juliet

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!



(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/SbcH2d)

I mentioned at the start of this month that I had a new flash story in Lightspeed; now it is free to read online! Or you can follow the same link to listen to it instead, narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. As the title implies, "I Cut Off a Monster’s Arm. AITA?" is modeled after the type of Reddit post where someone posts about an incident in their life, seeking reassurance that they're not the one at fault in that situation (or sometimes confirmation that, yeah, they done screwed up). It's also one of a small but possibly growing number of flash stories I've written based around Japanese yōkai tales -- the third one will be out at the end of this month or the beginning of the next!

As usual, you can buy the entire issue of Lightspeed containing my story for $4.99, or subscribe for a whole year at $41.92. It's great to be able to read things free online, but it's also great for the magazines that publish them to be able to stay in business!

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/JjsfB9)

After a hiatus in which it wasn't on sale anywhere, The Writer's Little Book of Naming is now available once again! This is a micro guide to things you might think about while coming up with personal names, place names, and in-world terms for your fiction; it's a deeper dive than my Patreon essays, in one neat little package.

And yes, this means there are more Writer's Little Books coming! The Little Book of Platitudes, which takes on common saws of writing advice, will be out next month (you can pre-order it right now), and those two will be followed by new titles: Little Books on research, public reading, various poetic topics, and more. My goal is one a month for a while, though we'll see how well I'm able to maintain that schedule in reality. It turns out there are a bunch of subjects upon which I have 8-10K words of stuff to say, which is too small for a book book, but excellent for a little focused ebook.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://www.swantower.com/2026/06/16/the-writers-little-books-return/)

Given the surge in popularity of "tradwife" influencers these days, it seems an appropriate time to take a direct look at what it actually means for everything you need to be produced at home.

Starting with two basic facts: first, that essentially nobody has ever produced everything they need at home. And second, that the more you have to do so, the more your life sucks.

If you want an illustration of what I mean, check out the book Lost in the Taiga by Vasily Peskov. It's a nonfiction account of the Lykov family, who fled religious persecution and spent fifty years living in almost total isolation in the Russian wilderness. By the time they started having regular contact with anyone outside their family, they were living the most horrifyingly marginal existence you can imagine: their house was a filthy, windowless lodge, they wore crude skins for clothing, and multiple family members (especially children) had died due to the almost complete lack of medicine. The weather itself had nearly killed them more than once when their crops failed, at one point necessitating the Lykovs taking turns keeping round-the-clock watch on their few surviving plants, to keep wild animals from destroying them.

And even then, the Lykovs weren't fully self-sufficient. They depended on metal tools like their cooking pot which, if lost or destroyed, were completely irreplaceable. Yes, it's possible to cook without metal vessels; yes, you could theoretically make stone tools if you didn't have access to metal knives. But every such step toward self-sufficiency requires more labor, until every single hour in your day is devoted to the task of bare survival.

Granted, the Lykovs were not living in the most forgiving environment. But if you check out the stories of people who exited the "trad life," you'll find account after account of how much work they poured into living that way, until there was simply no time or energy left over for enjoying its supposed benefits. It's an open secret at this point that the glossy, successful tradwives pulling in huge amounts of money from their work are showing a highly edited version of their existence, often involving armies of paid assistants -- and/or their children, whose free time becomes a sacrifice on the altar of their mother's career as an influencer.

Because that's the first thing to know about home production as a system: everybody works. If you're old enough to do some kind of simple task, like shelling peas, then you do it. Furthermore, you work nigh-constantly, because there is always more to do. The internet likes to pass around the claim that medieval Europeans worked less than moderns, but if you start to crunch the actual numbers, that doesn't really hold up . . . especially when you consider the tendency to ignore women's work. Even if a saint's day or other religious festival meant the men weren't going out to labor in the fields, the women still had to tend children, cook meals, clean up afterward, and probably spin thread while they watched the celebrations. Life will not go on hold just because it's a special day.

But what do I mean when I say "home production"? It's a fuzzy concept, but generally speaking, it refers to the idea that stuff is mostly made and used at home. You can also, of course, make stuff at home and then trade or sell it elsewhere; given how often houses doubled as workshops, it's inevitable those two modes will overlap. And piecework, where someone gets paid per item they make, has gone hand-in-hand with home production for centuries, as a way for a household to bring in a little more money. Home production in the sense I mean it here, though, is about the idea of self-sufficiency: rather than buying things ready-made, you make them you and your family, for you and your family.

Measured by the time and effort invested, home production focuses almost entirely on food (including drink) and clothing, and neither one is fully seasonal. Winter still entails agricultural labor, and when it doesn't, the men are probably working on making or repairing tools they'll use when the weather warms up, or taking care of livestock. The women are busy turning the raw outputs into actual food, and the aforementioned spinning, which has to fill almost every moment it can if you're to have enough thread to weave enough cloth to clothe everybody in the family. They might also make simple medicines at home, or crude furniture, or other necessities and minor luxuries, but those are a side note to the overwhelming demands of sustenance and shelter for the body.

And that's still not the whole story, is it? Blacksmiths have been high on the list of necessary trades since we invented metalworking. (All right, since we invented iron-working. Apparently the proper term for someone who works bronze is a brownsmith!) Successful metalworking requires so much training and specialized knowledge, not to mention equipment, not to mention time, that nobody's doing that and also being a full-time farmer. Pottery is much the same, because building and operating your own kiln is way too much to add atop everything else. Other things can be done at home, like milling grain, but they're so labor-intensive that it's vastly more efficient to have a specialist with the right tools do the job.

This is how "home production" turns out to be a spectrum. Yes, people used to produce most of what they needed at home -- but not everything, and at the first opportunity, they started outsourcing certain tasks. If you could buy or trade for thread already spun (perhaps from a local poor spinster), you did; if you could buy or trade for cloth already woven, you did. You were, essentially, buying a respite from the endless labor that is the genuine trad life. Furthermore, specialization of labor is good for us as a society: a dedicated weaver can make finer cloth than someone who's doing that in her spare time, and god knows a dedicated physician can know more about medicine than someone tossing a few herbs into tea and hoping that will do the job. When you don't have to do everything yourself, you get better results.

But the belief that the traditional life was somehow purer and better isn't entirely a new phenomenon. The transcendentalist philosophers of nineteenth century America, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, touted the benefits of "simple living" out in nature. In recent years the internet has given them something of an unfair shake; it's true they weren't entirely self-sufficient, but neither did they claim to be. (Thoreau in particular has become the target of "his mom did his laundry and brought him sandwiches!" We don't actually know how his laundry got done, and he himself admits he regularly walked into town to dine with friends and family.) It is true, however, that they approached their vision of simplicity from a relatively privileged direction, and could therefore afford a great deal of assistance and modern convenience. Their lives would have been significantly more difficult if the innovations of the Industrial Revolution had not made things like the production of their clothing faster and cheaper than the womenfolk of their families could manage by hand.

The flip side, of course, is that there can be genuine satisfaction in making stuff yourself. Especially if your job feels very separated from material reality -- you spend all your time on the computer moving words or numbers around, all to create something far removed from the physical product, or that never becomes a physical product at all -- then sinking your hands into a mass of dough, or sewing your own skirt, or raising vegetables, or any of the other simple tasks of creation often feels rewarding all out of proportion to its necessity . . . or maybe rewarding because it isn't necessary. It reconnects you with the fruits of your labor, and that can be very good for the brain.

So although I have a ton of issues with the entire "trad" movement (even before we get to the often reactionary politics behind it), I recognize and value some of the impulse there. And for writers, it's worth not only acknowledging the ugly reality of what real self-sufficiency looks like, but understanding the conditions that make people nostalgic for the concept. I would wholeheartedly believe in a spacefaring civilization where anything can be printed from a replicator on the spot -- and therefore has thriving communities of hobbyists who enjoy making stuff by hand instead.



(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://www.swantower.com/2026/06/12/new-worlds-home-production/)