Nadia Moran vs technology!
Tarun asks:
“The Conquest also seemed to have frozen human technological development completely which is extremely unrealistic. No advancement in any tech for 300 years ? Does no human study science or do R&D any more ? I find it rather strange that Elves have suppressed this – they could have waged their wars against the Archons far more effectively if humans had advanced technologically.”
The High Queen did that on purpose.
Some technology has advanced quite a bit – like, agricultural science, materials science, and medical technology are way more advanced than they were at the Conquest. If James Marney had lived in 2013, he would have died from his wounds, or at the absolute minimum he would have lost the leg. There are also fusion power plants that Nadia doesn’t know about, and electrical technology is more advanced – think about Nicholas telling Nadia about EMP shielding. A lot of the technological improvements are quiet things that Nadia doesn’t notice or takes for granted.
That said, the Elves have deliberately stalled human technological progress in three areas:
-Weapons tech. No one but the High Queen has control of any weapons of mass destruction. Not humans, not Elven nobles, only the High Queen.
-Information technology. The Elves don’t want people organizing without them knowing about. So IT and the Internet are carefully monitored.
-Automation technology. The High Queen wants all her former men-at-arms to have stable jobs so they can marry and have children and raise the next generation of men-at-arms, and a large pool of unemployed men is fertile ground for a revolution. So any kind of automation technology that would make jobs redundant gets shut down. Like, if a grocery store owner installed a self-checkout, he would find himself in a lot of trouble very quickly. The Elves care more about social stability than any economic inefficiencies this generates.
The tricky part about writing CLOAK GAMES is that Nadia is at times a very solipsistic narrator – if she doesn’t care about something and it doesn’t affect or threaten her, she won’t think about it at all. (She doesn’t have the intellectual curiosity that someone like Caina or Adelaide Taren would have.) On the other hand, this makes it easy to reveal plot-important information without resorting to infodumps.
-JM
Even more important in some ways is the fact that in order to win the war against the Archons, the High Queen and her vassals (and their human minions) will (presumably) need to return to the Elven homeworld – through the Shadowlands, which screws with tech that isn’t properly shielded.
Any foothold would need to be established with relatively little in the way of advanced technology, so in a lot of ways, there’s no point in developing things like practical power armor or energy weapons (for example). And there’s another, and more important, reason to not develop energy weapons – they might very well be able to hurt Elves, unlike regular bullets, and that would give the Human Rebels a dangerous weapon against the High Queen’s rule, because if loyal humans have and are making them, then it’s only a matter of time before the Rebels get their hands on some.
I’m not entirely convinced about the stalling of all automation tech, at least for heavy industrial purposes – especially for jobs that would be directly competing with the military for young, physically fit, men to fill them, depending on how long it’s desired that men serve in the military. And for extremely high precision work, such as making computer innards and the like (it’s basically impossible make all the parts without automation, though most assembly can certainly be done by hand). I think some automation for those capacities would probably still be allowable, and might still be slowly refined/improved.
Any man who is fit is supposed to spend ages from 18 to 24 serving as an Elven noble’s man-at-arms. Some stick around and make a career of it. There are almost always campaigns of some kind or another going on in the Shadowlands.
As for automation tech, there is some, it’s just not that common. (When Nadia sees a robot in LAST JUDGE, she thinks that she’s seen them before, just not all that often.) But between economic growth and social stability, the Elves will always pick social stability.
The only thing that has ever bothered me is the lack of bombs. If there was anything between a nuke and a helicopter missile I assume Arv would have dropped one on Castomyr (I think I speeled that rite), rather than send one girl and a bunch of cannon fodder, I mean soldiers to kill him. Even a couple WW2 era bombs LITERALLY dropped from a passing plane would have done it.
If she has to nuke an entire city to keep the freaking Archons out, even turning a city into Dresden
would have less casualties. Yes, yes the EMP is required to destabilize the gates, but uhhh one assumes the gates are powered by someone or something nearby, something blow-up-able. That isn’t a word. I don’t care.