t a lot of options. Yes, earlier generations didn’t use anywhere near as much power as we do, and they didn’t use electricity at all—except maybe in Baghdad—but you can argue cause and effect all day long. Did they not use power because they didn’t have as much of it, or did they not produce as much because they didn’t need it?

However you come down on that argument, the truth is plain to see: all the way through the Renaissance, at least, there weren’t a lot of ways to produce power. You could use human or animal power, as many cultures did. It works for travel, but also for machines that require an impetus, such as millstones, potters’ wheels, pulleys, and most other things that the people of a thousand years ago would need.

Wind and water provide a better path to power, and this was figured out some two thousand years ago. Since then, the technology has only been refined. A blowing breeze or flowing stream can spin a wheel with far less human intervention than muscle power, and they’re cheaper than beasts of burden in the long run. Even the first windmills and waterwheels, built backwards by the standards of our imagination (horizontal blades for wind and undershot wheels for water), nonetheless freed up the labor of both man and beast for other, better things.

Now with magic

This triumvirate of wind, water, and muscle was enough to get us through the ages. But what can our little bit of magic add to the mix? We’ve already seen that magical stores of energy are available to our fictional culture, and they can be used to propel a wheeled vehicle. Hook them up to any other type of wheel, and they’ll do the same thing. For a relatively small price, the people of this land have a magical alternative to wind and water. That’s not to say those won’t be used; it’s more likely that the magical means will complement them.

Even this is a huge development, but let’s see if we can do anything else before we look at how it would transform society. Most magic involves manipulating natural forces, especially fire and water and air. So why not lightning? Now, that’s not to say that mages can summon thunderbolts from the sky, no more than they can call a tidal wave or shoot fireballs from their fingertips. This is more subtle.

Static electricity is pretty easy to discover. We encounter it all the time. In the winter, it’s even worse, because the air’s drier and we tend to wear thicker clothing. I know that I cringe whenever I go to open a door this time of year, and I’m sure I’m not alone. The small shocks we get don’t have a lot of energy (on the order of millijoules), but you can ask anyone who’s ever been struck by lightning or hit with the discharge from an old CRT about the potential power of static electricity.

Electric current is a bit harder to get, but that’s where the magic comes in. As of now, it’s in its early stages, but mages have begun to store an electric charge in much the same fashion that they store mechanical power. Charging is easier, for those who know the proper lightning-element spells, and some truly massive containers can be built, resembling globe-sized versions of those plasma balls that used to be all the rage. Using the current requires some way of interfacing with the containing sphere, typically by wrapping a lightly infused bit of metal around it. This, for all intents and purposes, creates an electrode.

The first uses of this magical technology were purely medical. “Shock therapy” was briefly considered a cure-all, until it was found that it didn’t really cure much of anything. A few practical uses came out of the earliest generations: an easy spark generator, handy for starting fires (if far more expensive than sticks and rocks); a way of creating better magnets than any lodestone; electroplating metals. For a decade, the fashion among mages was to find a new and exciting way of using this captured lightning.

Then somebody figured out how to make an electric motor. This was very recently in our magical society’s history—not just within living memory, but within a generation—and it’s mostly a curiosity right now. Small electric spheres can’t provide enough current to produce a significant amount of power, and the larger versions are too costly for practical use. However, that hasn’t stopped people from trying. Some very rich individuals have contracted higher mages to develop a mill powered by this new source of energy, but no one else thinks it’s a viable replacement for the motive spheres…yet.

A few mages are traveling down a different path. Instead of trying to harness the lightning they have imprisoned for mechanical power, they are investigating the possibilities of using the electrical energy directly. They’ve made some interesting discoveries in doing this, like the fact that some materials conduct electricity, while others stop it. Small mundane devices can store tiny amounts of energy and dissipate it slowly—capacitors. And, of course, our mages are learning about the intimate connection between electricity and magnetism.

In the end, our magical society can be said to have the beginnings of electrical technology, although they came about it by a different route. As of yet, they haven’t been able to do too much with it, apart from toys, scientific experiments, and a new form of lighting that aims to be better than the old oil lamp in every way. They have, in our terms, early batteries, motors, and light filaments. Once these get out of the mage’s laboratory, they will have the same effect as their Earthly equivalents had on us.

The development of magic-powered propulsion, however, is much more of a culture shock. With the storage of mechanical energy, most repetitive labor can be automated. Looms, mills, mints, forges, nearly every aspect of medieval-style living benefits from this. The need for workers (or slaves, for that matter) has decreased severely in our fictional society’s recent times. People still need to be able to feed their families, but the unskilled masses are finding new jobs.

And they won’t remain unskilled for too long. The machines have already taken over the roles once relegated to child labor, but the children have to go somewhere. Why not school? Trade schools, whether operated by guilds or skilled craftsmen, are beginning to appear in the cities, a supply coming into existence to meet the demand. And many of these trades must teach the basics of education, as well.

Power to the people

Just by giving the populace a way to move things can we transform a people. Muscle power is very limited, and it’s tiring, even with the endurance spells we’ve already said this society has. Waterwheels need specific conditions to be productive. Not everywhere is lucky enough to have the sustained winds to make that form of power practical. But magical power levels the playing field.

Historically, the increase of power with technology has had the immediate effect of giving the affected segment of the population more time to spend not working. They naturally find ways to fill those gaps. Art, hobbies, education—the same things we do in our free time. Some of those spare-time activities end up becoming full-time jobs of their own, and so the cycle continues.

But it’s a positive feedback cycle. Each time the power available to a society increases, that’s that much less work that has to be done by its people. As we know, the less time you spend doing what you have to do, the more time you get to do the things you want to do. Greater power, then, leads to a higher standard of living, even if it’s hard to see the tangible benefits.

On ancient artifacts

I’ve been thinking about this subject for some time, but it was only after reading this article (and the ones linked there) that I decided it would make a good post. The article is about a new kind of data storage, created by femtosecond laser bursts into fused quartz. In other words, as the researchers helpfully put it, memory crystals. They say that these bits of glass can last (for all practical purposes) indefinitely.

A common trope in fiction, especially near-future sci-fi, is the mysterious artifact left behind by an ancient, yet unbelievably advanced, civilization. Whether it’s stargates in Egypt, monoliths on Europa, or the Prothean archives on Mars, the idea is always the same: some lost race left their knowledge, their records, or their technology, and we are the ones to rediscover them. I’m even guilty of it; my current writing project is a semi-fantasy novel revolving around the same concept.

It’s easy enough to say that an ancient advanced artifact exists in a story. Making it fit is altogether different, particularly if you’re in the business of harder science fiction. Most people will skim over the details, but there will always be the sticklers who point out that your clever idea is, in fact, physically impossible. But let’s see what we can do about that. Let’s see how much we can give the people a hundred, thousand, or even million years in the future.

Built to last

If your computer is anything like mine, it might last a decade. Two, if you’re lucky. Cell phone? They’re all but made to break every couple of years. Writable CDs and DVDs may be able to stand up to a generation or two of wear, and flash memory is too new to really know. In our modern world of convenience, disposability, and frugality, long-lasting goods aren’t popular. We buy the cheap consumer models, not the high-end or mil-spec stuff. When something can become obsolete the moment you open it, that’s not even all that unwise. Something that has to survive the rigors of the world, though, needs to be built to a higher standard.

For most of our modern technology, it’s just plain too early to tell how long it can really last. An LED might be rated for 11,000 hours, a hard drive for 100,000, but that’s all statistics. Anything can break tomorrow, or outlive its owner. Even in one of the most extreme environments we can reach, life expectancy is impossible to guess. Opportunity landed on Mars in 2004, and it was expected to last 90 days.

But there’s a difference between surviving a very long time and being designed to. To make something that will survive untold years, you have to know what you’re doing. Assuming money and energy are effectively unlimited—a fair assumption for a super-advanced civilization—some amazing things can be achieved, but they won’t be making iPhones.

Material things

Many things that we use as building materials are prone to decay. In a lot of cases, that’s a feature, not a bug, but making long-term time capsules isn’t one of those cases. Here, decay, decomposition, collapse, and chemical alteration are all very bad things. So most plastics are out, as are wood and other biological products—unless, of course, you’re using some sort of cryogenics. Crossing off all organics might be casting too wide a net, but not by much.

We can look to archaeology for a bit of guidance here. Stone stands the test of time in larger structures, especially in the proper climate. The same goes for (some) metal and glass, and we know that clay tablets can survive millennia. Given proper storage, many of these materials easily get you a thousand years or more of use. Conveniently, most of them are good for data, too, whether that’s in the form of cuneiform tablets or nanoscale fused quartz.

Any artifact made to stand the test of time is going to be made out of something that lasts. That goes for all of its parts, not just the core structure. The longer something needs to last, the simpler it must be, because every additional complexity is one more potential point of failure.

Power

Some artifacts might need to be powered, and that presents a seemingly insurmountable problem. Long-term storage of power is very, very hard right now. Batteries won’t cut it; most of them are lucky to last ten years. For centuries or longer, we have to have something better.

There aren’t a lot of options here. Supercapacitors aren’t that much better than batteries in this regard. Most of the other options for energy storage require complex machinery, and “complex” here should be read as “failure-prone”.

One possibility that seems promising is a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG), like NASA uses in space probes. These use the heat of radioactive decay to create electricity and they work as long as there’s radioactivity in the material you’re using. They’re high-tech, but they don’t require too much in the way of peripheral complexity. They can work, but there’s a trade-off: the longer the RTG needs to run, the less power you’ll get out of it. Few isotopes fit into that sweet spot of half-life and decay energy to make them worthwhile.

Well, if we can’t store the energy we need, can we store a way to make it? As blueprints, it’s easy, but then you’re dependent on the level of technology of those who find the artifact. Almost anything else, however, runs into the complexity problem. There are some promising leads in solar panels that might work, but it’s too early to say how long they would last. Your best bet might actually be a hand crank!

Knowledge

One of the big reasons for an artifact to exist is to provide a cache of knowledge for future generations. If that’s all you need, then you don’t have to worry too much about technology. The fused-quartz glass isn’t that bad an option. If nothing else, it might inspire the discoverers to invent a way to read it. What knowledge to include then becomes the important question.

Scale is the key. What’s the difference between the “knowers” and the “finders”? If it’s too great, the artifact may need to include lots and lots of bootstrapping information. Imagine sending a sort of inverse time capsule to, say, a thousand years ago. (For the sake of argument, we’ll assume you also provide a way to read the data.) People in 1016 aren’t going to understand digital electronics, or the internal combustion engine, or even modern English. Not only do you need to put in the knowledge you want them to have, you also have to provide the knowledge to get them to where it would be usable. A few groups are working on ways to do this whole bootstrap process for potential communication with an alien race, and their work might come in handy here.

Deep time

The longer something must survive, the more likely it won’t. There are just too many variables, too many things we can’t control. This is even more true once you get seriously far into the future. That’s the “ancient aliens” option, and it’s one of the hardest to make work.

The Earth is like a living thing. It moves, it shifts, it convulses. The plates of the crust slide around, and the continents are not fixed in place. The climate changes over the millennia, from Ice Age to warm period and back. Seas rise and fall, rivers change course, and mountains erode. The chances of an artifact surviving on the surface of our world for a million years are quite remote.

On other bodies, it’s hit or miss, almost literally. Most asteroids and moons are geologically dead, and thus fairly safe over these unfathomable timescales, but there’s always the minute possibility of a direct impact. A few unearthly places (Mars and Titan come to mind) have enough in the way of weather to present problems like those on Earth, but the majority of solid rock in the solar system is usable in some fashion.

Deep space, you might think, would be the perfect place for an ancient artifact. If it’s big enough, you could even disguise it as an asteroid or moon. However, space is a hostile place. It’s full of radiation and micrometeorites, both of which could affect an artifact. Voyager 2 has its golden record, but how long will it survive? In theory, forever. In practice, it’ll get hit eventually. Maybe not for a million years, but you never know.

Summing up

Ancient artifacts, whether from aliens or a lost race of humans, work well as a plot device in many stories. Most of the time, you don’t have to worry about how they’re made or how they survived for so long. But when you do, it helps to think about what’s needed to make something like an artifact. In modern times, we’re starting to make some things like this. Voyager 2, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, and other things can act, in a sense, as our legacy. Ten thousand years from now, no matter what happens, they’ll likely still be around. What else will be?

Out of the dark: building the Dark Ages

We have an awful lot of fiction out there set in something not entirely unlike our Middle Ages. Almost every cookie-cutter fantasy world is faux-medieval, and that’s only the ones that aren’t trying to be. The Renaissance and early Industrial Era also get plenty of love, and Roman antiquity even comes up from time to time. But there’s one time period in our history that seems a bit…left out. I’m talking about those centuries after Rome fell to the barbarian hordes, but before William crossed the Channel to give England the same fate. I’m talking about the Dark Ages.

A brighter shade of dark

Now, as we know today, what previous generations called the Dark Ages weren’t really all that dark. Sure, there were Vikings and Vandals, barbarians and Britons, Goths and Gauls, but it wasn’t a complete disaster. The reason we speak of the “Dark Ages”, though, is contrast. Rome was a magnificent empire by any account, and the first to coin the “Dark Age” moniker on its fallen children were living in the equally “shining” Enlightenment. By comparison, the time between wasn’t exactly grand.

Even in our modern knowledge, the notion of a Dark Age is still useful, even if it doesn’t quite mean what we think it means. In general, we can use it to refer to any period of technological, social, and political stagnation and regression. That’s not to say there wasn’t progress in the Dark Ages. One great book about the period is titled Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel, and that’s a pretty good indication of some of the advancement that did happen.

Compared to what came before—the Roman empire, with its Colosseum and aqueducts and roads—there’s a huge difference, especially at the start of the Dark Ages. In some parts of Europe, particularly those farthest from the imperial center, general conditions fell to their lowest levels in hundreds of years. While the Empire itself actually did survive in the east in the form of the Byzantines (who were even considered the “true” emperors by the first generations of barbarian kings), the west was shattered, and it showed. But they dug themselves out of that hole, as we know.

Dying light

So, even granting our more limited definition of “Dark Ages”, what caused them? Well, there are a lot of theories. Rome was sacked in 476, of course, and that’s usually considered a primary cause. A serious cold snap starting around 536 couldn’t have helped matters. Plagues around the same time combined with the war and famine to cause even greater death, completing the quartet of the Horsemen.

But all that together shouldn’t have been enough to devastate the society of western Europe, should it? If it happened today, it wouldn’t, because our world is so connected, so small, relative to Roman times. If the whole host of apocalyptic horror visited the EU today, hundreds of millions of people would die, but we wouldn’t have a new Dark Age. The reason can be summed up in one word: continuity.

Yes, half of the Roman Empire survived. In a way, it was the stronger half, but it was also the more distant half. When Rome fell, when all the other catastrophes visited its remnants, the effect was to cause a cultural break. Many parts of the empire were already more or less autonomous, growing ever more apart, and the loss of the “center of gravity” that was Rome merely hastened the process.

A look at Britain illustrates this. After Rome all but gave up on its island colony, England all but gave up on it. Outside of the monasteries, Rome was practically forgotten within a few generations, once the Saxons and their other Germanic friends rolled in. The Danes that started vacationing there in the ninth century cared even less for news from four hundred years ago. By the time William came conquering, Anglo-Saxon England was a far cry from Roman Britannia. This is an extreme example, though, because there was almost no continuity in Britain to start with, so there wasn’t much to lose. However, similar stories appear throughout Europe.

Recurring nightmare

Although Europe’s Dark Ages are a thousand years past, they aren’t the only example of the kind of discontinuity of a Dark Age. Something of the same sort happened in Greece two thousand years before that. The native peoples of America can be considered to have a Dark Age that started circa 1500, as the mighty empires of Mexico and Peru fell to Spanish invaders.

In every case, though, it’s more than just the fall of a civilization. A Dark Age needs a prolonged period of destruction, probably at least two generations long. To make an age go Dark requires severe population loss, a total breakdown of government, and the forcing of a kind of “siege mentality” on a society. Climatic shifts are just a bonus. In all, a Dark Age results from a perfect storm of causes, all of which combine to break the people. Eventually, due to the death, destruction, and constant need to be on guard, everything else falls by the wayside. There simply aren’t enough people to keep things going. Once those that are left start dying off, the noose closes. The circle is broken, and darkness settles in.

That naturally leads to another question: could we have a new Dark Age? It’s hard to imagine, in our present time of progress, something ever causing it to stop, but that doesn’t make it impossible. Indeed, almost the entire sub-genre of post-apocalyptic fiction hinges on this very event. It can happen, but—thankfully—it won’t be easy.

What would it take, then? Well, like the Dark Ages that have come before, it would be a combination of factors. Something causing death on a massive, unprecedented scale. Something to put humanity on the back foot, to disrupt the flow of society so completely that it would take more than a lifetime to recover. In that case, it would never recover, because there would be no one left who remembered the “old days”. There would be no more continuity.

I can think of a few ways that could work. The ever-popular asteroid or comet impact is an easy one, and it even has the knock-on effect of a severe climate shock. Nuclear war never really seemed likely in my lifetime, but I was born in 1983, so I missed the darker days of the Cold War. I did watch WarGames, though, and I remember seeing those world maps lighting up at the end. Two hundred years after that, and I don’t think we’re looking at a Fallout game.

Other options all have their problems. An incredibly virulent outbreak (Plague, Inc. or your favorite zombie movie) might work, but it would have to be so bad that it makes the 1918 flu look like the common cold. Zika is in the news right now, but it simply won’t cut it, nor would Ebola. You need something highly infectious, but with a long incubation period and a massive mortality rate. It’s hard to find a virus that fits all three of those, for evolutionary reasons. The other forms of infectious agents—bacteria, fungi, prions—all have their own disadvantages.

Climate change is the watchword of the day, but it won’t cause a Dark Age by itself. It’s too slow, and even the most alarming predictions don’t take us to temperatures much higher than a few thousand years ago, and that’s assuming that nobody ever does anything about it. No matter what you believe about global warming, you can’t make it enough to break us without some help.

Terminator-style AI is another possibility, one looking increasingly likely these days. It has some potential for catastrophe, but I’m not sure about using it as the continuity-breaker. The same goes for nanotech bots and the like. Maybe they’ll enslave us, but they won’t beat us down so badly that we lose everything.

And then there’s aliens. (Insert History Channel guy here.) An alien-imposed destruction of civilization would be the logical extension of the Roman hordes into the global future. Their attacks would likely be massive enough to influence the planet’s climate. They would cause us to huddle together for mutual defense, assuming they left any of us alive and alone. Yeah, that could work. It needs a lot of ifs, but it’s plausible enough to make for a good story.

The light returns

The Dark Age has to come to an end. It can’t last forever. But there’s no easy signal that it’s over. Instead, it’s a gradual thing. The key point here, though, is that what comes out of the Dark Age won’t be the same as what went in. Look again at Europe. After Rome fell, some of its advances—concrete is a good example—were lost to its descendants for a thousand years. Yet the continent did finally surpass the empire.

Over time, the natural course of progress will lift the Dark Age area to a level that is near enough where it left off, and things can proceed from there. It will be a different place, and that’s because of the discontinuity that caused the darkness in the first place. The old ways become lost, yes, but once we discover the new ways, they’ll be even better.

We stand on the shoulders of giants, as Newton said. Those giants are our ancestors, whether physically or culturally. Sometimes they fall, and sometimes the fall is bad enough that it breaks them. Then we must stand on our own and become our own giants. The Dark Age is that time when we’re standing alone.

Naming languages: personal names

Everyone has a name. Most people have more than one. Every year, thousands of expecting mothers buy books listing baby names, their meanings, and their origins. Entire websites (my favorite is Behind the Name) are dedicated to the same thing. Unlike place names, people’s names truly are personal.

Authors of fantasy and fiction have a few options in their quest for distinctive names. A lot of them take the easy route of using real-world names, and that’s fine. Equally valid is the Tolkien method of constructing an elaborate cultural and linguistic framework, and making names out of that. But we can also take a middle approach with a naming language.

Making a name for yourself

Given names (“first” names, for Westerners) are the oldest. For a long time, most people were known only by their given names. Surnames (“last” names) probably originated as a way to distinguish between people with the same given name.

How parents name their children depends very much on their culture and their language. Surnames can be passed down from father—or mother, in a matriarchal society—to child, or they can be derived from a parent’s name, as in Iceland. Given names can come from just about anywhere, and many of their origins are lost to time. But plenty of them are traceable, as the baby-book authors well know.

The last shall be first

Let’s start with surnames, for the same reason I focused on English place names last week: they’re easier to analyze. Quite a few surnames, in fact, are place names. On my mother’s side are the Hatfields—yes, them—whose ancestors, at some point in history, lived in a place called Hatfield. In general, that’s going to be the case with “toponymic” surnames. Somebody took (or was given) the name of his home town/village/kingdom as his own.

Occupations are another common way of getting a surname. My last name, Potter, surely means that someone in my family tree made pottery for a living. He then passed the name, but not the occupation, to his son, and thus a family name was born. The same is true for a hundred other common surnames, from Smith (any kind will do) to Cooper (a barrel maker) to Fuller (a wool worker) to Shoemaker (that one’s easy). A great many of these come from fields long obsolete, which gives you an idea of how old they are.

Some cultures create a surname from a parent’s given name. That’s closer to the norm in Iceland, but it occurs in other places, too. Even in English, we have names like Johnson, Danielson, and so on.

Other possibilities include simply using first names as last names, reusing historical or religious names (St. John), taking names of associated animals or plants, and almost anything else you can think of.

What’s your name?

For given names, occupations and places don’t crop up nearly as much. Instead, these names were originally intended to reflect things like qualities and deeds. When given to a child, they were a kind of hopeful association. You don’t name a boy “high lord” because he is one, but because you want him to be one.

Again, cultural factors play a huge role. Many English names come from old Anglo-Saxon ones, but just as many derive from the Bible, the most important book in England for about a millennium. Biblical influences changed the name game all over Europe, in fact. (Christianity didn’t wipe out the old names, though. Variants of Thor are still popular.)

Other parts of the world have their own naming conventions. In Japan, for instance, Ichiro is a name given to firstborn sons, and that’s essentially its meaning: “first”. And many of those Bible names, from Michael (mine!) and Mary to Hezekiah and Ezekiel, they all have connotations that don’t nicely translate into our terms. Some of them, thanks to Semitic morphology, encompass what would be whole sentences in English.

Foreign names are often imported, usually as people move around. In modern times, with the greater mobility of the average person, names are leaving their native regions and spreading everywhere. They move as their host cultures do; colonization brought European names to indigenous people—when it didn’t wipe those people out.

All for you

The culture is going to play a big role in what names you make. How do your people think? What is important to them? A very pious people will have a lot more names containing religious elements (e.g., Godwin, Christopher). A subjugated culture will import names from its oppressors, whether on its own or by decree.

Language plays a factor, as well. Look at the difference between Chinese names (Guan, Lu, Chiang) and Japanese (Fujiwara, Shinzo, Nagano). There’s a lot of culture overlap due to history, but the names are completely different.

Also, the phonology and syllable structure of a language will affect the names it creates. With a restricted set of potential syllables, it’s more natural to make names longer, so they’ll be more distinct. (Chinese, obviously, is an exception, but polysyllabic Chinese names are a lot more common in modern times.) Names can be short or long in any language, however. That part’s up to you.

As with place names, you’ll want a good stock of “building blocks”. These will include more adjectives than the place-name set, especially positive traits (“strong”, “high”, “beautiful”). The noun set will also represent those same qualities, especially the selection of animals: “wolf” and “bear” are common in Anglo-Saxon names, for example. Occupational terms (agent nouns) will come in handy for surnames, as will your collection of place names.

Finally, personal names will change over time. They’ll evolve with their languages. And they’ll adapt when they’re borrowed. That’s how we go from old Greek Petros to English Peter, French Pierre, Spanish Pedro, and Russian Pyotr.

To finish this post off, here are some Isian names. First, the surnames:

Modafo “of the hill” (modas “hill” + fo “from”)
Ostanas “hunter” (ostani “to hunt” + -nas)
Samajo “man of the west” (sam “man” + jo “west”)
Raysencat “red stone” (ray “red” + sencat “stone”)

Now, some given names:

Lukadomo “bright lord” (luka “bright” + domo “lord”)
Iche “beautiful girl” (reduced ichi “beautiful” + eshe “girl”)
Tonseca “sword arm” (ton “arm” + seca “sword”)
Otasida “bearer of the sun” (otasi “to hold” + sida “sun”)

In Isian, names follow the Western ordering, so one can imagine speakers named Tonseca Samajo or Iche Modafo. What names will you make?

Magic and tech: information technology

In our modern era, we are well and truly blessed when it comes to information. We have the Internet, of course, with its wealth of knowledge. In only a few seconds, any of us can call up even the most obscure facts. Sure, it’s far from perfect, but it’s more than people from just a hundred years ago could dream of. To someone from the Renaissance or earlier, it really would be magic.

Information

Since the written record is often all we have of older cultures, it’s fairly easy to trace the development of information technology. The Internet is only a few decades old, as we know. Telephones, television, and telegraphs (notice a theme there?) preceded that. Radio transmission goes back only a hundred years or so; before its invention, your choices for communication were mostly limited to the written word.

Writing dates back millennia. It’s the oldest and most stable method of storing information that we have. From clay tablets and inscriptions, we can follow its trail through the ages. Papyrus and parchment have been replaced by paper, which is now giving way to LEDs and flash memory, but the idea remains the same. Although the form modern writing takes would astound anyone from earlier times, its function would be familiar in an instant.

In those older days, what options do you have for information and communication? If you’re literate—not everyone was—you can write, obviously, but there’s only so much that gets you. The Chinese invented a printing press about a thousand years ago, but they didn’t really find it useful; if you look at the Chinese script, you’ll probably see why. The Western, alphabetic, world loved it when they got it four centuries later. Copying by hand was your only option for most things before that. (Seals and stamps had limited use, and block printing didn’t show up in Europe until a couple of generations before Gutenberg.)

The form of a written text also changed through history. That’s mostly because of the conditions. Scrolls work better for some materials, but the codex (books like ours) is more compact, and it’s a more natural fit for paper. And letters can be written on anything handy, even bits of other works!

Add the magic

So, in the era we’re covering, the printing press hasn’t been invented. Woodblocks are a new innovation just now trickling in. Most work is done on parchment, some on paper, and it’s done almost exclusively by hand. Scribing and copying are important professions, and their services are always in high demand. And, thanks to the relative lack of supply, the written word is expensive. Can our magical society improve on this state of affairs? If so, how?

A general copying spell (like D&D’s Amanuensis) is too much to ask for, but that hasn’t stopped some mages from trying. But our magic kingdom does have a few information innovations that have become commonplace. One isn’t connected to writing at all, but to speaking: a spell that increases the volume and clarity of a speaker’s voice. In other words, it’s a PA system. In real life, before the invention of electrical amplification, you had to use natural means, mostly in the form of architecture; amphitheaters aren’t built that way just for looks. In this magical land, though, a good acoustic setting is no longer so vital. Anyone can make his voice heard, anywhere, no matter how large the crowd.

Long-distance communication also isn’t as big a problem. Historically, conversing with someone in another city was hard, involving a back-and-forth series of letters. With the upgraded travel abilities of this society, mail delivery gets a boost, too, but that’s not the only option. Through use of a hand-sized glass ball (essentially the same as a crystal ball or Tolkien’s palantír), direct communication can be achieved. It’s highly limited, however. For one, there’s the expense of creating and imbuing the spheres. Then, it’s only a one-to-one system, as speech is transmitted in something like telepathy. No conference calls or broadcasts, unfortunately.

But even this is a huge step up from couriers. Every town of more than a few hundred people has at least one dedicated connection, usually staffed by junior or washed-up mages. For a small fee, short messages can be sent over the spheres to loved ones, acquaintances, or tradesmen in nearby cities. Longer distances can be covered by a relay system, and the biggest cities are set up as centralized “hubs”, with dozens of connections to their neighbors and the most important places.

The overall effect is a society where people are more likely to be aware of what’s outside their locale. Like the telegraph systems of the 1800s (which directly influenced this idea), communication in this world has become more “real-time”. Unlike telegraphs, the magic spheres are wireless, so they can also be taken aboard ships and to foreign lands. No more waiting two years to hear from sailors at sea, not when they can give you daily updates. True, they may only be a few words in length, but Twitter only gives you 140 characters, and people love it.

More magic

So that’s communication improved by magic. What about the storage of information? We can’t do too much better than printed books without some serious technological improvement, and I’ve already said that these guys don’t even have printing. Can we do better than hand-copied manuscripts?

By using the same endurance spells as before, scribes can work longer and faster, increasing their output. Memory-aiding spells, which have near-infinite uses, can give a true photographic memory that would mean fewer books are necessary; high wizards are their own libraries. (That also cuts down on spell thievery and protects the secrets of the arcane from outsiders.)

A path recently explored involves an enchanted plate of glass. That’s already a hard sell, due to the higher cost of plate glass—magic helps this somewhat, as we’ll see later on—and the further expense of the enchantment. But this particular spell “freezes” an image in the glass for a time. The mage holds the pane between himself and the scene he wishes to capture, and he invokes the spell. Almost instantly, the image is frozen. It’s not permanent (it lasts a few years at most) but it does record in clear color. The downside is that one piece of this glass can only “hold” a single picture. The first use of this particular advance in magic has been in art, strangely enough, capturing images that painters can then use as models.

The wizards do have a few other minor aids to information technology. Invisible ink is known in our world, but they have a variant that really is invisible to anyone other than another mage. Short-distance voice transmission spells are easy enough that they’re mostly used by young adepts for pranks. Writing materials are not limited to parchment and paper; “burning” pens allow one to write on wood, metal, or just about anything else. But the more traditional materials are also easier to make, thanks to spells that speed the fabrication processes. And when printing does come, magical propulsion will quickly make it as fast as Industrial-era presses.

What do you know?

In the end, the magical society doesn’t have much that can top handwriting…yet. That doesn’t mean they’re stuck with medieval-era information tech, though. The magic-based telegraph and photograph are some 500 years ahead of their natural counterparts, and they both help to create a populace more aware of its surroundings, of its setting. On top of that, scribes can work harder and faster (and with better eyesight!) than their Earthly kin, meaning that they make more books. More books means more opportunity to read, which encourages a higher literacy rate. The final result: a well-read, well-informed people.

It’s far from modern, granted. It’s not even that close to Victorian, except for our magical answer to the telegraph. But the larger amount of information available is going to have a ripple effect, as we’ll see in coming posts. Everything from espionage to economics changes when people know what’s going on.

Naming languages: place names

Once you have the bare skeleton of a conlang necessary for making names, you’ll probably want to start making them. In my view, most names can be divided into two broad categories: place names and personal names. Sure, these aren’t the only ones out there, but they’re the two most important kinds. Historically, however, they follow different rules, so we’ll treat them separately. Place names are, in my opinion, easier to study, so they’ll come first.

Building blocks

The absolute best part of the world for the study of place names has to be England. Most conlangers speak English, most conlanging materials are in English, and most places in England are named in English. Even better, many English places have names that are wonderfully transparent in their formation, and that gives us a leg up on our own efforts. Thus, I’ll be using examples from England in this post. (A lot of American names tend to copy English ones in style and form, but there are also plenty that come from other languages, and not all of them Indo-European. That makes things much harder, so we’ll stick to English simplicity.)

The first thing to realize when looking at place names, or toponyms, is that they reflect a place’s history. As I’m writing this, I have Google Maps opened up to show southern England, and I can already find a few easy examples: Oxford, Newport, Ashford, Cambridge, and Bournemouth. For most of these, it should be obvious how they got their names (“ford of the oxen”, “the new port”, “ford near ash trees”), while others need a little bit of puzzling out (“bridge at the Cam river” and “mouth of the bourne”—a bourne was a small stream or brook).

These few examples show the basic method of making place names. First, you need a number of words in a few classes. Geographical features (“river”, “sea”, “forest”, etc.) are one of the main ones. Another covers human constructs (“town”, “hamlet”, “village”, “fort”, “mill”, “bridge”, and a thousand others). Animal names can come into play, too, as in “Oxford”. Also, a few descriptive adjectives, such as color terms, are immensely helpful, and you can even throw in some prepositions, too.

Just putting these together in the English style—but using the words and rules of your naming language—nets you a large number of place names. For example, here are some place names in Isian, an ongoing conlang of my Let’s make a language series:

Raymodas, “red hill” (ray “red” + modas “hill”)
Ekheblon, “new city” (ekho “new” + eblon “city”)
Jadalod, “on the sea” (jadal “sea” + od “on”)
Lishos, “sweet water” (lishe “sweet” + shos “water”)
Omislakho “king’s island” (omis “island” + lakh “king” + o “of”)

Notice that a few of these have had their constituent parts modified slightly. This can be for reasons of euphony (e.g., vowels merging) or evolution. Also, places with names meaning the exact same thing can be found in the real world. The historical city of Carthage derives its name from the Phoenician for “new city”, and there’s a Sweetwater not too far from where I live.

Changing the names

While most place names are derived in the above fashion, some of them don’t seem to be. But if you look closer, you can find their roots. Those roots often paint a picture of the life of a place, and they can even be a tool in the archaeologist’s toolbox. The way some English place names changed, for instance, illustrates the pattern of invasions across that country. Viking invasions gave York its name, as they did with a number of towns ending in -by. Celtic influences can be found if you look hard enough; “Thames” most likely comes from that family. And don’t forget the Romans.

Of course, names are words or combinations of words, and they are just as susceptible to linguistic evolution. That’s how we get to Lyon from Lugdunum and Marseilles from Massalia, but it works on smaller scales, too. One of the most common changes that affects names is a reduction in unstressed syllables, as in the popular element -ton, derived from town. (The English, admittedly, take this a little too far. If you didn’t know how Worcester and Leicester were pronounced, could you ever guess?)

Names can also be borrowed from languages, just like any other word. This happened extensively in North America, where native names were picked up (and mangled) by European settlers. This is especially noticeable to me, given where I live. Sale Creek, my current home, is purely English and obvious. But I moved here from nearby Soddy, and no one can seem to agree on an etymology for that name. The nearest “big city” of Chattanooga derives from the Muskogean language, while the state’s name, Tennessee, comes from a Cherokee name that they borrowed from earlier inhabitants.

What this means is that some of your names don’t have to be analyzable. If you find a sequence of sounds you like, but you can’t find a way to fit it into your naming language, no problem. Say it’s a foreign or ancient name, and nobody will complain. That’s basically how our world works: some names can be broken down, others are black boxes. This can even give you a bit of a hook for worldbuilding. Why is there an oddball name there? Is it a regional thing, maybe from some barbarian invasion a thousand years ago? Or was it named after a forgotten emperor?

Onward

Next week, we’ll close out this miniseries of posts by looking at the names of people. These are intimately related to the names of places, but they deserve their own time in the spotlight. Until then, draw a map and put some names on it!

Naming languages

A naming language is the second-simplest kind of constructed language. (The simplest conlang is what’s sometimes called a “relex”, basically a form of English with all the words changed, but with the same grammar.) If all you need is a way to productively create alien-sounding names for people and places in a setting, with little regard to grammatical, syntactic, or naturalistic concerns, then a naming language is a good compromise between throwing some sounds together and creating a whole conlang.

Elements of a naming language

First and foremost, a naming language isn’t a full language. You can get away with cutting so many corners that you’re left with a circle. Throw out stuff like subordinate clauses and subjunctive moods. You won’t need them. True, some cultures have names that are complete sentences, but those are rarely the kind of complex structures requiring a whole conlanging effort. No, for naming languages, we can strip things down to the bare necessities.

One thing we’ll need is a phonology, a sound inventory. This can be whatever you like, whatever you think sounds best. Since we won’t have a lot of the grammatical cues of a full conlang, the phonology is going to determine the basic feel of our naming language. If you’re working with aliens, try to think of the sounds they would make, and then think of how a human would interpret them. For human cultures, look for inspiration in the languages of those cultures you want to emulate.

Next, you can work out a way to turn those sounds into syllables, then into words. Once again, use appropriate human languages as a guide, but not a straitjacket. At this stage, you can go ahead and make some simple words that you think might come in handy. Names for people and places follow different rules, and I’ll do a post for each in the coming weeks, but think of common objects, terrain features, activities, and occupations. Those are a good start.

Third, naming languages do need a little bit of grammar. It’s nothing close to what a “real” language would have, though. Your primary concern is making names, so you really only need the grammar necessary to make them. Simple combinations of nouns and adjectives work just fine for many cases; all you have to decide is what order they go in. You can throw in verbs, too, but don’t worry too much about case or mood or things like that. Those are only distractions.

Lastly, remember that languages change. Names change, too, but under different conditions. Place names tend to follow the phonological changes of their “host” cultures more closely than personal names, but the latter certainly aren’t immune to evolution. And some names pick up (or lose) connotations as their languages and cultures change. This is especially common for personal names. Boys’ names become girls’ names, and vice versa. Names fall out of fashion (Puritan names like “Increase” don’t find much traction today) while new ones arise from cultural shifts (witness the current popularity of fantasy names like Daenerys).

Place names can change, too, but this usually requires a massive shift in the cultural or political situation. For real-world examples, look at Burma/Myanmar, or the mass renaming of cities in India, or the changing of American place names in the pursuit of political correctness.

To be continued

In the next two weeks, I’ll go into more detail about each of the two main types of names. Next week, we’ll look at place names, because I think they’re easier and more transparent. After that will be personal names, with some closing thoughts on making “alien” names.