In an alternate history work of fiction, what would be a good way to rationalize/justify a world in which there is no usage of fossil fuels?

I think in this alternate history / worldbuilding idea, the physical matter still exists - there is coal, oil, etc, in the earth, but I am wondering if we can come up with a satisfying reason why humans could not make use of anything more efficient than peat in production. Is there a scientific-sounding explanation that could be given to make a world in which coal and oil are useless in industry?

I have been reading “The Future is Degrowth” and “The Origin of Capitalism” and that is what inspired this. The first book says something along the lines of “the capitalism we know, of endless accumulation, is fundamentally a fossil capitalism”. The second book makes a very convincing case that what existed in England centuries before fossil fuels was already distinctly (agrarian) capitalist. Interest in everyone’s thoughts and ideas about how this could be constructed, and what sort of events could play it out in the cradle of capitalism but also worldwide.

  • 如浮云Ru FuyunOPEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    Thank you for an incredible response. I plan to respond in detail in the morning but a few thoughts right now.

    • I was kind of toying with an idea of tram ways lasting longer and being developed upon further, but yes, a world without trains is no fun. They’d have to be introduced sooner or later running on something else.
    • Pretty cool that a photovoltaic cell was created so early. It wouldn’t be too extreme of a stretch for that guy to be born a few decades earlier and for developments to be made in the years following, at least to someone outside natural science / a “layperson” like me.
    • A timeline in which socialist governments started taking over in the 19th century is also definitely worth exploring. I see a lot of talk on sci fi Twitter about science fiction as a vehicle for critique of the present and hopes for the future. In a way I think alternate renditions of the past could be too.
    • BloopsEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      Of course! It was my pleasure to write it. 😀 Aerial tramways are really cool. You could probably power them with hydro, but the geography would be majorly constrained. Canals were also very big in Britain prior to railroads, and a bit less important in America. Canals would be even more important in this scenario. You could have canal trolley buses where boats are pulled along a cable powered by flowing water somewhere else. Check out this article. In real life, the cables were instead driven by steam engines. For passenger and freight shipping, there are several innovations in sail ships that could have been developed. Some ideas include improved sail design, rigging that requires less labor, catamarans, hydrofoils, and Flettner rotors.

      Yeah a lot of scifi is dystopian and/or capitalist realist. And almost all socialist alt history is written by liberals and rarely ever hopeful. I’d like to write utopian literature in the vein of Looking Backward but I don’t really know where to start. It’s been years since I wrote (mediocre) fiction in school.

      • 如浮云Ru FuyunOPEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        It seems like relying on waterways to travel and not being able to build railroads going west could have seriously slowed down colonialism in Western North America? It also makes me think of southern China. I just finished reading China: A History by John Keay, and I’m not retaining much, but the importance of watercraft in the south and horses in the north comes up over and over.

        I’ll try and read Looking Backward, sounds cool! I also have no experience writing fiction after public school. I guess there is probably a lot of content online to dig into for writing fiction for beginners we can look into… that stuff would also make good posting here.___

        • BloopsEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          I skimmed through Looking Backward and its sequel a few weeks ago. It’s kind of cool when the author ends up being right on the money when predicting future technologies like credit cards. Some of the concepts are pretty interesting as well like paper clothes becoming widespread (it was a trend later in the 20th century, and the idea of disposability being the future lasted another century). But the author is also a racist, so it gets weird. The sequel is open-minded when it comes to the status of women (they wear pants?!), but Edward Bellamy never got over his white supremacy.