Given that my job mostly involves sitting at a desk, I have to devote particular effort to getting exercise if I want to be in good health.

This is not a modern phenomenon, but it is something of an elite one. If your day involves heavy physical labor in the fields or a factory, if you’re a laundress or a dyer hauling around sopping masses of fabric on the regular, if you’re a warehouse worker or grocery store stocker constantly lifting boxes, why on earth would you want to spend some of your precious non-working time doing yet more physical activity? Even if something like strengthening auxiliary muscles or stretching would benefit you, odds are low that you’re spending much time on that. When your workday ends, you want to rest.

But the more leisured classes throughout history have often understood that getting exercise improves health, and they’ve had the time, money, and energy to devote toward that goal. Depending on where you look, they’ve also linked it to spiritual development (Indian yoga) or character-building (Muscular Christianity). So what did such people do to stay fit?

Unsurprisingly, a whole swath of historical exercise looks a lot like war training. Warriors and soldiers prior to the gunpowder era often practiced with heavier versions of their usual weapons, whether those are swords, maces, spears, staves, or otherwise. Archery has likewise occupied a frequent niche, as have wrestling and boxing, even if men rarely expected to be fighting bare-handed in the field.

This extends not only to fighting, but to other things you might need to do during a battle. Climbing, for example: up a pole, up a rope, up the underside of a ladder, even running up a wall to grab the top like a modern parkour athlete. Throwing things: not just javelins but any heavy object, like a stone, a discus, or a pole (most famously in the form of Scottish caber tossing, but they’re not the only ones to do it). Riding — and not just riding, but also vaulting onto a horse (real or wooden), as if you are mounting on the run.

And, of course, the perennial classic: lifting heavy things! Often this was just stones, but purpose-built weights like the Greek halteres or Indian clubs go back a fair way. (Kettlebells are much more recent, coming from Russian weights used for crops, and then repurposed by performing strongmen.) Exactly what form the lifting has generally taken, though, is unclear to me. Deadlift? Bench press? Squat? I’m leery of assuming people have always done the same modes we do now; odds are pretty good it was more generally “pick this thing up and then maybe walk with it before putting it down,” rather than the strictly regulated movements of a modern gym.

Many historical exercises required little to no equipment. Running, skipping, jumping, swimming, dancing . . . if it moves your body and gets your heart rate up, it’s probably been used as exercise. (Unless you’re doing it in bed. Though that’s been considered exercise, too.) Calisthenics such as push-ups, which use the body’s own weight to provide resistance, are easy to incorporate into an exercise regimen, though I’ve seen indications that chin-ups might be a more modern phenomenon. Possibly this is true when they’re viewed as their own, separate movement, as opposed to the final stage of something like that wall-running exercise mentioned above. Then off in India, yoga of course has a centuries-long history — though we should bear in mind that modern yoga-as-exercise is significantly different from the historical tradition, which goes well beyond bodily fitness.

Some kinds of acrobatics seem to be fairly ancient, though it’s difficult to be sure exactly what forms people practiced. Tumbling in the basic sense — somersaults of various kinds — is another of those things that can double as a war skill, so it seems to have been common. Other movements, like bridges or handstands, are done more for their own sake, to build flexibility, strength, and balance. I haven’t been able to find out whether more advanced skills like handsprings or flips featured in exercise routines; certainly they would be practiced by actual acrobats, but I personally doubt the average person was doing them just for fitness.

Naturally, we don’t always stick to just one thing at a time. If running is good, and jumping is good, why not combine them? Now you have invented hurdles! The leisured classes most likely to engage in these activities were also not above doing elective grunt labor for the sake of fitness; ancient Greek boxers apparently thought digging was great exercise, and others have chopped wood.

Exercise also bleeds over into the broader category of sport. Any kind of physical game provides a workout; the distinction is merely whether you happen to be getting that workout because you wanted to play a game, or whether you’re play the game in order to improve your fitness. There’s no particular point in trying to separate those two — it only matters for how you present someone deciding to engage in that activity.

Though exercise has frequently been a male-dominated pastime, it’s not wholly so. Women’s health also benefits from fitness . . . but it’s true that people have often worried that too much of it might harm us, or more specifically, our fertility. A fear that is not entirely unfounded; elite female athletes do tend to experience amenorrhea, the absence of a period. But you have to train pretty hard to get that far, and the notion that your uterus might fall straight out of your body if you run a marathon has more to do with sexist assumptions and bad biology than any practical truth. (How else would all those peasant women doing heavy labor manage to have kids?)

Because of these fears, women’s exercise has tended to be lighter: walking, running (at shorter distances than men), and riding are very common. During the Victorian era, activities like archery, cycling, and rowing got added to the approved list. Calisthenics for women were much more of an innovation in that era, promoted by reformers, with much backlash and fear of what the consequences might be.

While exercise can be done in many places, then as now, we like to make it as social activity. The term “gymnasium” comes to us from the Greek institutions where men and boys would work out — naked, as the root of that word indicates — which also doubled as schools more generally. The Romans liked to pair a gym with a bath complex, so they could warm up their muscles and clean themselves off afterward. Over in India, the spiritual aspect of yoga could mean its physical practices were carried out in suitable locations like temples . . . or conversely in the wilderness, as part of a broader ascetic life. European gentlemen of the last few centuries might have rooms for boxing or fencing, or even private swimming pools, as part of their elite clubs. And, of course, where exercise is used to keep soldiers fit in peacetime, you’ll find facilities incorporated into military barracks.

Public gyms for general use, though, seem to be a phenomenon of the nineteenth century onward. And that makes sense: as industrialization and mechanized transport vastly increased the amount of time we spend sitting, as more children went to school and spent their days at desks, we started having to carve out dedicated spaces and times for working our bodies. We put more emphasis on physical education in childhood, and adults started thinking more about the need to move.

Which is my cue to stop typing and go downstairs to work out in my den. I have a goal of being strong enough for a pull-up by the end of the summer, and I want to hit that mark!

This is honestly closer to a theory-type essay, as I’ve already talked about more concrete angles like prostheses and assistive devices (in Year Four), and this time around I’m looking more at the dynamics of presenting physical disability in fiction.

Activists for better representation of disability often object to worldbuilding that imagines magic or advanced technology has erased that issue from existence, and advocate for greater visibility for disabled characters in our stories. I want to take a moment to say: in any setting that doesn’t have such handwavy solutions, quite frankly, disability ought to be vastly more common than it is.

Let’s take the specific example of trachoma and its accompanying condition, trichiasis. It roughens the inside of the eyelid and causes it to turn inward — eyelashes and all — resulting in repeated abrasion of the cornea. Though it was eliminated in the developed world during the 20th century and a 21st-century push has thus far wiped it out in thirty countries where it was still endemic, historically, this has been one of the leading causes of infectious blindness. It ran rampant through army camps and other crowded environments; it spread in cities; it infected people repeatedly throughout the course of their lives, until they lost their vision entirely.

How often have you seen it in a story?

Or consider osteoarthritis. We may occasionally note an elderly character being “stooped” or groaning at their stiff joints, but the reality is that any person whose job involves a lot of heavy manual labor is at high risk of developing such problems . . . and “heavy manual labor” is a great description of agrarian life at any point prior to industrialization. (During industrialization, it depends a bit more on what type of factory you’re working in.) Archaeologists can look at a skeleton and judge what social class that person belonged to just by comparing their age to the wear and tear on their joints: two sets of remains recently found in Pompeii were fairly clearly identifiable as some middle-aged lady of the house and some younger male servant or slave, based on the damage to his bones — and the lack of such damage to hers.

Injury in particular plays a key role here. Just in my lifetime, the tendency to send someone to physical therapy after an accident or surgery has skyrocketed, because we now have a much better idea of how to return the body to full function. But in the past? People often had to return to work as soon as they were anything like physically capable of it, instead of taking time to fully heal — or, if they were wealthy, they got coddled with bed rest that actually made their recovery harder. How often do we see the results of that in fiction, though? Sure, we all know the trope of the character with old injury who can tell when it’s about to rain . . . but we say much less about reduced range of motion, persistent loss of strength, or the ways that compensating for one problem (like an uneven gait) can screw up some other part of your body (like your back).

Of course, this is in part because we complain most about discomfort and limitations when we feel like we shouldn’t be subject to them. If literally everybody around you starts experiencing arthritis by the time they’re thirty because you’re all constantly doing backbreaking labor, then when your own aches and pains begin to set in, that’s more apt to feel like par for the course. It’s a mark of how far medicine has come in the last century that we in the developed world expect we ought to continue to feel good for decades on end.

But also, I suspect that if we were to depict physical disabilities being as widespread as they were in historical reality — and still are, in many parts of the world — it would come across as unrelenting misery porn. If we tried to represent the honest rate of painful and disfiguring scars, missing teeth, deteriorating vision, weak grips, backaches, neck pain, reduced mobility, disturbed digestion, and more that probably afflicted the average rural village, market town, or overcrowded city of the past . . . frankly, I’m horrifying myself just trying to imagine it.

And even if you’re writing science fiction of the sort that imagines a more technological future, this won’t all go away — or at least, it won’t for all of the characters. Anyone on the bottom end of the social scale is liable to experience more disability relative to the elite, who can afford time to heal or expensive treatments and therapies to address their problems. The nature of the problems in question may change, and might include fictional ideas like neurological issues caused by the use of brain implants, but they’re still likely to be there.

I am not, for the record, advocating that half of all characters under the age of forty should have some kind of disability, and every single character above that line. I suspect the result would end up distracting rather than effective — one of those situations where truth winds up seeming less realistic than fiction. But I do think that all of us, not just the disability activists, would benefit from acknowledging more often how much this can be threaded into characters’ lives, without them being explicitly marked out as Characters With Disabilities.

Especially because, when these issues are so widespread, they’re no longer going to define someone’s identity in the same way we might expect today. Having a bum knee or terrible vision or a stomach that regularly sends you to the privy at a run is just going to be how people are. That character can’t walk without a cane? The same is true for six other people in the village. Some disabilities will still stand out — seizures, for example, are going to be rarer, and quite possibly attributed to supernatural causes rather than ordinary life — but many of them will seem like business as usual.

Which means that, in fiction, noting their presence can be done through simple traces of description. Two characters are having a conversation; one of them, upon being given a heavy object to look at, grimaces and transfers it to her stronger hand. The other one, standing up to leave, leans on the arm of his chair and then gently eases his weight onto his right hip. The servant, summoned to escort him out, stops rubbing at the infection reddening their eyes. The narrative doesn’t have to stop and explain that these people have physical problems; it’s just part of the descriptive texture, used to break up the dialogue and exposition.

Am I thinking of these things more right now because I’m moving through my forties? Is that “right hip” example possibly drawn from personal experience, which I only recently mitigated with physical therapy? Nahhhh.

But man, does age give me more sympathy for characters whose bodies don’t work perfectly on command, every time.

Climate change is on everyone’s mind’s lately, to the point where “climate fiction” is now a recognized subgenre — both within speculative fiction and without. Given my focus in this Patreon, however, I’m not going to attempt to spin scenarios about what our world might realistically look like in fifty or a hundred years, or how we’re going to respond to it; other people have already done that in far greater depth, with far greater knowledge of the subject, than I could hope to do.

Instead, we’re going to take a look at the climate changes humanity has already experienced, and what we’ve done about them.

Broadly speaking, we can lump these into two major categories: changes in precipitation, and changes in temperature. Furthermore, we can specify that, for it to count as “climate change” in a meaningful sense, it has to be a lasting alteration, not a brief one. Short-term change is weather; long-term trends are climate. And only the latter drives significant adaptations from society.

Of those two categories — please forgive the incoming pun — temperature tends to sneak under the radar. As we’re in the process of finding out, you can get significant alterations in weather patterns from global shifts of only a degree or two; in the days when no one had reliable thermometers marked with a systematic scale, that kind of shift was impossible to measure. And a gradual, large-scale drift like the one that produced the eras we term the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age happens on a timeline so slow, people are apt to notice it only across the generations: maybe your grandfather tells stories about how frost never used to strike after the spring equinox, or conversely, the ground had always thawed by then.

These changes are still significant! Agriculture depends on people knowing when it’s safe to put crops in the ground, and having enough time for them to mature before autumn storms or winter freezes kill them. As the average temperatures drift from what they used to be, harvests get poorer, because local customs are adapted to the weather patterns everyone expects. But as those patterns break, people will gradually change their customs to match, growing crops better suited to the conditions that now prevail.

Changes in precipitation can be a lot more calamitous. In this historical record, we most often hear about this as an issue of drought, when a persistent lack of rainfall across multiple years results in famine. It’s also possible, however, for the problem to go the other way; too much rainfall leads to flooding and crops drowning in the field. Or, in a worst case scenario, you get both: current theories hold that the decline of the Khmer Empire owed a lot to unpredictable shifts between not enough rain and far too much, which wrecked the stability of a society that depended upon sophisticated hydroengineering.

People can also adapt to changes in rainfall, of course, but it’s more difficult because the effects are more sudden. While unusual heat or frost can kill crops, a slow upward or downward drift in average temperatures gives you time to change from wheat to barley or vice versa, as you plant something hardier for the conditions. Droughts and flooding arrive more abruptly, and in between instances, you get good years where it seems like everything is back to normal. It’s only when you look back on the pattern that you can see where things started going downhill — and by then, quite a lot of people may have starved.

Attempts to engineer our way out of trouble are not a new phenomenon. The aforementioned hydraulic works, discussed in more detail last year, are all about trying to buffer against the vagaries of water being over- or under-supplied. Farmers can also insulate their fields with straw or attempt to shade them with taller plants, to mitigate the effects of heat and cold and reduce evaporation. But mostly, the response to this has had to take the form of changing our own behavior: planting something more tolerant of the conditions at hand, so that at the end of the day — or the season — we have something to eat.

I’ve been speaking of this primarily in terms of crops because that has been the overwhelming consideration — and also the only part even vaguely in human control. If climate shifts produce more hurricanes or tornadoes or blizzards . . . well, historically speaking, there is bugger-all people have been able to do about it. Even now, we can only do so much to fortify our houses and cities against those kinds of storms. And while it’s true that climate change can also introduce novel diseases, neither the people of the time nor historians looking back now can generally tell where exactly those epidemics came from. All people could do was hunker down and hope to survive, or migrate somewhere they hoped would be safer.

Because climate has historically been every bit as much out of our control as weather. While it’s true that human action can affect the globe, as we’re seeing right now, it tends to require a scale of influence we really only hit with the Industrial Revolution. Before that, our population was too small, our output of climate-changing factors too restricted. We have changed local climates through actions like deforestation, which can lead to desertification, but the biggest alterations have mostly come about through natural forces: volcanic eruptions, changes in ocean circulation, and the like.

I should note in passing a particular subset of (thus far fictional) climate change, which is the process of terraforming. Science fiction has long played with the idea that humans could deliberately alter the climate of a whole planet specifically to make it hospitable — and not just the climate, but the entire composition of the atmosphere and the biomes of the land and sea. Most novels have handwaved their effects into existence, caring more about it as a background device to allow for human settlement on other planets; only a few have really devoted attention to the mechanisms by which this might be achieved. If you’re interested in that end of things, I am definitely not qualified to help you! But it’s an intriguing question to explore — not least because the precursors to such ideas are being explored right now on our own planet.

Back to the home front: bear in mind that, more than any given set of conditions, the problem tends to be change. Some conditions are, admittedly, more favorable than others; mild temperatures and moderate rain — however those are defined for the region — are going to produce better results than the alternative. But humans are very good at adapting to the situation at hand, and thriving as much as possible under those circumstances.

It’s when the rug gets pulled out from under us that havoc truly results. Then the behaviors and patterns that protected us before suddenly become maladaptive. Even if the new situation is entirely survivable, we may not be acting in the best fashion to get through it. But figuring that out, and making the necessary changes, is easier said than done . . . and no, that isn’t simply a not-very-coded slam against all the inertia getting in the way of responding to our current climate crisis. People cannot easily abandon cities threatened by rising sea levels or the depletion of the local aquifer, or pivot their economy toward resources that better suit the new reality. That’s especially true of everyone at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale, for whom the immediate concern has to be their ability to get by today.

As I said above, these changes are mostly going to play out on a timescale that means we only see a snapshot of one moment along the line — or, perhaps, look back upon it in retrospect. (A few authors will have their story elapse over generations or centuries, but that’s not common.) Still, knowing that context can help set the stage for a plot . . . one with far too much relevance for us today.

Weather tends to show up in novels merely as a background detail — all too often as an example of the pathetic fallacy, where e.g. it’s raining because the protagonist is sad. Every so often, it rises to the level of plot device: there’s a snowstorm so characters can get snowed in somewhere. Speculative fiction honestly has a dearth of weather worked into the general description of a scene, despite the fact that any time the story moves outside, there must be some kind of weather in play.

But if that were all, I wouldn’t be devoting an essay to this subject. After all, this Patreon is about worldbuilding, which means not just the physical but the cultural side of a setting. (Given my inclinations, the cultural side more than anything else). So how is weather itself a part of society?

Depending on where you live, you already know some of the answers to that. Weather shapes our houses, our clothing, and our food, in ways discussed in previous essays. It also gives a rhythm to our lives: if you live in a region where afternoon thunderstorms are expected in the summer, or the monsoon blows through at certain times of year, that affects what activities people undertake at what times. But there are other, more directly weather-focused elements, too.

Let’s start with a question we tend to take for granted nowadays: can you see the weather coming?

Weather forecasting as a formal science got started in the nineteenth century, and it began with us more rigorously measuring what the weather even was. You can’t do much in the way of prediction unless you have a mass of data about highs, lows, wind speed and direction, pressure changes, precipitation, and so on. And you need that data to be spread over a large area, because of course weather is never purely a local phenomenon! This included giving scientific instruments to ship captains, since the ocean is a key driver of weather . . . and also the safety of those captains can depend on knowing what the weather is about to do.

Fast communication is key, too. If you hear that an area upwind of you is getting a cold snap or a storm front, odds are good that’s headed your way shortly. What really sets forecasting going, though, is computers — which can crunch huge amounts of data vastly quicker than humans can — and weather balloons and satellites to measure conditions from above. Thanks to those things, especially improved computer modeling, the precision of our forecasts has improved astonishingly: these days, the prediction for four days from now is as accurate as the prediction for tomorrow was thirty years ago.

Of course, people have been trying to predict the weather for a lot longer than we’ve had computers, or even thermometers. This has largely been short-term and based on observations of immediate phenomena: for example, “red sky at night, sailor’s delight; red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning” is accurate for regions where weather tends to move from west to east, as the tint of the sky signals the location of a high-pressure (good weather) system and whether it’s headed toward you or moving away. Or, where I grew up — at the tail end of Tornado Alley — we all learned that a certain greenish cast to the sky meant the weather was ripe for forming twisters.

The thing about that green sky is, it does mean a likelihood of severe weather . . . but not necessarily tornadoes. And that’s the flaw of this kind of weather lore, that it can be inconsistent, or outright incorrect. That whole North American tradition of Groundhog Day, where the presence or absence of shadows seen by a groundhog predicts how much longer the winter will last? It has absolutely no statistical underpinning. Some analyses even give it a negative correlation, showing that Punxsutawney Phil’s predictions are less accurate than random chance! Maybe we need to update our proverb.

But humans are not content merely to know what the weather is likely to do an hour or a day from now. We would really, really love to control it, to suit our own purposes.

And for millennia, people have been promising the ability to do exactly that. This is honestly one of the underpinnings of certain elements of religion: you pray or make offerings to a deity of the sky or agriculture in the hopes of getting the rain or sun necessary for a good crop, or a deity of the sky or sea to get the wind you need for your ocean voyage. Humans can’t control the weather, but gods can, so you ask them nicely for their help. Colloquially, we often call society-wide weather rituals “rain dances,” and dancing is indeed a common element, though not a universal one.

Rainmakers, however, peddle claims of a more direct skill. They assert that they, on their own, can end a drought — or, less commonly, end a deluge that’s causing flooding or drowning the crops. Historically, they attributed their power to magic; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they instead dressed their assertions up in scientific trappings. Charles Hatfield, one famous American rainmaker, used a secret mix of chemicals in evaporating tanks to “attract” rain to an area. His apparent success rate (likely due to him being a good weather predictor, rather than weather-worker) was high enough that he was able to charge the City of San Diego ten thousand dollars — in early 1900s money! — to fill their empty reservoir.

Which promptly backfired on him, as the region experienced torrential rains that broke a dam, killed about twenty people, and caused an estimated $3.5 million in damage. Rainmakers who promised results they failed to deliver could and did get sued for fraud, but rainmakers who “succeeded” too well could also wind up in trouble.

This idea has not gone away. If anything, it’s trying to accelerate into the realm of actual, reliable science. We’ve been conducting experiments in cloud seeding for decades, aiming to encourage rain or snow through scattering material in the atmosphere. Its efficacy is debatable, and people have understandable concerns about the environmental impact of the material used. Other, newer concepts involve things like reflecting some of the sun’s energy back out into space, to slow the effects of global warming.

Science fiction can take these ideas to an extreme. Especially in closed environments like biomes, stories may depict weather as scheduled down to the minute, so characters know to expect a quarter-inch of rain between 3:17 and 4:01 p.m. That’s plausible when the “rain” is actually coming out of ceiling pipes; when it’s the product of natural planetary forces, it’s much more of a stretch. At that point, you’re more in the realm of fantasy, where a sorcerer can summon a storm on demand . . . which would probably have a lot more society-wide effects, especially in military contexts, than most novels take the time to imagine.

With the rise of climate fiction as a subgenre, though, we might expect to see a lot more weather control showing up in our stories. And so, with an eye toward that, next week we’ll take a look at climate change!

I live in California — specifically in the San Francisco Bay Area, a place whose history is indelibly shaped by the gold rush of 1848. And, having proposed in last week’s essay a speculative path to industrialization involving the discovery of some kind of unobtanium, I find myself led naturally to the notion of a rush: a sudden influx of hopeful miners to the location of a newly discovered mineral deposit, seeking to make their fortunes in one fell swoop.

We hear about these mostly as gold rushes, but they can actually happen for other resources, too; there have been silver rushes and diamond rushes. So what elements are necessary to cause a rush?

First and most obviously, the object of the rush must be highly valuable. Nobody’s going to travel for months, often through rugged wilderness (because all the sites closer to home have already been claimed), to go after an ordinary resource like iron or coal. Or rather, they will, but not in the kind of sudden mass migration that leads us to call such an event a rush. If people don’t grow starry-eyed at the thought of getting their hands on some of that thing, it’s not fancy enough for this scenario. Think especially in terms of value versus volume: something that wows people when you hold it in the palm of your hand will have much more power to attract prospectors than something that requires an entire cartload to impress.

Second, it has to be (theoretically) easy to obtain. This is both a legal and a technological angle, with the legal part being the question of who owns the land where the resource is found. I suspect it’s no accident that, of the nine countries Wikipedia lists as having major gold rushes in the 19th century, eight of them were areas colonized by Europeans, with Greece as the sole outlier. In places like Australia, Venezuela, and the United States, a frontier mentality prevailed which facilitated the idea that any random guy could move in and start panning for gold. Try the same trick in England of the same era, and the landowner will have words and possibly bullets for you — not to mention the unlikelihood of finding major gold deposits not already under exploitation.

At least, easily accessible ones. This is the technological side of the equation: if extracting the resource requires sophisticated training and/or expensive equipment, then that’s going to limit active parties to the well funded, well organized operations. These days a lot of our mineral extraction involves digging up ore, sometimes from deep underground, and subjecting it to complex chemical and physical processes. It’s a far cry from some guy with a pan on the bank of a stream believing he might strike it rich.

And finally, people have to hear about it. This seems like an easy requirement to meet, but again, notice that “gold rush” is a phrase we associate with the nineteenth century. There are a handful from earlier — all of them in the context of Spanish and Portuguese colonization of the Americas — but the mass communication of newspapers and especially the electric telegraph made it vastly easier to spread the news widely, creating a large pool of hopeful prospectors willing to pack up their lives and go in search of fortune.

(You might think, by the way, that the accessibility of the location might matter. One look at the Klondike Gold Rush, however, puts paid to that notion. People were willing to risk freezing off their body parts, dying of starvation, being eaten by bears, or falling off a mountain to get to where there was gold. It certainly does help if it’s easier to get to, especially if there are ships or trains, but it’s not a requirement.)

That mass media thing, of course, cuts both ways. Whoever first discovers the resource probably doesn’t want anybody to know about it! Marshall and Sutter at Sutter’s Mill in 1848 wanted to keep their gold to themselves. Alas, despite oaths of secrecy, the guy they sent to secure mineral rights for their land blabbed the tale repeatedly along the way and failed in his mission to boot. Sutter not only didn’t get to keep the gold to himself, but lost all his workers to prospecting, his crops and cattle to squatters, and his entire dream of a profitable agricultural rancho there.

Of course, not everybody who rushes to a source of gold, silver, diamonds, or any other valuable material makes their fortune. In fact, the vast majority of them don’t. Advantage goes to those who get there first, as they stake out and deplete the best claims — which of course contributes to the feverish sense of urgency, people making snap decisions rather than thinking it through. Between the cost of getting there, the cost of equipment (which may not be specialized but is still an expense for the kind of poor man hoping to strike it rich), and the cost of supporting yourself and any allies or employees in the wilderness, most people start out in the hole. In the California Gold Rush, it’s estimated that a few lucky souls truly acquired a fortune, about half made a modest profit, and the rest lost their shirts.

Which is why the actual smart move — albeit the much less glamorous one — is to be the guy selling picks and shovels. It was less than two months after the discovery at Sutter’s Mill that Samuel Brannan bought every piece of prospecting equipment he could find and opened a store in the then-tiny town of San Francisco, so he could sell those things to the people he knew would come — knew in part because he was also one of the first people to publicize the discovery! (The story goes that he couldn’t put it in his newspaper because all his staff had run off, so instead he walked through the streets with a vial of gold, shouting about it to everyone who could hear.) Selling pans at seventy-five times the price he paid for them, he made out like a bandit and became enormously wealthy.

Selling picks and shovels is also a lot safer. Any time riches or the dream of them are at stake, you’re going to get people fighting over them, and a gold rush is no different. Claim-jumping is the act of starting to work on a site someone else has claimed as their own — usually not while they’re conducting active operations, but if they haven’t gotten to it yet or have decided it’s not as promising as another location, neither of which mean they’re ready to let you have it instead. Even when people respect those boundaries, any dispute is liable to escalate to fighting . . . and, of course, any pre-existing tensions are likely to be exacerbated by the tense conditions. Black, Latino, and Chinese miners — along with smaller numbers from other marginalized groups — faced particularly intense threats and bloodshed; it’s no accident that they were less likely to reap a profit than their white counterparts. Meanwhile, Native Americans were massacred by miners who wanted them out of the way.

This kind of thing is also environmentally disastrous, because the men (and much smaller number of women) chasing a vision of gold don’t care very much about anything else. Deforestation, soil runoff, and active pollution from toxic chemicals wreak havoc on the land and anybody relying on it for their survival. In just a few short years, this can transform not only the immediate landscape of the claims but anything downstream of them, and not for the better.

And all of these things could happen in a speculative world! Any planetary colonization scenario is ripe for it, so long as interstellar travel is available to the masses. Even something non-mineral, like the hunting of fantastical beasts could potentially look like a gold rush, if someone finds a critical use for their horns or hides or other body parts. As long as it’s local to a certain area, valuable, relatively easy to get, and advertised widely, the fever will take hold, and people will come.

There’s a particular type of alternate history whose premise is: what if [fill in the blank past society] industrialized? (Rome is a particular magnet for this.)

The challenge of such speculation is that we have precisely one data point for what de novo industrialization looks like. Many parts of the world have industrialized, but they’ve done it by adopting the concepts and technologies developed elsewhere. As a result, our explanations for how it happens run the risk of being just-so stories, with no way to test them and see if they’re correct. Those being the only explanations we have, though, we pretty much have to go with them whenever we attempt to depict either an alternate historical industrialization, or this process happening in a secondary world.

But before we ask what it takes to industrialize, we should first look at what industrialization is.

I’m going to give a simple answer to this. An industrial society is one that’s figured out mechanized methods of production, rather than everything having to be done by hand. In order make that mechanization work, we had to harness new sources of energy — specifically, fossil fuels — and then reorganize labor around creating and operating the machines. As a consequence of such changes, a society of this type develops more specialized division of labor, and also tends to support higher, denser populations.

So: how do you get there from an agrarian society where muscles provide most of the power?

Obviously this is in large part a technological question. A Bronze Age society can’t industrialize for the simple reason that their metallurgy can’t support the kinds of technology necessary for powerful steam engines; hunter-gatherers, even less so. Even an iron-working society can’t necessarily manage it, because a boiler capable of surviving useful levels of pressure isn’t something any old blacksmith can bang together. But technology is only one side of the equation, and if all you’re looking at is the metallurgy, it’s easy to think that surely any place with good blacksmiths could figure it out — that it’s pure chance no other time period industrialized. In reality, you also have to ask yourself, what are we making these machines for?

Yes, aeolipiles — primitive steam turbines — existed nearly two thousand years before the Industrial Revolution got rolling. But they were essentially toys, producing very little power and using up tons of fuel to do it. They had no practical function. It took a completely different design to arrive at a steam engine that could do anything useful . . . and the odds that anybody was going to put in the work for that design were low, because what purpose would it serve?

When your vision of the Industrial Revolution is that change at its height, with massive engines driving locomotives or machines that fill whole rooms, you miss how inefficient, ineffective, and unreliable early steam engines were. Even if some Greek inventor tinkered around with the aeolipile or asked “I wonder if there’s a better approach?”, he would wind up spending tons of money and effort on making a device that still wasn’t worth it. The argument I’ve seen — the best just-so story we have for the Industrial Revolution — is that it started where it did and when it did because eighteenth-century Britain found itself in a situation where even a kind of crappy steam engine was better than no engine at all: coal was needed for heating purposes, their coal mines had gotten deep enough that they were flooding with water, and oh look, the fuel you need for the engine is right there where you’ll be using it. No need to pay for transporting it anywhere. The economics worked out to make that a problem worth solving with a new technological development.

Coal has been used for a long time in cooking and heating, but we’ve tended to go for the easy surface deposits first, and to switch away from it when those become less accessible. The roots of Britain’s industrialization probably lie in deforestation and the more intensive mining of coal in the century or two leading up to the development of actual steam engines — a set of circumstances that didn’t prevail in, say, Rome. They handled their mechanical problems with slave labor and had much less need for coal, living where they did; as near as I can tell, peninsular Italy had very little coal anyway (compared to Britain). So trying to invent a steam engine there would be a solution in search of a problem to solve: not a situation that favors the kind of technological development that has to pass through multiple not-very-effective stages before it gets to the good stuff.

And the good stuff, as you all probably learned in school, is steam engines that are smooth and efficient enough to be useful in textile production. Once you have those, it’s worth the cost to build them in places other than on top of coal mines and transport coal to them. Other uses, too, but after the water-pumping prologue, textile industrialization really is Act I of the Industrial Revolution, because it’s an easy place for a better (but still not amazing) engine to make a difference. So here, again, the just-so story says Britain was the right place at the right time: they had huge industries in both wool and (thanks to colonialism) cotton, meaning that productivity gains in something as basic as the spinning of thread could produce absolutely explosive growth. Everything after that — trains and steamships and cool steampunk gadgets — is flying on the momentum created by coal mining and thread.

Of course, all of this is the mundane path to industrialization. In a speculative world, it’s entirely possible to change the starting conditions and create a different trajectory; so long as it still follows the general pattern of “non-muscle energy source allows for new, mechanized, mass production,” it will feel industrial. If that energy source is the discovery of a vein of some mineral which, when a small quantity is placed into a device, becomes an abundant form of power, maybe nobody has to slowly iterate through crappy devices to reach a point where it makes economic sense to transport the stuff elsewhere. Or it’s a method of channeling magical power from the sky, recently discovered by an innovative sorcerer, which turns out to be useful for some productive task. (Quite possibly it’s still textiles: as noted in the previous essay, those are, alongside food, one of the basic survival requirements that have historically demanded the most time and labor.)

I’ll admit to ambivalent feelings about that latter example, because of what kind of magic I like in my stories. An industrialized form of magic is one that, by definition, can be depersonalized. At that point, no matter what words you attach to it, I no longer find it very magical: it’s just technology by a different name. I can still enjoy stories in such a setting; I’ll just enjoy them for reasons other than the magic. And I freely admit this is a personal opinion, not one shared by every reader. For worldbuilding purposes, it’s entirely fine to create a speculative twist on the process of industrialization — and then it helps to understand what does and does not make sense!