Having certain technologies available before their time in a medieval fantasy setting.

I don't see any issue whatsoever, provided there's at least a plausible reason these innovations would have occurred (or at least the appearance of one).

If it makes sense for your world, then go for it. That's the beauty of a fantasy setting. It can be anything you want it to be.

Are you doing an alternate Earth, or historical fiction?

Alternate Earth, you can get away with less-than-perfect accuracy, especially if there is no technological reason why a ship's wheel couldn't have been invented a few centuries early. (It doesn't seem as great a leap as, say, modern ballistics in a medieval world that had just recently started working with gunpowder.)

Historical fiction, you will be flayed alive by readers, who expect accuracy and are likely to be experts on the period (unless you're pitching it as a one-off/experimental thing, and even then prepare to defend it.)

My suggestion: if you want to mix your time periods and techs, create an alternate Earth setting that is inspired by, but not bound to, our own history.

If your story is a fantasy story in the 13 century then you should be using the correct technology of the time.

But since your story is in a 13 century like setting, I don't think it has to be like the historical 13 century technology, It just need to be similar to it.

And well done for the research.

Your world, your history, your timeline.

You may get a comment or two about it, but it's your world, and who's to say that it wasn't invented early. You could even "hang a lantern on it" and have the characters talk about how great this new wheel is. An enthusiastic captain can tell a funny story of how the inventor came up with the idea. That's what I did to explain hay bales in my world.

Jinnambex said:

Great replies from all! I like the idea of explaining the wheel as a new invention, and I can maybe even incorporate the idea in later. The story is definitely not alternate earth (its a completely different fantasy world) but I currently have the story written with a whipstaff in mind. I could have the ship be wrecked and the same captain later get a "new and improved" ship with a wheel. That could be fun.

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Is there a specific advantage to the wheel over the whipstaff? This could be a plot point; changing and evolving tech can win battles, even wars. (Just think of how revolutionary something as simple as the barrel was, or sails that allowed tacking into the wind.)

And if it's not Earth, then by no means are you constrained by how Earth evolved - especially if it fits existing tech levels/manufacturing abilities. (Consider how many advances have been made, only to be lost and have to be remade, throughout history. IIRC, Ancient Greece was practically on the edge of an early Industrial Revolution when it fell.) It's not like you're dropping a diesel motor onto a galleon, here...

Brightdreamer said:

Are you doing an alternate Earth, or historical fiction?

Alternate Earth, you can get away with less-than-perfect accuracy, especially if there is no technological reason why a ship's wheel couldn't have been invented a few centuries early. (It doesn't seem as great a leap as, say, modern ballistics in a medieval world that had just recently started working with gunpowder.)

Historical fiction, you will be flayed alive by readers, who expect accuracy and are likely to be experts on the period (unless you're pitching it as a one-off/experimental thing, and even then prepare to defend it.)

My suggestion: if you want to mix your time periods and techs, create an alternate Earth setting that is inspired by, but not bound to, our own history.

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Bless you for this answer (says someone who went the Alternate Earth route).

Interesting question and answers! Back to lurking now.

~Winks, who is also doing some ship mashups but carefully researching because there's always (well, mostly) a reason behind the madness...

If it's something that could plausibly have been invented earlier in our world, it's not an issue for me. It does jump out at me if something exists in a fantasy world that has the feel of a certain era that the existing technology and infrastructure couldn't ostensibly support. I honestly don't know whether the invention of the ship's wheel was precipitated by other technological advances that made it plausible, or if it was just something that could have been done earlier, but no one thought of it before the end of the 17th century. I suspect most readers are in the same boat, assuming they even know when the ship's wheel first appeared. They are more mechanically complex than their predecessors.

It's going to be a relatively small proportion of readers who have the in-depth knowledge about the history and technological know how that led to a particular invention. There are plenty of implausible anachronisms in commercially successful fantasy novels. It comes down to what you and your target audience are willing to tolerate.

Of course, another approach is to simply have the ship steered by the device used in the period you describe (in our world). I was going to say a whipstaff, but it looks like those didn't show up until the 16th century, so a ship from the "real" 1300s would have been steered by a rudder and tiller (ships were smaller before then). As you pointed out up thread, whip staves allowed people to steer larger ships than a simple rudder and tiller but the helmsman was still below the main deck.

Regardless, unless the ship's steering mechanism contributes to the story in some significant way, it's probably not a huge deal which way you go.

Okay, I'm a bit confused here.

Here's another source that states the whipstaff was invented in the 15th century.

But either way the whipstaff is anachronistic.

However, none of that matters! If it's a fantastic setting, no one is going to care about this type of thing, and 99% of people aren't going to know a whipstaff from a boom vang. If you want something more historically accurate that's also familiar, just go with "tiller."

In a fantasy setting, it wouldn't bother me. Things happen at different rates, and in different places then they do in the real world.
After all, in our world, the tiller was replaced by the whipstock, then the wheel, because the ships kept getting bigger.

It seems totally reasonable that in your world, if shipbuilding advanced faster than in ours, of course the related tech would be developed at a faster rate as well. Can't sail the high seas in an uncontrollable vessel.

It's not like you're asking if the captain can have GPS to make crossing the World Ocean easier.

BT Lamprey said:

Okay, I'm a bit confused here.

Here's another source that states the whipstaff was invented in the 15th century.

But either way the whipstaff is anachronistic.

However, none of that matters! If it's a fantastic setting, no one is going to care about this type of thing, and 99% of people aren't going to know a whipstaff from a boom vang. If you want something more historically accurate that's also familiar, just go with "tiller."

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Given the discrepancies in sources, and given the reason whipstaves were invented, it hardly matters. Will readers even be able to peg the exact decade your world is comparable to? So many things, from fashion to various innovations, would be different in an alternative version of history, especially on a different world.

You are also right that most readers won't know or care how the ship is steered anyway.

And even if there is something in a book I personally find implausible, I'm not going to toss it down in dismay if the characters are compelling, the overall setting and premise intriguing, and the plot interesting. A handful of people might, if the implausibility is something that counts as a pet peeve for them, but there will always be people who won't take to a given book for any of a thousand reasons.

Like people have said above, in a fantasy setting you're free to change things to suit your story.

One thing to consider when you're making these changes is why a certain thing did not exist in our world prior to a certain date, and what were the other effects of its introduction, or the introduction of whatever technological precursor made it possible. Things don't exist in a vacuum. Some inventions depend on other things already being there, and some are like a key that opens the door to many others. Others, of course, could have been invented much earlier than they really were & it's just a historical accident that they happened when they did. And some actually had been invented, but no one needed them and they were forgotten.

So when you change one or two things, think about what else you might need to change upstream, or what other downstream possibilities your change introduces.

It depends on if this is Earth as we know it, or an alternate history or another world entirely. If it's Earth as we know it, then you can be forgiven for little fudges. I personally think it would be interesting to use historical restrictions, but that's up to you to decide. If it's alternate history, you can push things around by a century or two, within reason.

Technology development is a toss up. Steel development wouldn't have happened without spending a long time working with iron. Early iron working was so inferior to bronze work that only the poorest of people even bothered with it, and it probably wouldn't have developed, except that the complex societal and trade infrastructure that made bronze possible collapsed. If this network hadn't collapsed the iron age might not have come for hundreds of thousands of years after it did.

Some technologies had no reason not to exist before the point that the did, it's just that nobody thought of them before hand. The cotton gin is an example of this. There isn't anything in one that couldn't have been made hundreds of years before hand.

It's not unbelievable that in a different world or timeline, people could have thought of things and built them earlier or later. There isn't any part of a 17th century ship that I think would be outside the skills of a 13th century shipwright to make.

Nivarion said:

Some technologies had no reason not to exist before the point that the did, it's just that nobody thought of them before hand. The cotton gin is an example of this. There isn't anything in one that couldn't have been made hundreds of years before hand.

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That's true in terms of the machine per se. A device is more than just its machinery, though. The reason the cotton gin was never invented before the late 18c was that, before the late 18c, there was no need for cotton to be processed efficiently in bulk. The development of industrial textile manufacturing (originally in England for locally grown wool) combined with a growing market for cotton fabrics (originally imported into Europe mostly from India) to create a hunger for cotton thread and cotton textiles that existing markets could not satisfy. In North America there were good conditions for growing cotton, but the difficulty of processing it made it uneconomical. A machine like the cotton gin that could turn raw cotton into thread on an industrial scale was needed to remove this bottleneck. If Eli Whitney hadn't developed it, someone else almost certainly would have.

Tl; dr: inventions are partly technology or engineering. But they're also a use case and a marketing plan: there's a need for a thing, and people who can get it and use it. Successful inventions exist within a matrix.

Necessity is the mother of invention, after all.

For an utterly gross oversimplification, note that the advances in western ship steering technology also roughly coincided with the discovery of the new world. Previous steering technology was adequate with the size of ships sailing around the Mediterranean, north Africa, and the northern European seas, and land transport was also an option. But with the drive to exploit the Americas, Africa, India, where sea was the only option and so many fabulously valuable goods to transport, bigger and bigger ships were demanded and there was significant demand and drive to solve the steering problems that came with the bigger hulls.

All a setting needs to accelerate one minor bit of technology is just to have necessity drive the need for something at an earlier time.

If it's an alternate earth/fantasy setting inspired by a real setting you have some leeway without snapping the reader's suspension of disbelief (IE, case in point, the series I'm working on is based on the mid-15th Century, and I'll soon be introducing a wheellock rifle, which didn't appear until the early 16th century). Obviously, there's limits to what readers will accept (throwing ironclad warships in along with the ship's wheel, for example) which is why I always hate seeing "It's fantasy!" tossed around as carte blanch for anything.

The MOST important thing (and others have touched on) is to make sure you're accounting for how the technology would have come to be in your world, and how it would affect society and other technology around it. IE how the introduction of cheap, easy to use firearms radically alters warfare by breaking the monopoly of the elite warrior caste over the military, and allowing pretty much anyone to pick up a gun and be trained comparatively quickly into a capable soldier.

Another thing: Do your research! The more you understand the technology (how it works, what other technologies may be required for it to work, etc.) the better your presentation and the less it will stick out and strain the suspension of disbelief (it's always obvious when a writer doesn't know what he's talking about. Like in 90% of the depictions of Medieval arms and armor I read).

Thomas Vail said:

Necessity is the mother of invention, after all.

For an utterly gross oversimplification, note that the advances in western ship steering technology also roughly coincided with the discovery of the new world. Previous steering technology was adequate with the size of ships sailing around the Mediterranean, north Africa, and the northern European seas, and land transport was also an option. But with the drive to exploit the Americas, Africa, India, where sea was the only option and so many fabulously valuable goods to transport, bigger and bigger ships were demanded and there was significant demand and drive to solve the steering problems that came with the bigger hulls.

All a setting needs to accelerate one minor bit of technology is just to have necessity drive the need for something at an earlier time.

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I thought there were galleons by the 1530s, modelled maybe on the big, gun-carrying galeasses (with sweeps). In which case the stimulus was the Ottoman Empire and the need to carry heavy guns. But even big galleons were steered by whipstaffs on the tillers until well into the 17th century it seems. I wonder if the need for ships' wheels had more to do with navigating off of new charts (printed with a need to watch the binnacle to stay on course) rather than ship size.