People hurling flaming things at one another - more than one way to do it?

aberwyn on "thinking outside the box" when it comes to the inevitability of technological development, particularly in fantasy worlds. We tend to think that all civilizations must develop along the lines that ours did, but that attitude discounts the immense resourcefulness and curiosity of humans. On the subject of gunpowder and guns, she writes,

It's quite possible for a culture to not develop guns as we know them. Certainly the Greek and Romans had powerful flame-throwing siege weapons -- but they never stumbled across gunpowder. When their empires collapsed, the knowledge of how to build those weapons -- and the money to do so -- disappeared. It was never really revived until the 1960s, with napalm, because in the meantime the accidental invention of black powder had spread west.

There is no one single inevitable path that these technological developments had to follow. One thing that a fantasy world might show us is that simple fact. And something new is not necessarily a sign of Progress in the capital letter Whiggish sense.

Katharine Kerr's Blog - Is Technology Inevitable? - May 24, 2012 14:56