October Thoughts

But your question might be broader than my video. So let's plunge a little deeper (another video might come from this question haha). 

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I think the big change with immortality depends on whether everybody's immortal or only a few people are immortal.

If everybody's immortal, your world becomes a lot more static because people's relationships don't change. As I said, my mom died this year, and even though we knew it was coming—she'd been suffering from dementia and had forgotten who we were about three years ago—it still changed my relationship with my siblings in many ways.

If I think of the arrival of my nephews, the children of my brother and my sister, their arrival changed our lives and our relationships to each other again. 

If you have a generally immortal world, your relationships will have a tendency to stay static a lot longer, and I think that would have a dramatic impact on your culture.

The scenario you're probably world-building is what happens if there's one or two immortal people and everybody else is not immortal. I think your immortal people will tend to isolate themselves from mortals a little bit because otherwise they'll build relationships with mortals, and then the mortals die, and then they'll build relationships with mortals, and the mortals die. It would be somewhat like our relationship with pets. Yes, of course, there are people who have pets over and over, and there are people who have pets once and say never again because the pain of losing them is too great. I think the same will apply to your immortals. Some won't mind the constant death, but many will. 

I also think that your immortals will have a much more chill reaction to what mortals might think of as a disaster because immortals are like, "Well, it'll be solved in a few years," or, "This'll change," or, "Yes, many people are going to die, but it'll all come out in the wash." That kind of attitude.

And then, of course, your power levels will dramatically shift, and that comes down to those economic models that I spoke about in the first video that I linked in here. So go take a look at that. I think that will answer your economics questions about immortals.

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How should writers handle ‘medieval stasis’ and avoid bad explanations for missing technology (I.e. gunpowder) or a world that doesn’t develop?

I really should make a video about this. But meanwhile, to answer your question: to keep your world at a certain technology level, you don't have to go that far afield. Just try to understand why certain technologies developed when they did and prevent those circumstances from arising in the same manner.

Speaking about guns specifically: the Chinese had gunpowder and developed fire lances way before it came to the West. The reason why guns developed so fast in Europe compared to how slowly they developed in China was twofold. One, the quality of European steel was higher—just an environmental factor. But more importantly, European siege warfare was better suited to gun development because of the usefulness of cannons in blowing apart castle walls. 

The early guns, the fire lances, didn't offer the Chinese armies much advantage over a bow. They didn't offer the Europeans much of an advantage either. But what they did offer the Europeans was a much bigger, improved siege engine, and because European warfare was so focused on the siege, it was a technology worth developing.

I'll be bringing out a video about siege warfare, by the way, so look out for that.
 

If you want to have gunpowder for fireworks but no guns, just make sure that the people who invented gunpowder don't really have siege warfare. If they don't have siege warfare, there's no reason to invest in making fire lances turn into guns.

More generally: Try and understand where the technology came from and why it developed as it did in our world. Then just tweak your environment or culture that might give rise to that technology so that it doesn't take the development paths that it took in our world.

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