Reading list suggestions

Hello everyone,

I am by no means an expert in this field, hence posting on this forum, but i am trying to research a very particular reading list that i hope members of this forum can help me with. I am trying to find books in which the industrial revolution didn't happen. So far I have had little luck searching google and thought asking for suggestions on this forum might prove a more fruitful source for gathering information. Any suggestions would be greatly received.

Thanks
 
Just to start your list

Keith Roberts' 'Pavane'. Here technology is controlled by the catholic Church. I get the impression technological progress is not static, but very much slowed down.


There's not much about the everyday life in the rest. 'Years of Rice and Salt', 'Voyage to Fusang', and the short story 'The Sleeping Serpeant' all have technology seriously delayed (but the New World still discovered) by a larger Mongol Empire.


Harry Turtledove's short story 'Counting Potsherds' is set when Greece is defeated by Persia, and apparently science is never going to happen.


In Poul Anderson's short story 'In the House of Sorrows', technology does seem to be much slower. It's a good story, too.
 
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The Industrial Revolution still happened in The Years of Rice and Salt, just not in Europe since 90% OF Europeans died from the Black Plague. As for the Turtledove story, I thought the implication was that it was democracy that was stillborn? It's not like the Greeks invented the idea of technological progress.
 
The Industrial Revolution still happened in The Years of Rice and Salt, just not in Europe since 90% OF Europeans died from the Black Plague. As for the Turtledove story, I thought the implication was that it was democracy that was stillborn? It's not like the Greeks invented the idea of technological progress.

You're quite right about Years of Rice and Salt. (I no longer have a copy, and was relying on an unreliable memory.)

I agree about the Potsherd stories being about democracy, but I thought there was a strong implication that under Persia, at least for a while, things would be stagnant. The Ionians were the first scientists, but science didn't arise in Persian Ionia.

However, hoping there are better recs to come.

edit: I should have remembered first off, de Camp's short story 'Aristotle and the Gun'.
 
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