It actually makes sense for colonists on primitive worlds to have a lot of pre-industrial technology. Science fiction grandmaster Robert A. Heinlein did the same thing in his books. For industrial and information age technology, you need factories, power plants, road and rail and shipping infrastructure, sources of energy, etc., none of which exist yet on a newly settled world. Your fancy hovercar, or high-tech combine harvester you use to bring in your crops, yeah, they're great, until something breaks down, and the spare parts have to be shipped in from off-world at enormous cost, which you, bare subsistance farmer eking out a living on newly cleared land, don't have the income to cover. Horses, on the other hand, will reproduce themselves.
It makes perfect sense for low-tech to be common on these worlds: it will be relied upon heavily until the new planet's economy gets developed enough to support building and maintaining all that high-tech infrastructure and industy that you can't have high tech without.
reply
share