When we think of science fiction, we often immediately leap to ‘high tech’. What cool things could technology do in the future? How arewe going to conquer space? What wouldit be like for the digital revolution to physically implant itself in our bodies?
Questions such as these are all important questions for a writer considering a science fiction story, and many times actually provide the springboard for a story. It’s easy to see why: from any one of those questions, answers spiral outward in a glorious fractal of possibilities, and it becomes a game to try to predict how any given answer might impact the development of humanity.
Did you know that there is one particular implement that has alreadyhad a massive impact on humanity and cultural development that most SF fans don’t give much of a thought to, though? Probably because it’s not super high-tech.
In fact, it’s about as low tech as you can get.
I’m referring, you see, to the plough (or plow, I guess, depending on where you get your English from).
The plough is the last thing a science fiction writer (or reader) might consider when listing off their favourite or most influential pieces of technology—but it’s actually high on the list of technological advances that made a drastic impact on humanity. And if you’re creating your own cultures, it’s vital to understand why.
Because, you see, when you break it down to the simplest notations, the plough is responsible for entrenched gender inequality.
Don’t worry; I can hear your scepticism from here. You’re not the first to respond this way, and you won’t be the last. But I promise you: it’s true.
The theory goes like this:
You live somewhere that’s hospitable to growing a lot of food crops, likely somewhere temperate without too many trees (or with trees you can fell). One day, it occurs to you that hey! Instead of digging individual holes for each of these seeds or plants, you could maybe just strap a stick to a donkey’s behind (or a horse, or an ox, or, you know, an ass—I’ll leave the obvious puns to you) and let the combination of animal + stick do the work for you.
Only, the stick keeps hitting rocks and things or just trailing helplessly along on the ground, and you realise that with a few modifications, the most effective combination is actually teamwork between you all: the animal pulls the stick, the stick digs the ground, you hold onto the stick to make sure it stays where it’s supposed to. Great.
The thing is, though, this method of farming requires a lot more upper body strength than shifting agriculture (thinking large-scale ‘gardening’ rather than ‘farming’), which means it’s largely the domain of the menfolk. But anyway, there’s plenty back in the farmhouse for the women to do, so that’s not a problem. It’s just equitable division of labour, right?
Sure. For a while.
Fast forward several generations, and we find that the split between private and public spheres becomes entrenched. Not only is labour segregated now (which happens in shifting agriculture societies too), but it’s enforced. Women do the private-sphere stuff. Men do the public-sphere stuff.
Including, once settlements are large enough, the governing.
Fast forward a few more generations, will all of this solidifies, coagulates, codifies even more. We see societies and populations where the men are in charge, because ‘obviously’ they are better suited to the public sphere, which the women are confined at home—because ‘obviously’ they are not strong enough for public activities.
The role of women has never been very highly valued, even in shifting agriculture, but the research is clear: to start ploughing the soil en masse is to start down the difficult and apparently inevitable path toward entrenched, institutionalised gender discrimination.
But you’re a sci fi writer, right? So let’s think about this in the context of technology, of space—of planetary colonisation. Because I bet you didn’t realise that figuring out how your new planetary colonies made their food would have such an impact on their social roles and values.
Here’s a scenario. We fly into deep space, far beyond our solar system to other star systems, because that’s a thing we can do now. (Work with me here.) We find some cool planets that look like they could support humanity.
We touch down, and probably unroll the terraforming units, because if we can reach other solar systems, we can alter their environments to be habitable, right?
Technology is good to us, and the planet is tamed, and we begin to grow food. Possibly, this is mostly done with advanced tech—or at the very least, say, motorised tractors.
No hand ploughing. We’re good so far.
But then humanity begins to fragment—over the planet, throughout the stars—and pockets begin to form. Natural disasters cut some populations off from others, crises occur that threaten extant technology, somebody catches religion and denounces machines, even though machines (rockets) brought them here from Earth. (Maybe they thought humanity should never have left.)
Some of these pockets leave technology because they’re poor—in money, in resources, in trade. Some renounce technology willingly, either because of some kind of religious conviction, or simply a desire to move back to their roots, to a ‘purer’ time in humanity’s past.
We know this would happen. It happens now. Humans have always been human, after all, and it’s far more likely than not that they always will be.
So now we have pockets of people starting over—some with a hand-operated plough. Throw enough people into space after all, and statistically everything will happen at some point.
And now we end up with the plough cycle all over again, in a context rich for conflict: a spaceship containing historians from a different far reach of space, crashing on a backwater planet with little tech, who flail helplessly as they try to steer the low-tech planet down a different route, because they know where this one will lead. The far-future descendants of a society who overcame discrimination, forced to confront the discomforting truths of their past: that once, the people who are now deemed unpeople were welcomed with open arms. The travellers who return home hundreds of years into the future to discover that their home has devolved in their absence, and now they are unwelcome, part of a persecuted minority.
As science fiction writers, the temptation is often to look toward the next Greatest Thing, the next Big Tech, the next Major Revolution. But in order to accurately predict the future, you must be grounded in the past.
We’re condemned to repeat its mistakes otherwise, after all.
Faster-than-light travel and wearable devices and brain implants and food replicators and nanobots and medical patches and so forth are all exciting (and these days, nearly all of this list is attainable, if not affordable—we are truly living in the future). But don’t forget to start your invented societies from the ground up. Don’t overlook the simple technology that has the power to change the structure of civilisation either.
If not the plough, then what? What other alternatives can you invent? And what other deceptively-simple inventions might go on to cause massive societal shifts?
If you’re writing science fiction, it’s great to know about the theories behind the multiverse, the possibilities for faster-than-light travel, the conceptual basis for time travel. But it’s equally important to remember the basics—like that one surprising farming implement that changed the world forever.
Amy Laurens is the author of the Sanctuary series, a portal fantasy trilogy set in small-town Australia, and the Kaditeos series (staring with How Not To Acquire A Castle), a comic fantasy series set in a secondary world with suspicious similarities to our own. She has also written the non-fiction title How To Create Cultures that explores the links between culture and the environment.