Back on my bullshit

City of Stairs is again proving the problem - if it's a plot point that your country isn't producing steel, where are you getting your cars? Seriously, where is the steel for cars, roads, and infrastructure coming from?  

EDITED:
Okay, much is explained by this interview: The author does not in fact care about the stuff that's bugging the fuck out of me. 

from Bigger on the Inside: Talking with Robert Jackson Bennett about City of Stairs

Brian Slattery: To someone following your career, a move into fantasy doesn’t seem all that unlikely. So it’s interesting that you mentioned yourself that you would “never set anything in a second-story world, chiefly because I always felt these sorts of things were kind of, well, a big pain in the ass.” Then you went on to say that “I’ve never been happier to be proven wrong—I’m having a tremendous amount of fun.” Can you flesh this out a little bit? Why did you shy away from a book like this? What changed your mind? And once you dug into it, what did you discover that a fantasy book could let you do that you hadn’t been able to do before?

Robert Jackson Bennett: Well, to be fair, it is a big pain in the ass. To maintain this world, I have to carefully curate what is now an eleven-page Word document consisting of a 2,000 year timeline, along with varying names of the months, the days, the religious texts. This would be a pain in the ass to maintain even if it corresponded with a real-world history (imagine a Word document summing up the Tudors), but when the burden rests on me to provide the name of the book or town (or whatever), and make sure it’s consistent with all the other books and towns I’ve mentioned thus far, then suddenly I have to think very long and hard about this tossed-off mention of a thing in a single line of the book that has no long term consequences on the plot whatsoever.

But it actually is quite a bit of fun. What I’m describing are the most boring bits, the parts I like the least, but I also get to do all kinds of fun things, where the way the miracles work and the ways the cities are structured reflects what I feel to be the nature of our own real world, only distorted. Fantasy offers us the opportunity to take the limitless contradictions that confront us in our world and set them against one another, thus allowing us a rare peek into what makes these contradictions both so ridiculous and so desperately human.