It's been interesting to read the acoup.blog post series on deconstructing military logistics in fantasy stories. I don't know how much was just obsessive atten

It's been interesting to read the acoup.blog post series on deconstructing military logistics in fantasy stories. I don't know how much was just obsessive attention to detail, how much was having served himself, but Tolkein was extremely exacting about how long a trip would take and a realistic size of army that could be sustained. Then you get to A Song of Ice and Fire and George Martin has all but said he doesn't care and nobody should try to figure out a timeline or distances between locations because they won't work if you scrutinize it closely. I don't know if that generalizes to all writers, but it gives the impression that many don't really care about realism like they used to. But yeah, it could be the mismatch between history and current travel methods. Writers of the past, even when they wrote about the past, largely would have still been limited to traveling at the same speeds as distant ancestors via sail and horse. Writers of today who write about the past have no personal experience when they've only ever traveled by plane and automobile.