Researching the unresearchable

When you have a weird question (e.g. “If someone gained encyclopaedic knowledge of an advanced civilization, how could they improve technology in a medieval fantasy world?”), how do you research it?  .–Alpakka

Researching for fiction depends on what the writer needs to know. That sounds really obvious, but you don’t always know what it is you don’t know and need to find out. It depends on what kind of story you’re writing. Lewis Carroll didn’t need to research actual medieval knights to write Through the Looking Glass, but he did need to know how chess pieces move. Someone writing an alternate Earth where dinosaurs survived and developed a technological society would need to know about the biology of dinosaurs, geography, and geological eras (surviving the ice age would have had a big impact on the technology and civilization dinosaurs developed, I would think…) but researching human history might not help them much.

And if you are making up a medieval-world-with-magic that you want to look realistic, you need to know where it’s starting from. New technology depends on three things: 1) what resources are available (including labor—pre-industrial societies frequently did not have a lot of people available to work on things that didn’t produce food-clothing-and-shelter), 2) what infrastructure and technology already exists (you can’t invent a microscope lens if glass-making still produces glass that’s cloudy and full of bubbles), and 3) what the perceived need for it is (history is full of inventions/discoveries that didn’t get used for decades because the average person didn’t see why they should bother with them, or judged them “too expensive” to be worth it).

A fantasy writer can fudge a lot with magic, but you still have to know what resources can be had, what the society already knows how to do, and what things people want (or could be persuaded to want) right now because they’re in the middle of either a golden age or a disaster (war, plague, famine, drought).

“Medieval fantasy world” covers a lot of potential ground when it comes to their technological level. If you want it to be as realistic as reasonably possible, you can’t just throw together technologies and social structures from different centuries and geographical areas. You need to either 1) pick an arbitrary century and location, and do a bunch of research about what life was like and what they knew how to do, or 2) start with reference material on the timing and spread of inventions and their impact on medieval society, and then pick a place and time where your main character can have the greatest impact.

Either way, you nearly always want to begin with broad, general background reading, and narrow it down once you have a better idea of what you really need to know. There are lots of books (and websites) with names that start “Timelines of…” (History, Science, World History, Everything) that can give you a general idea of what was invented where and when. Keep in mind that new developments did not spread quickly or evenly, especially if you are looking at periods where transportation was uncertain and/or dangerous, and even more especially in areas where there was a lot of conflict and therefore kings/emperors/chieftains were reluctant to share anything that gave them a military advantage.

Frances and Joseph Gies’ Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel  is a recommended overview that follows the development of European technology in the Middle Ages (and where some of it was actually invented and imported from). (Joseph and Francis Geis have a bunch of other highly useful books for anyone wanting to write a more authentic medieval-European setting: Life in a Medieval City, Life in a Medieval Castle, etc.) The A History of Private Life series is enormous, dense, and expensive, but may be worth tracking down at a library if you decide to do a deep dive. Dorothy Hartley’s Lost Country Life is another common resource for what it says on the tin.

There are also loads of possibly-interesting books that focus on very specific areas, like the history of medicine, or spinning, or random “inventions that changed history,” though you will probably need to limit your searches to “in the Middle Ages.” Web pages for reenactors often have useful bibliographies. There are books and web sites on recreating historical dress for theatrical productions that go into great detail on how they were constructed.

You may also want to look at the choices different authors made in their alternate-history and time-travel novels (H. Beam Piper’s Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen and L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall come to mind—one author chooses gunpowder as the major game-changer, the other picked a smorgasbord of things ranging from the printing press to double-entry bookkeeping).

My Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions  might also be helpful, though they’re more general than specific to a time-travel book. They are basically a list of “do I need to know this?” things that I may want to make up or do some research on while putting a world together. I have never needed to know everything on the list, and I occasionally need to know something that isn’t on the list, so it shouldn’t be taken as a rigid do-all-this-and-it-will-be-enough thing—they’re not supposed to be an exhaustive listing.

The other question you need to address is one you can’t research: How does magic work, and how much difference does the existence of magic make? You get to decide this, and you can go either way. Magic-substitutes-for-tech can give you a society that is significantly more advanced in some areas than others (a medieval society using cold spells to extend their food storage as, in essence, magic-based refrigerators), or a dead ringer for an industrialized nation (magic carpets as airplanes, dragons incinerating the trash, enchanted mirrors as cell phones…) in spite of having no real-life technology. Magic-is-difficult/rare means that the common people will be using the same technology that was used in the real world, and your main character will have a lot more to invent.

The lovely thing about being a fiction writer is that everything is material in some way—that interesting bit of trivia about the Roman Empire having toys powered by steam engines (that they never thought to apply to anything else) may not fit into this book, but it will turn out to be useful for some other book eventually.