[Dragaera] Centuries and Centuries of Dragaeran history and no one has invented a steam engine?

[Jonathan Carey, CHRL via Dragaera]

Howard: you're getting your two perspectives mixed up: I'm aware of the
explanations of why we, as humans who exist in OUR world, write about
cultures with impossibly long histories.  The challenge for me was to come
up with a reason that makes sense the story world, so that we may further
prolong the willing suspension of disbelief that all audiences create when
they encounter any sufficiently entertaining entertainment.

Regards,

Jon Carey, B.A.(Hon), CHRL, CHRP

On Mon, May 30, 2016 at 1:15 PM, Howard Brazee <howard at brazee.net> wrote:

>
> > On May 30, 2016, at 10:53 AM, Jonathan Carey, CHRL via Dragaera <
> dragaera at lists.dragaera.info> wrote:
> >
> > 2) The Natural Maturation cycle of Dragaerans:  they take almost a
> thousand
> > years, give or take a couple centuries, to reach adulthood.  This is
> BOUND
> > to have a retarding (read: slowing) effect on the speed of their daily
> > lives.  Psychologically, this is very sound, but there are precious few
> > examples of this actually being the case in the books themselves.
> > Dragaerans, for all intents and purposes, seem to live as "quickly" as we
> > do, just over a far longer period of time (which seems to be, very
> roughly,
> > 34x the length of an average Easterner's life).
>
> I have similar questions - but in the case of Dragaeran life span, I ended
> up saying - because our fantasy tradition has long lived elves.    Nothing
> more.   I have to suspend my disbelief.   We *see* that advancements do
> happen.   We see science exists and is not suppressed.    It won’t work to
> try to make that make sense.   As long as the stories are internally
> consistent, we can accept the environment the same way as we accept FTL
> space ships or time travel in our science fiction.