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Reminds me of Lest Darkness Fall[1], a 1939 novel about an archeology professor who is transported back in time to Rome under the Ostrogoths on the eve of Belisarius' invasion to reconquer Italy for the Eastern Roman Empire under Justinian.

The hero of the novel, Martin Padway, gets his start teaching Arabic numerals to a Syrian banker in Rome, and then distilling brandy. By the end of the novel he's running a newspaper and has a semaphore telegraph network set up throughout Italy. Good fun reading.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lest_Darkness_Fall

This isn't dissimilar to deathworld 2, where a futuristic guy crashlands on a planet and has to reinvent modern technology for a mongolian style culture. I'm a big fan

There's also The Lost Regiment[1] series, about a Maine regiment from the American Civil War transported to an alien planet. They discover that medieval Russian peasants were previously transported there and now live as serfs/peasants under nomadic alien warlords (IIRC the aliens periodically cull the humans for food). The Union boys, in tremendously fun if a bit predictable style, lead a peasant rebellion against the aliens.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Regiment

I know Lest Darkness Fall. It’s great. Someone recommended it in the Hacker News thread when I posted the first volume, so I read it after that.

Thanks for the rec, sounds like a hoot

I like the premise but the yellow-stained AI artwork really makes this hard to like more.

You're only as good as the tools you use. They are improving fast though, you can already see a noticeable difference between the artwork in Volume 1 and Volume 2, and they were made about six months apart.

I don't know if this is true?

I'm pretty sure a pro is much better with amateur tools than a newb is with elite tools.

Give me the most expensive and fine art brushes and I doubt I could make anything worthy of hanging on a fridge. Bob Ross could outclass me with a napkin.

I agree, somehow I really dislike that picture for reasons I’m not aware of.

Creative content should be labeled as AI generated, assisted, or AI free up front.

I think people should find out themselves, but the OP was quite explicit about it.

Isn't there a massive contradiction here though, on the one hand the slave can't write on the lintel and be seen in the future proving their worlds are not connected (vol 1 page 18), on the other hand there are all these artifacts that get dug up, proving that they are. Or am I misunderstanding something?

Their universes disconnect the moment they make contact, but Marcus knows Pompeii well and escapes the eruption just before it happens. So he can point Ulyses to places where things will be buried or hidden.

I also needed the relationship to go both ways, not just Marcus getting ideas from the future. That makes the plot more interesting.

Ah I see, so it's 'another earth' repackaged, except they're displaced in time. I see now. What a lot of effort this must have been.

lol, yes, it was.

This kind of fiction is pretty popular in Russia. So there are websites and forums that discuss the kind of hand-waving needed to make the stories interesting (I recommend https://www.popadancev.net/ ).

And one thing that really stands out is that there are really not that many shortcuts. To build something like a steam engine, you need to invent advanced steelmaking, casting, advanced tooling (lathes, drills, etc.), and so on.

In general, ancient people were able to exploit the tech available to them with great efficiency.

There are some technologies that were overlooked longer than they should have, but not that many. For example, rubber could have been invented 400 years earlier. Hooke had a microscope capable of resolving micro-organisms in 1665, but the germ theory of diseases took 300 more years to develop.

> And one thing that really stands out is that there are really not that many shortcuts.

Completely agree, but the one exception that really stands out to me is canning. Napoleon offered a large cash prize for a cheap and effective method of preserving food for use as army rations. The method used (canning) doesn't require any special equipment (glass jars or tin cans are nice, but not necessary). It would have theoretically been possible to discover this thousands of years earlier. What would have happened if Hannibal or Pyrrhus or Cyrus offered the reward instead?

I actually disagree a bit. The whole premise of the story is that there are shortcuts indeed, when someone has the entire tech tree available at the push of a button.

The Romans were very capable engineers. If you give them a few key ideas and steer them away from dead ends, progress can compress a lot.

But the economics don't work. A bronze steam engine would have been extremely expensive and it would have taken multiple attempts to work out the best alloy mix. Without refinement the result would have had a low power output and short working life.

Even if you have a blueprint, a bronze engine is still a major research project.

The economics don't work only when compared to the modern alternative. The economics of a grindstone attached to a waterwheel don't work today but they did historically. A steam engine with low power output could still have been extremely useful in the right context despite not being up to the more strenuous tasks of historical variants.

Your steam engine will likely be less efficient than a pair of oxen. It'll need a lot of wood, water, and will always leak.

If you want something truly revolutionary, try the modern horse saddle and horse collar (and bit).

Agreed, there's a lower bound set by the other available tech. I didn't do the best job articulating there. In the context of the thread my objection is that the economics of the finished product aren't the issue.

The problem is arriving at working knowledge of the tech in the first place. But that's clearly not a logical impossibility, merely expensive and dependent on lots of surrounding factors.

The obsession of a single rich elite, not economics, is precisely how much of early chemistry came to be.

Two things:

1) This idea has been debunked...a lot. The Romans were capable but they were nowhere near an industrial revolution

2) Necessity is the mother of invention. The Romans didn't really need an industrial revolution, or at least their power base didn't.

This is do-able, because it doesn't require much metalworking. This is technology from 1700-1750 or so, made from wood with a few metal bits. Roman technology was capable of that.

Dude, wtf are you talking about? 1750 is freaking high-tech. They had large scale iron casting, gunpowder production, precision engineering good enough to make a clock that can provide accurate time after going around the world, most of the modern math foundations, telescopes, and even steam power.

Clockmaking goes way back, but for a long time was off in its own technological niche. People with tiny files working brass made clocks by hand. The first mass produced clocks appeared in the late 1700s.

Precision didn't come to iron and steel until Maudsley's lathe, around 1800. It can be seen at the Science Museum, London. It looks like a modern lathe, but is quite different from its predecessors. It's on display, but not emphasized, and few people know its importance.

Today we think of engineering as a continuum, where you pull the technology you need from mechanics, electronics, materials science, and chemical engineering to get something done. That's a modern concept. For most of history, those groups barely talked. For a long time, there was a huge distance between science and engineering. Science was sort of an aristocratic hobby, and engineering was done by people who worked in forges and shops. It wasn't until the era of the steam engine that both sides started talking much. They had to figure out thermodynamics to get steam engines to work efficiently.

Groups still barely talk. There is a lot of money to be made simply by taking a 'well known' concept in one field and applying it to another.

You certainly can avoid a lot of dead ends, but we're still talking about the span of at the very least multiple decades.

And the next question is practicality. You can make a steam engine demonstrator from bronze. But bronze was expensive, and of varying quality. So your engine will necessarily be low-power, and too inefficient for practical use.

It should have been possible to create electricity with waterwheels. You ”only” need copper.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbegal_aqueduct_and_mills

Albeit 2nd-3rd c. AD

Featured in Connections "Faith in Numbers" S1E04 1978

https://youtu.be/z6yL0_sDnX0

https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...

Great article on why the premise doesn't make sense.

I know and love the Acoup Blog, and the premise of the story does not contradict what Acoup says. In fact, if you look carefully, there is an Easter egg hidden somewhere in the story about the Acoup Blog.

I'm not sure that's really the case. The fundamental issue with the idea of a Roman Industrial Revolution isn't that Rome didn't have the technical antecedents (although that's still a big issue), but rather that the Industrial Revolution only solves problems that Rome didn't have.

One of the big, if easy, mistakes to make about history is to assume that a historical society is just like modern society at a lower tech level. Bret Devereaux is fond of dunking on George R. R. Martin's question "but what was Aragon's tax policy like?" as malformed because Gondor is a polity that doesn't really have the capacity to have a tax policy in the first place (it's pretty clearly modeled off of something like the Byzantine state). Not that Tolkien is immune from this either--the Shire suffers from being a Victorian-era English countryside being transplanted to a ~15th century tech level.