How long can the invention of guns be put off?

Question

Fantasy writers tend to prefer forms of combat that predate guns, because they are more showy, and they involve close and long-duration combat with an identified adversary instead of shooting at distant specks and twitch-spraying bullets in close quarters. Fantasy writers also like to use settings where guns are technologically possible. This leads to a lot of fiction where for some inexplicable reason guns were never invented, and warriors duke it out with swords in train stations while taking calls on their cellphones.

If the universe has the same physics as ours but history can be changed at will, what's the latest technological era into which the total dominance of firearms over all other weapons can be delayed without abandoning rationality completely? What historical events or trends would have to be altered?

Answer 1

What historical events or trends would have to be altered?

It is hard to point at a single instant in time and say that yes, that was the turning point, but by way of an example I'd look to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The Ottoman army used some exceptionally large cannon that took hundreds of men to manoeuver and operate, and (to grossly oversimplify) used them to wreck the defenses of a walled city, end the Roman empire and wrap up the european middle ages (depending on who you ask). It would have been quite unambiguous for all involved that when those cannon brought the walls down that the world was changing and that gunpowder was the future of warfare. They were behind the curve, though.

The cannon that they used were already the products of a long tradition of gunpowder warfare. Fire-arrows had been about for hundreds of years, and had evolved into the precursors of rocket artillery. Gunpowder hand grenades, the precursors to more substantial bombs and explosive shells, were similarly old. Cannon had been developed some 200 years previously, and had been steadily improving and spreading during that time.

Basically, you'd need some kind of apocalyptically devastating event to occur in China about a thousand years ago to slow all that down... plague, or meteorite strike might have done the job but really, the genie was already out of the bottle by then. By the time Constantinople fell it would have been far, far too late.

To slightly misquote William Gibson, the future was already there. It just hadn't been widely distributed yet.

instead of shooting at distant specks and twitch-spraying bullets in close quarters

Do note that it took hundreds of years of scientific and technological development to develop guns capable of that sort of thing. Troops armed with mêlée weapons were still found on battlefields for hundreds of years... spanish tercios were still useful units in the mid 17th century, some 200 years later, and cavalry armed with lances and sabres were still fielded in the 19th century to occasional good effect.

That's the best part of 400 years of sword-wielding heroes (or villains) and knights in shining armour across Europe. If you can't make a good story out of that, it seems like maybe you're just not trying!

Fantasy writers tend to prefer forms of combat that predate guns, because they are more showy, and they involve close and long-duration combat with an identified adversary

Its because they like lazy stereotypes. That's ok, because the readers like them too. The advent of gunpowder siege weaponry rather ruins castles and walled cities, and everyone likes a good fortification, but everything else associated with those well-worn fantasy tropes would have carried on working just fine for a long, long time before it became unambiguously foolish to go to war without firearms.

Answer 2

Before the early 1800s, pretty much every discovery in the field of Chemistry was a mistake or total trial and error. If the Chinese didn't screw up some life-lengthening elixir experiments around 850 AD, then they would have never invented gunpowder, and we may not have had guns for quite some time. It is important to note that Gunpowder was not one of those inventions that was accidentally discovered in more than one place. This suggests it really was much more of a fluke than an inevitability.

However, between about 1600-1800, experimentation led to the discovery of nearly 50 elements at which point the scientific community started having enough data to predict the properties of yet undiscovered elements and chemical compounds giving birth to what we think of as modern chemistry. While it is unlikely that no explosive chemicals capable of firing a bullet would have been discovered by 1800, it would have been impossible for scientists to not be able to predict what they would need to make an aqidate low-yield explosive to get the job done once they reached this point.

Since the world was already industrialized by 1800, it would not have taken very long at all to get from no guns to them being the dominant weapon.

Answer 3

I think the biggest thing that would have to be altered is the amount of war and the scale of the conflicts that occur. It's hard to say for curtain obviously but I don't think it's particularly unreasonable to assume guns didn't become a mainstream weapon in a world that's at even our current level of advancement. Guns didn't become widely used as a "main" weapon as they are today until around 1835 when the colt revolver came to be. It was the first gun that used the ideas of the industrial revolution mixed with weaponry. I personally think the biggest issue becomes the amount of conflict. If your world is for example run by one giant government or has some way that large scale conflict have been prevent it's possible no one would of invented it. The problem really becomes less about if guns are used but if they aren't how did other tech come around since a huge amount of tech we use was researched using war money. Hope that helps!

Answer 4

A bit drastic but one way to achieve this would be to limit the supply of metals. If the physical circumstances of Earths formation had been different and there were no (or very few) concentrated sources of metal ores near the surface in inhabited areas then reliable guns would not have been developed because there would have been no reliable way to constrain the hot gasses required to propel a bullet.

This would still leave bows and arrows, slings and stones, clubs and non-metal swords like the ancient Maya used (Macuahuitl), spears, axes and maces using flint edges and stone throwing engines.

It might even allow nobles to have metal swords made out of some highly expensive and exotic material like iron or nickel or (name your metal available in very small quantities at huge cost).

Answer 5

I think an important aspect to bear in mind is that the integration of firearms or weapons using gunpowder in general was a very progressive process regardless of the considered nation or army, and coexisted with traditional weapons for a long time.

Early handheld gunpowder weapons, such as arquebuses and muskets, while having clear advantages also had very distinct drawbacks, so that bows and crossbows stayed very much relevant right until the beginning of the 17th century, and even after that point "only" about 40/50 percent of infantrymen in a given army were fielding firearms at most.

That means that instead of a sudden turning point after which all armies werer using muskets, there is a significant overlap in the use of firearms as well as more traditional weapons in the military which lasted for several centuries. Moreover, for much of that overlap firearms were in the clear minority compared to blades until they eventually became efficient enough.

Finally, one must bear in mind that certain "isolated" civilizations, such as the Azteks or Inca empires, came very late in contact with gunpowder when they were discovered and subsequently conquered by the Spanish.

So to sum up, just because your fictional world is set in a time-period where firearms would have already been invented does not necessarily mean that they are very common let alone the prevalent weapons of war. You could limit the use of this technology to only a few soldiers, or even set your narrative in an isolated country which has simply not had the chance to come in contact with the technology at all.

Finally (and that would also have some historical accuracy to it), you could prejudice the concept and use of firearms by imagining that the knights or nobility in general would look down upon such lowly, "easy" to use weapons, just like they did with crossbows. As such, firearms could be a rarity amongst the fighting elite or left up to dishonorable mercenaries or marauders.

Answer 6

If you want something to be possible for humans to discover, but for them not to do so, you have to make it expensive and of limited utility. Most importantly of all, you absolutely must ensure that it's not a convenient way for humans to exercise power/dominance over each other, because humans really like inventions that do that.

Unfortunately, the development of firearms was driven precisely because they were more convenient ways for humans to kill each other than prior technology: safer than melee weapons, less physically demanding than bows and slings, and requiring less skill and training than either. Mass use of personal firearms in warfare wasn't driven by guns being more effective or lethal than longbows (they weren't, at first, as several comments have mentioned); it was driven by being able to raise an army of reasonably lethal soldiers much faster and more easily than before.

So if you want to delay the introduction of firearms, make them harder to use, and the alternatives easier. Counterintuitively, I'd suggest it would be helpful for the ancients to discover a more powerful explosive than gunpowder first, before metallurgy had developed enough to allow creating cannon and musket barrels that could contain it. 13th century (al)chemists would probably have been able to meander their way through inorganic chemistry to discover nitroglycerin, and its properties are interesting enough that people could have tried to work with it (it's safe if stored in solid form below 13°C and that might lead to some interesting warfare conundrums like firearms "freezing up" in cold weather), but they'd have really struggled to harness its explosive force to propel a projectile.

On the flip side, making non-firearm ranged weapons more convenient to retain could be encouraged with some tweaks to technology. The early discovery of carbon fibre and compositing techniques would be very helpful for improving the range, lightness and durability of longbows without being much help to the blacksmiths over in the other workshop tearing their hair out over the latest buckled cannon barrel. A slight twist on the gender norms of warfare to include women in armies in a "men fight hand-to-hand, women fight ranged" would ensure a large, stable body of ranged soldiers whose presence was not questioned, but standard historical sexism would mean there was less drive to innovate and improve their weaponry.

Between various small factors like these, you can probably justify the absence of personal firearms well into the 19th century, maybe even into the 20th. You need to provide an obvious alternative tech tree, though; the obviously flawed worlds are the ones where we're supposed to imagine that human beings just never saw the value in having a long-distance way of killing each other. Saying that they conduct warfare by launching high explosive shells at each other with catapults, however, requires quite a lot less suspension of disbelief.