Zompist Bboard Again

Some academics have used the term "Flintstoning" to refer to the projection of modern assumptions onto past populations. The eponymous example is the Flintstones, where people living thousands or tens of thousands of years in the past live in nuclear-family dwellings with lawnmowers and garbage disposals. Jetsoning would be the same process projected into the future: Asimov gives his future dwellers FTL drive and sentient robots, but assumes that future people will have gender roles indistinguishable from a 1940s PTA meeting.

I recently read a fantasy story set in an otherwise very interesting pseudo-medieval pseudo-European conworld, where the protagonist rides into the city to find its streets lit by torches on sticks placed at major intersections. I was so struck by the silliness of this that it took me right out of the story for a few minutes. But the idea that pre-modern people had modern relationships with light (i.e. everywhere you go, there is light available if you want it) is a tenacious one in fantasy.

In a way, this is the opposite of the Tiffany thread in Ephemera, but I want to focus on real examples from conworlds. What are some examples of Flintstoning or Jetsoning that you have encountered in conworlds, and has it ever soured you on a setting? Have you ever seen it done well?

Honestly, the place where this caught me the worst was in The Dragon Prince. It’s a quasi-medieval society that’s been in a state of Cold War with elves and dragons for a thousand years, and...they still revere them, because they’re not led by humans? Elves are allowed to literally imitate humans and mock them for having money and wars (both of which are kind of unavoidable if you don’t have elvish magic) and the humans applaud this, well, blackface? The only ruler shown to amount to anything is a twelve-year-old queen with two (dead) mothers? An absolute monarch puts forward a theory of justice from a modern-day ethics course, but barely acts on it? Haiku instead of roundels, with no indication that there’s any cultural context to it? I am annoyed.

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Thu Dec 24, 2020 12:11 am I recently read a fantasy story set in an otherwise very interesting pseudo-medieval pseudo-European conworld, where the protagonist rides into the city to find its streets lit by torches on sticks placed at major intersections. I was so struck by the silliness of this that it took me right out of the story for a few minutes. But the idea that pre-modern people had modern relationships with light (i.e. everywhere you go, there is light available if you want it) is a tenacious one in fantasy.

Possibly a stupid question, but why are mediaeval street lamps silly? Even the Indus Valley had them, after all.

I guess the canonical example would be Astérix, though I'm not sure whether that, strictly speaking, counts as a conworld.

bradrn wrote: ↑Thu Dec 24, 2020 1:37 am Possibly a stupid question, but why are mediaeval street lamps silly? Even the Indus Valley had them, after all.

They're not proper street lamps unless at least one of them has stopped working for no obvious reason.

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Thu Dec 24, 2020 12:11 amSome academics have used the term "Flintstoning" to refer to the projection of modern assumptions onto past populations. The eponymous example is the Flintstones, where people living thousands or tens of thousands of years in the past live in nuclear-family dwellings with lawnmowers and garbage disposals. Jetsoning would be the same process projected into the future: Asimov gives his future dwellers FTL drive and sentient robots, but assumes that future people will have gender roles indistinguishable from a 1940s PTA meeting.

I had always thought the Flintstones was always intended to be a portrayal of the culture of the time, given simply a veneer of something else to make the portrayal more palatable, and to allow them to push certain boundaries. If I understand correctly, Wilma's pregnancy being mentioned at all, much less depicted to any extent, was controversial at the time. The Jetsons were on some level the same thing: a product for an intended culture with a veneer of being set in something else.

While I know this isn't the point of the thread, I think it does bear pointing out that this is frequent. The Mikado, for example, is very much a satire on Victorian Britain, and has nothing whatever to do with Japan (where it is ostensibly set); The Threepenny Opera also comes to mind. The point of those two works was never immersion, but something for the time and society for and in which they were produced. It might be a useful distinction to make.

Most modern readers wouldn't catch this, but on the subject you're actually looking for — Ann Radcliffe likes to put fashionable things from her own time, like landscape-viewing and drinking coffee, into Continental Europe in the centuries that preceded here (one scene from Mysteries of Udolpho shows French peasant farmers in the late 1600s or early 1700s having coffee casually about long before it would have been introduced); while it did not break my immersion, it was undoubtedly amusing to read the footnote (I did wonder that they could afford what, at the time, I was sure must have been a luxury, but my immersion is also very hard to break).

I will admit that the words "Flintstoning" and "Jetsoning" are both much catchier than any more indicative (but certainly boring) term I could come up with would be.

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Thu Dec 24, 2020 12:11 amI recently read a fantasy story set in an otherwise very interesting pseudo-medieval pseudo-European conworld, where the protagonist rides into the city to find its streets lit by torches on sticks placed at major intersections. I was so struck by the silliness of this that it took me right out of the story for a few minutes. But the idea that pre-modern people had modern relationships with light (i.e. everywhere you go, there is light available if you want it) is a tenacious one in fantasy.

I feel like this would really depend on the fantasy. If it were otherwise a pretty hard adherence to what Mediaeval life was like for an ordinary person, this would feel very "wrong" indeed; if the technology isn't much past it on some levels, but on others you have magic replacing it, the Mediaeval Stasis may be assumed, I think, to be breaking, especially if you have intrusions of later times in certain parts of the setting (I could very well see Hobbits and Elves having this sort of relationship with light, but not much of the rest of Middle Earth, Hobbits being much more Victorian or Edwardian, and Elves being magical ancients).

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Thu Dec 24, 2020 12:11 amIn a way, this is the opposite of the Tiffany thread in Ephemera, but I want to focus on real examples from conworlds. What are some examples of Flintstoning or Jetsoning that you have encountered in conworlds, and has it ever soured you on a setting? Have you ever seen it done well?

Chaucer doing this in The Knight's Tale (in which he directly, and I think unironically, refers to ancient Greek warriors as "knights") comes to mind as an example where it at least does not bother me at all. I can simply enjoy a very broad range of fiction, however; if something feels anachronistic, I'm very likely to gloss it over if I'm enjoying the rest.

Rounin Ryuuji wrote: ↑Thu Dec 24, 2020 9:32 am Most modern readers wouldn't catch this, but on the subject you're actually looking for — Ann Radcliffe likes to put fashionable things from her own time, like landscape-viewing and drinking coffee, into Continental Europe in the centuries that preceded here (one scene from Mysteries of Udolpho shows French peasant farmers in the late 1600s or early 1700s having coffee casually about long before it would have been introduced); while it did not break my immersion, it was undoubtedly amusing to read the footnote (I did wonder that they could afford what, at the time, I was sure must have been a luxury, but my immersion is also very hard to break).

The timing may be off, but surely not by centuries. There was a coffeehouse in Rome in 1645, and one in Oxford by 1654. The coffeehouse that inspired Bach's Coffee Cantata was built in 1715. It was probably an urban thing for a long time, though.

zompist wrote: ↑Thu Dec 24, 2020 3:32 pm

Rounin Ryuuji wrote: ↑Thu Dec 24, 2020 9:32 am Most modern readers wouldn't catch this, but on the subject you're actually looking for — Ann Radcliffe likes to put fashionable things from her own time, like landscape-viewing and drinking coffee, into Continental Europe in the centuries that preceded here (one scene from Mysteries of Udolpho shows French peasant farmers in the late 1600s or early 1700s having coffee casually about long before it would have been introduced); while it did not break my immersion, it was undoubtedly amusing to read the footnote (I did wonder that they could afford what, at the time, I was sure must have been a luxury, but my immersion is also very hard to break).

The timing may be off, but surely not by centuries. There was a coffeehouse in Rome in 1645, and one in Oxford by 1654. The coffeehouse that inspired Bach's Coffee Cantata was built in 1715. It was probably an urban thing for a long time, though.

I went back and checked — the novel is apparently set in 1584 (it's been so long since I read it, I'd confused the setting with The Italian, which was set in 1758). I really ought to have gone back and looked before posting. It isn't as huge a distance as some things mentioned here, but it did spring to mind as something similar. Not off by centuries, no, but off by more than my initial posting would imply.

(I also have learnt Bach wrote a Coffee Cantata today. Yay, knowledge!)

An instance of Flintstoning, but in historical fiction. In the Roma Sub Rosa series, the protagonist regularly comments on how slavery is immoral (a thought that wouldn't have occured to a Roman...)

Jetsoning: Heinlein. Even in polyamorous matriarchies, wives still belong in the kitchen, and settling alien planets is functionally identical to homesteading in Oregon.

I don't count Astérix since it's done on purpose. (I'm rereading them with my daughter and some of the jokes are lost now... Not much of Astérix in Hispania makes sense now, the Brit don't close everything down on the weekend now, people from Auvergne don't have much of an accent...)

Not quite Flintstoning... But I like the idea that technology in a conworld doesn.t necessarily conform to our timeline.
A neat example was in Green Antarctica: the Tsalal figure out gunpowder early (but not guns!)

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Thu Dec 24, 2020 12:11 amAsimov gives his future dwellers FTL drive and sentient robots, but assumes that future people will have gender roles indistinguishable from a 1940s PTA meeting.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Fri Dec 25, 2020 12:34 pmJetsoning: Heinlein. Even in polyamorous matriarchies, wives still belong in the kitchen, and settling alien planets is functionally identical to homesteading in Oregon.

These are really good examples and this bit has in particular not aged well. The status of women in Dune is another one, although there you can find more in-world justification – the story is set at least 10,000 years in the future so there may have been a lot of regression. (The whole I would poke in that is SPOILER how the book ends, the whole bit about female and male energies etc.)

But of course, I would say most of this fiction isn't necessarily meant as a fully predictive – they're usually modeling 1 or 2 major concepts as different from the world they occupy and leave the rest as is so as to not overcomplicate the narrative. But now it's starting to sound I'm an apologist for the regressive views of classical sci-fi authors on women and should probably stop!

An instance of Flintstoning, but in historical fiction. In the Roma Sub Rosa series, the protagonist regularly comments on how slavery is immoral (a thought that wouldn't have occured to a Roman...)

This is a little annoying from a historical point of view, but from a narrative point of view I think it's unavoidable. We live in a time when the morality of slavery is well and truly settled, but all the wounds haven't quite healed yet. So giving your supposedly sympathetic hero an ambivalence toward human bondage would be distracting and probably ruin the character for some readers. You see the same thing in Game of Thrones. Every man, woman, and child in Westeros wakes up in the morning and thinks "Hmm, I wonder whom I will rape and dismember today?" You can throw babies off a cliff and probably get a medal for it. But if you're complicit in slavery, oh man, that crosses the line! And I don't blame the author, because otherwise the "good guys" (to the extent there are good guys in GoT) would not be likable enough.

To me, it becomes a problem when it's clearly an accidental blind spot of the author's. It shows that they haven't built a place that feels real, because they haven't thought out all the details. Some weird details are consciously made for story purposes, and come with internal explanations ("Why do the wizards of Harry Potter use money when they've lived in a post-scarcity economy for thousands of years?" "Why do the people of Westeros draw the line on slavery when they are fine with every other cruelty?"), and that's fine. But some are the product of carelessness ("How do total automation and wage employment coexist in the Robot books?" "Seriously, street lamp torches? Does someone come by every couple of hours and re-soak them in beef suet?"), and that's less fine.

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Mon Dec 28, 2020 11:10 am

An instance of Flintstoning, but in historical fiction. In the Roma Sub Rosa series, the protagonist regularly comments on how slavery is immoral (a thought that wouldn't have occured to a Roman...)

This is a little annoying from a historical point of view, but from a narrative point of view I think it's unavoidable. We live in a time when the morality of slavery is well and truly settled, but all the wounds haven't quite healed yet. So giving your supposedly sympathetic hero an ambivalence toward human bondage would be distracting and probably ruin the character for some readers.

I can also see this being contextual, to an extent. I don't imagine present or former slaves have generally had a good opinion of slavery (there being exceptions, of course — for some it was probably better than the lives they were living before), and there must be some strain of humanity that finds the idea generally repulsive: the abolition won out in the end. While most people are content to take society as it is, you do get some outliers.

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Mon Dec 28, 2020 11:10 amYou see the same thing in Game of Thrones. Every man, woman, and child in Westeros wakes up in the morning and thinks "Hmm, I wonder whom I will rape and dismember today?" You can throw babies off a cliff and probably get a medal for it. But if you're complicit in slavery, oh man, that crosses the line! And I don't blame the author, because otherwise the "good guys" (to the extent there are good guys in GoT) would not be likable enough.

I actually find the series difficult to watch because of this. I don't like the characters enough to excuse the fact that the world seems bent on wallowing in cynicism and muck. Other people seem to like it, though, perhaps because of what you've mentioned about the wounds of slavery not being healed yet, and this giving the world enough morality for them.

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Mon Dec 28, 2020 11:10 amTo me, it becomes a problem when it's clearly an accidental blind spot of the author's. It shows that they haven't built a place that feels real, because they haven't thought out all the details. Some weird details are consciously made for story purposes, and come with internal explanations ("Why do the wizards of Harry Potter use money when they've lived in a post-scarcity economy for thousands of years?" "Why do the people of Westeros draw the line on slavery when they are fine with every other cruelty?"), and that's fine. But some are the product of carelessness ("How do total automation and wage employment coexist in the Robot books?" "Seriously, street lamp torches? Does someone come by every couple of hours and re-soak them in beef suet?"), and that's less fine.

This is reasonable. The lamplighter was once a profession, however, so I could see a society that really valued having a close relationship with light at all times having something similar. I think it would show in other ways than simply having torches at night — some sort of cultural fear of the dark, or some maleficent supernatural entity lurking in it, but easily driven off by light, might help if it's a fantasy.

Agreed. But again, the point is that it would have to be there on purpose, not because the author assumes that having shiny poles is just something that happens whenever there are streets. Wizards can have money; it just needs to be a deliberate choice with an explanation.

Yes, true, I was simply pondering instances in which it might've been realistic. In fiction, I find, you can justify having a great number of things, if only you take a moment to think about them.

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Mon Dec 28, 2020 11:10 am"Why do the people of Westeros draw the line on slavery when they are fine with every other cruelty?"), and that's fine.

People's moral systems are often paradoxical. Look at the US's founding fathers and the text of the constitution and then the actual meaning. We the people referred to a small subset of white males. Yet in many ways they were paragons of innovative new morality. And we have to look past the fact that most of them owned slaves, most of them probably killed people in their lifetimes, and many of them raped women/people and thought it was absolutely fine – but they also wrote the first amendment.

On slavery, Rome (the HBO show) in spite of its many faults did a good job portraying attitudes towards that institution, and a morality that could be unnervingly different from ours. The drawback is, of course, that many would find Pullo and Vorenus unrelatable.

Street lights are a good example. This is really a case of the writer shooting themselves in the foot: the night was creepy before electricity, and doubly so in large cities. Why miss that opportunity to build up atmosphere?

Not that street lights are necessarily implausible.
Paris had city lights early (by the end of the 18th century; according to folk etymology, that's why it's called the City of Lights), but the reason why is more interesting, I think: Paris was an incredibly dangerous place and doubly so at night, so much that the city authorities and the king were willing to go to extraordinary expense.

vegfarandi wrote: ↑Mon Dec 28, 2020 12:42 pm

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Mon Dec 28, 2020 11:10 am"Why do the people of Westeros draw the line on slavery when they are fine with every other cruelty?"), and that's fine.

People's moral systems are often paradoxical. Look at the US's founding fathers and the text of the constitution and then the actual meaning.

Nah, that doesn't bother me. That's just good foreshadowing.

But seriously, I will repeat since it seems to have been lost in translation: I would never suggest that everything in a story must "make sense," whatever sense we choose to apply. But there is a big difference between unusual choices made by the author, and unusual things that sneak in because the author is ignorant. As a case in point, my spouse and I just finished Bridgerton. Is that show historically accurate? Hell no. But the "inaccuracies" are actually deliberate satire, so it's fine. Bring on the rib-crushing corsets! Bring on the trope about women not being allowed to read books! That stuff's fine.

One of my family's favourite jokes is pointing out how a Nora Roberts book, there's a scene in late medieval Ireland had potatoes (my mother, the only one who read the book, does not remember if the whole book was set in medieval Ireland or just that scene).