SIM: The Spread of the New Learning

A couple of people insisted that the new technology introduced by Emily, the New Learning, had advanced and spread faster and further than it should have realistically done.  Obviously, there’s plenty of room for debate here, but there’s quite a few factors powering the New Learning that may not have been taken into account.

One – The Nameless World is not full of medieval morons.  The cities – and the city-states – attracted vast numbers of runaway serfs and peasants who were willing to work hard to build lives for themselves that didn’t include toiling in the field for minimum reward.  There was a reservoir of highly-intelligent people, many of whom became craftsmen, merchants and even accountants/scribes.  The guilds did try to keep certain items of knowledge to themselves, particularly the various forms of writing, but their system was always leaky.  Ironically, many of the people they deprived of learning had to stretch their muscles to keep up – if you are forced to remember thousands of characters, remembering 26 is a snap. 

Two – Emily’s innovations did not come from her mind.  She didn’t invent them.  She knew how to use a mature system consisting of 26 letters and 10 numbers (plus various signs and marks).  The system had already had most of the kinks worked out by the time she learnt to read .  She had no trouble, therefore, teaching the system to her friends; people who wanted to copy it had no trouble stealing the system and spreading it far and wide.  The local rulers couldn’t do anything to stop it before it was already too late. 

Three – Emily ‘designed’ items she could either remember how to make in rough form or reason out the basic principles.  These ideas were forwarded to the reservoir of highly-intelligent craftsmen – see point one – who took the concepts and worked hard to make them work.  Unlike the inventors in our world, who had no way to know if they were heading towards something workable or simply wasting their time, they knew – through Emily – that there was something waiting for them at the far end.  The early steam engines were leaky jokes, for example; they knew to keep working until they had far more effective systems.

And none of these inventions could be effectively copy-righted.  A smart apprentice could memorise the design, then go elsewhere and start churning them out for himself. 

Four – Emily ‘accidentally’ triggered off something of an arms race, when gunpowder was developed and the first basic gunpowder weapons were demonstrated.  Again, the inventors knew there was something to find if they worked hard to develop new weapons.  Kingdoms that refused to experiment with firearms knew they’d lose out, when their rivals developed firearms for themselves; city-states knew that failing to develop firearms might lead to destruction when the nearby monarchs declared war.  There was no hope of putting the genie back in the bottle – states that tried simply lost inventors to other states. 

The combination of the four factors sparked off a whirlwind of innovation, an endless series of competitions to devise the next great thing before it was rendered obsolete.  

Don’t make of this more than it is.  There are railways, but it will be years before the Allied Lands are linked together as comprehensively as Britain or Europe.  There are places that have not – yet – been touched by the New Learning.  The really interesting developments are yet to come.