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from the put-on-the-special-glasses-to-see-through-their-disguise dept.
Daniel Wilson, the author of Robopocalypse, has a new book out on the shelves called The Clockwork Dynasty.
There's a great moment in The Hobbit when Bilbo Baggins is exploring a stinking troll cave and finds an ancient Elven short sword, lost for centuries, buried under the muck. It's Sting, baby. And nobody wonders whether Sting will be less powerful than all the flashy new swords on the market. They assume that it's more powerful.
In some of the most engrossing worlds ever imagined—Star Wars, The Hobbit, and even Dune—the older something is, the better. The characters in those stories respect the achievements of their long-disappeared ancestors, and they honor the technological feats of heroes whose deeds have turned to legend.
Maybe we're drawn to these stories because they're so different from our own society, where we're obsessed with the latest, freshest version of any gadget—and it's off to the trash heap with whatever falls out of date. If Bilbo had found an iPhone in that cave, I highly doubt it would have been worth wielding for the rest of his adventure and then passed down through his family.
In my latest novel, I wanted to capture that feeling of awe for the past and bring it into our present. The Clockwork Dynasty acknowledges that our ancestors had incredible technological triumphs—and imagines that some of them are still walking among us, machines disguised as people. Older than cities, these avtomat (a Russian word that can mean robot) fight their own ancient wars in the shadows, even as they quietly go about shaping our civilization in the image of a world they lost millennia ago.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/08/how-to-build-an-ancient-robot-overlord/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 03 2017, @06:47AM (2 children)
I think these ideas are more about lost technologies and ideas these "ancients" would have had, but we don't know about. The idea that there is a "magical" field of science that we have overlooked in our scientific time line. In principle, the same as if friendly aliens would land tomorrow and give insight in their technology.
The idea of investigating the technology, would us allow us to use it, without actually doing lot of the researching work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 03 2017, @08:11AM (1 child)
There is a "magical" way to do research much better than usual for many fields today. Also, it is what was practiced, and called science, by prior generations. Get rid of NHST and go back to that:
Meehl, Paul E (1967). Theory-testing in psychology and physics: A methodological paradox. Philosophy of Science, 34(2), 103–115. https://meehl.dl.umn.edu/sites/g/files/pua1696/f/074theorytestingparadox.pdf [umn.edu]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 03 2017, @09:19AM
Fuck off, Merlin! Take your magik and get your ass back to the isles of Avalon!