That is one thing that I noticed about science-fiction and fantasy.
Like whenever a character talks about times before their own, it’s never really prehistoric, more so ancient. Even in my stories I don’t really mention the prehistoric that much and I wonder why I do this. It’s my world-building and I could do whatever. Then you have to wonder what one means by “ancient times” and “prehistoric”. I like to think that when we are on the cusps of civilization then it’s ancient times, but a time when civilization wasn’t a thing yet then it’s prehistoric to me.
However, it’s something that I barely even see in the media that is fantasy and science-fiction.
Maybe I am blind to works that are like that out there, but this is something that I’ve noticed.
What are your thoughts? Is it because when it comes to prehistoric times, things get lost to time making it much harder to record even in fiction?
The problem with going into more than a European-centric Medieval setting is:
When the majority of the writers are Eurocentric in their ethnicity, they write what’s safe, what won’t get them in trouble, etc.
Past that, a lot of guys have an obsessions with Rome and Greece. Women are more likely to model Egypt. Getting outside of this sphere requires doing all the research you did in your childhood alll over again for an era you’re usually ill-equipped ot model anything after.
Then there comes the problem of “how can you X without progress?!”
How can one person live to 1000, 10,000 years old and not invent the Industrial Revolution from scratch, even if they’re dingy?
How can you have magic that rivals modern tech and not have very techy modernizations based off magic?
You really have to understand why they had some inventions take off and others didn’t. For example, the printing press would have been dead on arrival if there wasn’t a mechanical paper milling process in close association with it. One or the other, and the industrial revolution doesn’t happen. Furthermore, there was an increase in intellectualism (not magically people were smarter, but they had the food and time to care for their minds).
So, to keep these people in weak tech, you have to start unraveling things, and making sure those things aren’t valued or haven’t been figured out. It’s work, if you’re being serious about worldbuilding.
Outside of this work, you’re depending on people to be willing to suspend their disbelief. And that doesn’t work for all readers, at all.
I, personally, like a right at the start of the industrial revolution/end of the medieval approach to fantasy, where my characters are living in as rapidly a changing world as I grew up in (Xennial: outdoors to online 24/7). That sense of belonging to a dying world and grasping the new is VERY much my thing.
I saw “prehistoric times“ and immediately thought of the Flintstones
When I think “prehistoric“, I think of sabertoothed tigers and dinos, but what’s it really?
Cambridge dictionary: “describing the period before there were written records”
Merriam-Webster: “of, relating to, or existing in times antedating written history”
So, if that’s the definition, than I actually have thought about this time. Just because there weren’t written records doesn’t mean people didn’t pass things down orally, right? The feline race in Elgana, Kattalunae, I’ve thought up their prehistoric times when historical accounts were passed down through verbal communication (stories or songs) or tailsign (stories).
So, when they decided to record things and write them down (copying the humans who have everything written down), several Kattaluna scholars took different approaches with how to record tailsign, which becomes a problem for interpretation later. And their written language also has variants making reading historical texts in the ancient tongue a bit of a headache.
To answer your question, I think it’s more like “much harder to interpret“
A vast portion of Australian history is considered Prehistoric because the native people didn’t keep written records. History in Australia officially begins with Captain Cook’s arrival.
prehistoric refers to like, before recorded history. Ancient times refers broadly to archaic-late antique eras, like 4000BCE to 5th century CE when we’re talking about Earth. It doesn’t have anything to do with whether there was civilization or not, but rather whether the civilizations recorded their cultures and stuff. It’s like, “eras we know the history of” and “eras we don’t know the history of because it wasn’t preserved”.
So yeah you’re average speculative fiction character isn’t going to know much about a time/place/civilization that doesn’t have records.
A writer will have to make it from scratch–and a lot of times, the lazy just borrow from cultures they currently find “primitive enough” so there’s that mess to carefully peel back.
