Writing What time periods do you think are underused as settings?

[Ai-chan]

This is just a little thought I've been having. It isn't really specific to any genre, but you see common settings:

Fantasy: medieval Europe
Sci fi: far future in space

That's just two examples - but what time periods do you think are underdone in each genre? Which ones do you think are done badly?

My personal gripe - so often, when fantasy takes notes from the 19th century, it is often steam punk - to the point that I tell people "my story is inspired by early 19th century America" and they're like "oh, so steam punk."

What are your thoughts on time period inspiration in your settings?

While the majority of Ai-chan's stories are set in low-tech eras such as classical era and middle ages, Ai-chan does write sci fi set in the future too, under various pen names. The reason why Ai-chan chose these time periods were because they were easy to bullshit, to build worlds of. Since Ai-chan has studied at a kenjutsu dojo and practiced archery since school days, writing about swordfights, spears and archery is easy to Ai-chan. As for sci-fi, it is easy to create whatever fantastic futuristic elements because this is far in the future and whatever physics we have established now can be supplanted by whatever technology in the future, such as FTL and particle beams weapons.

Ai-chan is not a full-time author and has only published one book so far, so Ai-chan can't spend too much time doing research. One of Ai-chan's friend who's trying to write an alternate history story of WW2 has been stumped for 3 years and has not written even one chapter. It's because despite buying a lot of books and doing research in libraries throughout the country, most of the key events were not recorded or was only written as a passing mention. Malaysians are shit at keeping records, and documents often even get misplaced whenever there was a reorganization. While he hasn't completed even a single chapter, Ai-chan has written 5 different books in the meantime.

Writing about the present time represents a huge issue. Namely, you will be working based on the current understanding of science. And if you even deviate slightly from that current understanding, whether intentional or unintentional, you get slammed hard by everyone. Look at Interstellar, Space Odyssey and The Martian. They were criticized a lot for deviating from known science, and some people actually slammed them hard for those inaccuracies. These are works done by a group of people with multiple screenwriters, each being able to do their own research and correct each other's mistakes. Ai-chan is just one person, and this one person has to pore through thousands of materials on my own and the kind of slamming Interstellar received would make a lone hobby author rage quit.

The only way a present day story made by a single author can prosper if you do not use technology, science or knowledge as its plot driver. What this means is, they all have to be either romance, mundane thriller, or coming of age. And guess what? That's the majority of the books we have in circulation these days, so present day time period is not under-utilized at all.

Similarly, not many people know of 19th century America, or care about 19th century America. Why? Because it's been used sooooooo much for the past hundred years. To most people, 19th century America is not steampunk, but it is instead the Wild West era. That means cowboys, indians, bisons, coal trains, Zorro and a huge mecha that two people on horseback have to chase and disable.

All the time periods are already utilized, and if you haven't seen it, that most likely means you haven't looked far enough. So what other time period would there be?

 

[Discount_Blade]

I like the ideas of Conan the Barbarian. In between Cavemen and Written History. I've never read the books but I've always found the "Lost Era" concept of it fascinating. A "Vanished or Forgotten" Age.

It's traditionally set during 10,000 B.C., though plenty of scientists who also found it interesting apparently, simply say "after the conclusion of the last ice age" since they for whatever reason, don't like adding actual datelines. The writer of the series had his own name for that period. Hyborian Age,

Hyborian Age - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Always wanted to do something similar but I can honestly say I would have no idea what to do. I mean, in this Hyborean Age, kingdoms do exist. It's not just hunter-gatherer. I mean there are hunter gatherers as well as various other forms of nomads, but various kingdoms with monarchies and social/political structures exist as well. Many of them in fact.

It's extremely interesting...but complicated for me to know how I would add a story into a similar period.

 

[ChronicleCrawler]

Stone age probably. No one wants to write much about people smashing stones against each other.

 

[K5Rakitan]

The Bronze Age

 

[Discount_Blade]

The Bronze Age

I've actually wanted to do something with that. Specifically the Late Bronze Age Collapse and the "Sea Peoples". But man....so much info in that. Than there is the Trojan War that potentially happened right before the Collapse of the Bronze Age or during its early phases

Quite a few historians suggest the Trojan War occurred because the Mycenean Greeks were trying to colonize the area in and around the Trojan lands since they were fleeing mainland Greece from the "Dorians", who are one of the suspected potential identities of the Sea Peoples, the Dorians eventually taking over all of southern Greece, Athens being one of the few places that somehow managed to remain intact through the city itself was burned several times according to archaeological evidence. Pylos, which is considered the traditional Mycenean Greek capital, was completely destroyed, being rebuilt only centuries later, and archaeology says it was attacked from the sea, meaning an amphibious assault, (which is odd since Dorian Greeks, which includes Spartans, were never noted for their naval capabilities. Only the Corinth had a navy of any size and they aren't particularly close to Pylos)

The colonization theory is fairly popular, and they suggest the "Helen of Troy" reason for invading Troy was used as a convenient cassus belli for what they were already intending to do in the first place. And since Helen of Troy eventually returned to Sparta with Menelaus and they made up and no lasting bitterness followed...some scholars think she was in on a plot to spark the war with Menelaus's blessings. Something like a double-agent. Only theories though. I find it possible though since....who fights a 10-Year war after having his wife stolen....and then just..gets over it?

Sorry, got to rambling. Love Bronze Age stuff, especially since its pretty mysterious with so many historical blank spots.

 

[Jemini]

I like the ideas of Conan the Barbarian. In between Cavemen and Written History. I've never read the books but I've always found the "Lost Era" concept of it fascinating. A "Vanished or Forgotten" Age.

It's traditionally set during 10,000 B.C., though plenty of scientists who also found it interesting apparently, simply say "after the conclusion of the last ice age" since they for whatever reason, don't like adding actual datelines. The writer of the series had his own name for that period. Hyborian Age,

Hyborian Age - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Always wanted to do something similar but I can honestly say I would have no idea what to do. I mean, in this Hyborean Age, kingdoms do exist. It's not just hunter-gatherer. I mean there are hunter gatherers as well as various other forms of nomads, but various kingdoms with monarchies and social/political structures exist as well. Many of them in fact.

It's extremely interesting...but complicated for me to know how I would add a story into a similar period.

Something that could help is actually knowing a few things about the real history of that era that has been put together after Conan the Barbarian was written.

To start things off, "after the conclusion of the last ice age" actually really does give us quite a bit to go on. There have been ancient runs discovered of cities from around 11,000 BC. These dates for those ruins were discounted by earlier generations of archiologists because they were beset by the mistaken belief that Babylon was the oldest city in the world at 6,000 years old, because that's the earliest written record anyone could get ahold of. However, they have since discovered that 11,000 BC is likely a good accurate date for those ancient cities for 2 reasons.

1. Because these cities are completely underwater and completely intact. This baffled archeologists during the era when schools of study did not communicate with one another very well, but when climatologists predicting flood models for global warming became a bigger thing on people's minds it brought the archeologists and palientologists together to discuss the last ice age which ended around 10,000 years ago. They reached the conclusion that these cities had to have sunk due to rising sea levels as the last ice age ended.

2. During this era, all major cultural centers would be down at sea level. It just makes sense. Humans need water, and being by the sea also gives access to fish and sea trade. These are the ingredients needed to form a cultural center with wealth and prosperity. This means that every major cultural center of the 11,000 BC era would have been sunk completely by the rising sea levels, and this would result in human civilization being set back by thousands of years.

So, as a result of these realizations, it actually makes perfect sense that there would have been a thriving civilization with maybe even as good as bronze age technology in 11,000 BC, and the catastrophy of rising sea levels due to the end of the last ice age would destroy all of that progress. This is also thought to be the origin of all the flood stories that appear around the world. (Seriously, you know Noah's arc? Well, there is a similar flood story in literally EVERY single civilization across the entire planet that seemed to all develop independently of one another.)

Another thing to know about is oral tradition. You know some of those 11,000 BC era sunken cities? Well, there are tribal people who live in the area around some of those cities who, based upon their oral traditions which apparently lay out the exact dimensions of the buildings in those cities, they have been able to draw the researchers a map that turned out to be exactly accurate and to scale. People of our day laugh and scoff at oral tradition and think that since it's oral then it can't possibly be accurate. The truth though is that when a culture develops writing, it changes something in our brain that makes our memory worse. When you survive on oral tradition in a culture without writing, you can remember better and you remember the stories that the story tellers tell you in exact ver-batem detail, and the line of one story teller to another of preserved oral tradition is actually BETTER than a book can ever be in terms of accuracy of detail.

(Actually though, the fact that these story tellers are able to describe the city in such exact detail might be evidence that, the city being described at least, might not have had writing. The development of writing destroys oral tradition, and the fact that these exact details were perfectly preserved suggests that a trained story teller of the oral tradition was present in this city in order to begin the lineage of this tale after the city got sunk.)

This actually brings up another interesting theory. The lost city of Atlantis might have been the result of the Greeks hearing the oral tradition from one of these tribes. The tribe's oral tradition would have talked about this sunken city as having lost ancient technology, because it really did have lost technology of 11,000 BC that would have been better than the technology of 10,000 BC. And, then after hearing about these tribal people talk about lost ancient technology, the Greeks who were a writing culture might have had their imaginations run wild and get carried away.

There are all kinds of little bits and pieces like this you can pull together. You will not get the exact culture or history of the time by digging all of these up, but it will give you a much clearer picture of what it might have been like.

 

[NotaNuffian]

Something that could help is actually knowing a few things about the real history of that era that has been put together after Conan the Barbarian was written.

To start things off, "after the conclusion of the last ice age" actually really does give us quite a bit to go on. There have been ancient runs discovered of cities from around 11,000 BC. These dates for those ruins were discounted by earlier generations of archiologists because they were beset by the mistaken belief that Babylon was the oldest city in the world at 6,000 years old, because that's the earliest written record anyone could get ahold of. However, they have since discovered that 11,000 BC is likely a good accurate date for those ancient cities for 2 reasons.

1. Because these cities are completely underwater and completely intact. This baffled archeologists during the era when schools of study did not communicate with one another very well, but when climatologists predicting flood models for global warming became a bigger thing on people's minds it brought the archeologists and palientologists together to discuss the last ice age which ended around 10,000 years ago. They reached the conclusion that these cities had to have sunk due to rising sea levels as the last ice age ended.

2. During this era, all major cultural centers would be down at sea level. It just makes sense. Humans need water, and being by the sea also gives access to fish and sea trade. These are the ingredients needed to form a cultural center with wealth and prosperity. This means that every major cultural center of the 11,000 BC era would have been sunk completely by the rising sea levels, and this would result in human civilization being set back by thousands of years.

So, as a result of these realizations, it actually makes perfect sense that there would have been a thriving civilization with maybe even as good as bronze age technology in 11,000 BC, and the catastrophy of rising sea levels due to the end of the last ice age would destroy all of that progress. This is also thought to be the origin of all the flood stories that appear around the world. (Seriously, you know Noah's arc? Well, there is a similar flood story in literally EVERY single civilization across the entire planet that seemed to all develop independently of one another.)

Another thing to know about is oral tradition. You know some of those 11,000 BC era sunken cities? Well, there are tribal people who live in the area around some of those cities who, based upon their oral traditions which apparently lay out the exact dimensions of the buildings in those cities, they have been able to draw the researchers a map that turned out to be exactly accurate and to scale. People of our day laugh and scoff at oral tradition and think that since it's oral then it can't possibly be accurate. The truth though is that when a culture develops writing, it changes something in our brain that makes our memory worse. When you survive on oral tradition in a culture without writing, you can remember better and you remember the stories that the story tellers tell you in exact ver-batem detail, and the line of one story teller to another of preserved oral tradition is actually BETTER than a book can ever be in terms of accuracy of detail.

(Actually though, the fact that these story tellers are able to describe the city in such exact detail might be evidence that, the city being described at least, might not have had writing. The development of writing destroys oral tradition, and the fact that these exact details were perfectly preserved suggests that a trained story teller of the oral tradition was present in this city in order to begin the lineage of this tale after the city got sunk.)

This actually brings up another interesting theory. The lost city of Atlantis might have been the result of the Greeks hearing the oral tradition from one of these tribes. The tribe's oral tradition would have talked about this sunken city as having lost ancient technology, because it really did have lost technology of 11,000 BC that would have been better than the technology of 10,000 BC. And, then after hearing about these tribal people talk about lost ancient technology, the Greeks who were a writing culture might have had their imaginations run wild and get carried away.

There are all kinds of little bits and pieces like this you can pull together. You will not get the exact culture or history of the time by digging all of these up, but it will give you a much clearer picture of what it might have been like.

Cool, so this kind of gives the whole lost civilisation of Atlantis vibe, only instead of just one city, it could be nations sprouting like mushrooms all over the globe.

Which kind of plays into the story done by the animated movie.

 

[Deleted member 22014]

Heh, it might be fun to write something about the past with present understanding. But does anyone ever found that future setting is kind of overused?

Oh, so this threat is talking about underused time periods ..., err, anyway, some of you mentioned sci-fi in primitive time periods. I tried something like over-technology, it's an alien civilization that got stranded into backwater planet ..., pretty much like Rimworld, your colony laser gun against club swinging barbarian. That's somehow fun, bullying those ignorant people of the native planet. They'll be a god.

But I don't dare to dabble with the futuristic setting or timeframe. Mostly because I found that the Star War franchise(the old 77's one; with Luke and his pops) or Back to the Future is kinda weird when I watch them as a person who was born not from that time. It's just ..., odd.

In short, the futuristic setting is a no-go for me, as I don't even know or can't even imagine what is there in the future. I may be lacking in this ..., imagination. But futuristic technology and backwater planet with primitive tribal society ..., why not?

 

[AryaX]

Are there any stories set in time/place equivalent of ancient rome?

 

[Discount_Blade]

Something that could help is actually knowing a few things about the real history of that era that has been put together after Conan the Barbarian was written.

To start things off, "after the conclusion of the last ice age" actually really does give us quite a bit to go on. There have been ancient runs discovered of cities from around 11,000 BC. These dates for those ruins were discounted by earlier generations of archiologists because they were beset by the mistaken belief that Babylon was the oldest city in the world at 6,000 years old, because that's the earliest written record anyone could get ahold of. However, they have since discovered that 11,000 BC is likely a good accurate date for those ancient cities for 2 reasons.

1. Because these cities are completely underwater and completely intact. This baffled archeologists during the era when schools of study did not communicate with one another very well, but when climatologists predicting flood models for global warming became a bigger thing on people's minds it brought the archeologists and palientologists together to discuss the last ice age which ended around 10,000 years ago. They reached the conclusion that these cities had to have sunk due to rising sea levels as the last ice age ended.

2. During this era, all major cultural centers would be down at sea level. It just makes sense. Humans need water, and being by the sea also gives access to fish and sea trade. These are the ingredients needed to form a cultural center with wealth and prosperity. This means that every major cultural center of the 11,000 BC era would have been sunk completely by the rising sea levels, and this would result in human civilization being set back by thousands of years.

So, as a result of these realizations, it actually makes perfect sense that there would have been a thriving civilization with maybe even as good as bronze age technology in 11,000 BC, and the catastrophy of rising sea levels due to the end of the last ice age would destroy all of that progress. This is also thought to be the origin of all the flood stories that appear around the world. (Seriously, you know Noah's arc? Well, there is a similar flood story in literally EVERY single civilization across the entire planet that seemed to all develop independently of one another.)

Another thing to know about is oral tradition. You know some of those 11,000 BC era sunken cities? Well, there are tribal people who live in the area around some of those cities who, based upon their oral traditions which apparently lay out the exact dimensions of the buildings in those cities, they have been able to draw the researchers a map that turned out to be exactly accurate and to scale. People of our day laugh and scoff at oral tradition and think that since it's oral then it can't possibly be accurate. The truth though is that when a culture develops writing, it changes something in our brain that makes our memory worse. When you survive on oral tradition in a culture without writing, you can remember better and you remember the stories that the story tellers tell you in exact ver-batem detail, and the line of one story teller to another of preserved oral tradition is actually BETTER than a book can ever be in terms of accuracy of detail.

(Actually though, the fact that these story tellers are able to describe the city in such exact detail might be evidence that, the city being described at least, might not have had writing. The development of writing destroys oral tradition, and the fact that these exact details were perfectly preserved suggests that a trained story teller of the oral tradition was present in this city in order to begin the lineage of this tale after the city got sunk.)

This actually brings up another interesting theory. The lost city of Atlantis might have been the result of the Greeks hearing the oral tradition from one of these tribes. The tribe's oral tradition would have talked about this sunken city as having lost ancient technology, because it really did have lost technology of 11,000 BC that would have been better than the technology of 10,000 BC. And, then after hearing about these tribal people talk about lost ancient technology, the Greeks who were a writing culture might have had their imaginations run wild and get carried away.

There are all kinds of little bits and pieces like this you can pull together. You will not get the exact culture or history of the time by digging all of these up, but it will give you a much clearer picture of what it might have been like.

How would you say the day to day business of such cities were ran though without writing? No documents. No records. I know bartering would work with commerce, but that's about all I could surmise. Military matters would be a bit spotty to keep track of, though I can imagine how it would be done.

 

[Asami_Shirogane]

Scribblehub needs more Ooga Booga stories.

 

[Reisinling]

Recently I've seen an uptake in prehistoric stories (there are like 4 webtoon I seem to recall set in that setting, then Tartakovskys Primal, that pixar movie, that other cavemen movie, that Assasins Creed spinoff whose name I forget, and then that semi caveman game but in post-post apocalypse, sorry for being bad with names).

Actually, in webnovels themselves... WWII is not very popular I guess :D neither is WWI. Not that we need more media there.

I guess modern Africa might be an interesting setting?

 

[Jemini]

How would you say the day to day business of such cities were ran though without writing? No documents. No records. I know bartering would work with commerce, but that's about all I could surmise. Military matters would be a bit spotty to keep track of, though I can imagine how it would be done.

Very difficult to imagine. Either they trained a records keeper to remember this stuff, or maybe there was writing but 1. It was only known by a small number of people at the top (thus why a trained story teller would have been present in the city,) and 2. All evidence of this written language was destroyed when the sea level rose either by going down with the city or by whatever documents were preserved and taken out of the city being lost to the elements at a later date as the writing tradition died under the weight of having to survive outside the cities among people having difficulty adapting to the harsh wilds.

 

[Bloodysin28]

A very underappreciated setting is another dimension and real of existence in the afterlife like purgatory,soul society,heuco mundo,the abyss.the void.

 

[OvidLemma]

The truth though is that when a culture develops writing, it changes something in our brain that makes our memory worse. When you survive on oral tradition in a culture without writing, you can remember better and you remember the stories that the story tellers tell you in exact ver-batem detail, and the line of one story teller to another of preserved oral tradition is actually BETTER than a book can ever be in terms of accuracy of detail.

Based on what I know about memory (a medium amount), this probably isn't true - we have 'gist' memories and 'verbatim' memories, and both of these can be improved with mnemonics and drilling, especially at an early age, though adults can learn amazing memory tricks, too. And, even today, many memory specialists can recite hours upon hours of memorized information verbatim with little loss in other faculties (e.g. memorizing entire books of holy scripts). I think it more likely that the 'historians' of an oral tradition society would have a lot of practice with verbatim memorization and thus have exemplary memories, but I think the change is almost certainly quantitative and not qualitative. After all, throughout much of post-writing history, most people have been illiterate (and those non-literate people were not noted for having astounding memory relative to the literate scholars in their civilizations) - and, in the modern era, there are still a small number of pre-literate peoples out there. These civilizations often have interesting mnemonics for memorizing information, often nearly verbatim, but they aren't all memory geniuses. So I would contest the idea that writing somehow makes our memories worse, but suggest that we use writing as a mnemonic crutch at the expense of learning other mnemonics that would improve our oral memory.

The Memory Code: how oral cultures memorise so much information

How an ancient Aboriginal memory technique may uncover the meaning behind archaeological sites across the globe are revealed in a new book, The Memory Code.

theconversation.com

That said, I agree with most of the rest of what you've written here. And, beyond that, there are non-sunken ruins that attest to how advanced some neolithic civilizations were. For instance, the ruins of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey are at least 10,000 years old and far more advanced that what was considered possible in the stone age. Its existence suggests that there were stone-age civilizations about which we have almost no knowledge, and/or that hunter-gatherers were capable of a much greater degree of organization than previously realized.

Göbekli Tepe - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[OvidLemma]

Very difficult to imagine. Either they trained a records keeper to remember this stuff, or maybe there was writing but 1. It was only known by a small number of people at the top (thus why a trained story teller would have been present in the city,) and 2. All evidence of this written language was destroyed when the sea level rose either by going down with the city or by whatever documents were preserved and taken out of the city being lost to the elements at a later date as the writing tradition died under the weight of having to survive outside the cities among people having difficulty adapting to the harsh wilds.

It's also worth noting that counting was around well before writing. The oldest tallying marks/sticks, probably used for tracking merchandise or items, date to around 30,000 years ago - writing isn't needed to keep track of how many of what is where ("Oh, the marks on that bone represent how much cloth I have in stock"). Also, while we generally assume that ancient economies progressed from less to more centralized, the palace economies of the bronze age (e.g. Minoan) were far more centralized than any current economies. In these economies, goods flowed through a central palace and were subsequently distributed. If 'lost' civilizations had something like this, then most business would take place in and around the palace and might not be reliant on written records, though they almost certainly used tallies.

 

[Jatsang]

There was a time in the Islamic empire when scholars and physicians were welcome absolutely everywhere. Knowledge was so honoured during the period that a penniless wanderer might be greeted with joy and given gifts if they were known to be well learned. So given the many dangers that also existed during this period, I always thought that the setting would work wonderfully for a wandering adventure kind of story. It would be cool to see.

 

[K5Rakitan]

I've actually wanted to do something with that. Specifically the Late Bronze Age Collapse and the "Sea Peoples". But man....so much info in that. Than there is the Trojan War that potentially happened right before the Collapse of the Bronze Age or during its early phases

Quite a few historians suggest the Trojan War occurred because the Mycenean Greeks were trying to colonize the area in and around the Trojan lands since they were fleeing mainland Greece from the "Dorians", who are one of the suspected potential identities of the Sea Peoples, the Dorians eventually taking over all of southern Greece, Athens being one of the few places that somehow managed to remain intact through the city itself was burned several times according to archaeological evidence. Pylos, which is considered the traditional Mycenean Greek capital, was completely destroyed, being rebuilt only centuries later, and archaeology says it was attacked from the sea, meaning an amphibious assault, (which is odd since Dorian Greeks, which includes Spartans, were never noted for their naval capabilities. Only the Corinth had a navy of any size and they aren't particularly close to Pylos)

The colonization theory is fairly popular, and they suggest the "Helen of Troy" reason for invading Troy was used as a convenient cassus belli for what they were already intending to do in the first place. And since Helen of Troy eventually returned to Sparta with Menelaus and they made up and no lasting bitterness followed...some scholars think she was in on a plot to spark the war with Menelaus's blessings. Something like a double-agent. Only theories though. I find it possible though since....who fights a 10-Year war after having his wife stolen....and then just..gets over it?

Sorry, got to rambling. Love Bronze Age stuff, especially since its pretty mysterious with so many historical blank spots.

I'm so tempted to tell you what I named my baby right now, but I promised myself and him that I wouldn't do that. Let's just say it's in keeping with the theme.

 

[WasatchWind]

A very underappreciated setting is another dimension and real of existence in the afterlife like purgatory,soul society,heuco mundo,the abyss.the void.

I actually tried writing a story, meant to be an individual's journey through eternity, and I posted it to SH, but it got absolutely no attention, so I took it off, assuming people were turned off by the religious themes.

 

[jabathehut]

This is just a little thought I've been having. It isn't really specific to any genre, but you see common settings:

Fantasy: medieval Europe
Sci fi: far future in space

That's just two examples - but what time periods do you think are underdone in each genre? Which ones do you think are done badly?

My personal gripe - so often, when fantasy takes notes from the 19th century, it is often steam punk - to the point that I tell people "my story is inspired by early 19th century America" and they're like "oh, so steam punk."

What are your thoughts on time period inspiration in your settings?

Pre industrial,

Sengoku Jidai,

Mongol Khanates Height,

Final years of Rome

Height of Ottoman Empire

Meiji and Taisho periods