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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Sometimes a book series is so important that you want people to put everything aside and just read it. I'm not the only one who feels this way about N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy. The first and second novels in Jemisin's trilogy, The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate won the prestigious Hugo Award for the past two years in a row—the first time this has happened since Ender's Game and its sequel Speaker for the Dead won sequential Hugos in 1986 and 87. Now the final Broken Earth book, The Stone Sky, is out. You can gobble up the whole series without interruption.
There are a lot of reasons why this series has been hailed as a masterpiece. There are unexpected twists which, in retrospect, you realize have been carefully plotted, skillfully hinted at, and well-earned. There are characters who feel like human beings, with problems that range from the mundane (raising kids in a risky world) to the extraordinary (learning to control earthquakes with your mind). The main characters are called orogenes, and they have the ability to control geophysics with their minds, quelling and starting earthquakes. Somehow the orogenes are connected with the lost technologies of a dead civilization, whose machines still orbit the planet in the form of mysterious giant crystals called obelisks. To most people on the planet, the orogenes are known by the derogatory term "rogga," and they're the victims of vicious prejudice.
But Jemisin is hardly retelling The X-men, only with orogenes instead of mutants. She's created a sociologically complex world, and the more we read, the more we understand how the orogenes fit into it. As we travel with our protagonists across the planet's single megacontinent, we discover the place is full of many cultures, often at odds with one another. The brown urbanites from the tropics think the pale, rural people of the poles are ugly idiots; the coastal people aren't too sure about the inland people; and of course everybody hates the orogenes. These tensions are part of a long and complex history that we learn more about as the series develops. There are a number of mysteries to unravel in this series, but one of them is understanding the devastating origin of prejudice against orogenes.
[...] The Broken Earth is exciting, full of incredible technology, and powered by a dark historical mystery. It's something you can read to escape, or to ponder philosophical questions in our own world. In short, it's that rare series that appeals to a love of adventure, and to the urge to reflect on the unseen forces that drive our civilizations.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Grishnakh on Tuesday September 19 2017, @01:17AM
Its structure was well known for as long as concrete was made. It wasn't lost knowledge. It was merely the unavailability of two ingredients.
Oh bullshit. If the knowledge wasn't lost, they would have continued building concrete structures throughout the Dark and Middle Ages, but they didn't. They've only recently figured out how it was really made.
https://www.nature.com/news/seawater-is-the-secret-to-long-lasting-roman-concrete-1.22231 [nature.com]
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/roman-concrete-mystery-solved-scientists-a7824011.html [independent.co.uk]
Again Nothing has been lost. If you want to pay $200 for a keyboard there are several to choose from. If you want to pay $15 there are even more to choose from.
Bullshit. Prove it. There are no laptop keyboards made today that match those in the Thinkpad circa 2001. If you disagree, prove it or STFU. You can't buy a laptop keyboard off-the-shelf.
So again I ask, what is a "clear example" on our own world of civilians collapsing and losing technology?
I already pointed it out, you idiot: Roman technology, including concrete, roads, buildings, etc. After the empire fell, no one built anything like that for over 1000 years. All the practical knowledge was lost while Europe was mired in feudalism and Christianity. No one's still made anything that matches the Pantheon (the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world). You can also look at the Aztecs, Incans, etc. They made astronomical discoveries that were lost after their civilizations collapsed.
Here's a quick article [toptenz.net] listing a bunch of lost technologies, including the fairly recent Apollo program moon lander (we couldn't build a copy today if we wanted to; the design docs are gone and all the people involved dead or close to it).
It doesn't take that much to lose technology: just a loss of interest by the people who know how to do it, a loss of any documentation, and a little bit of time so the people who knew how to do it are all gone.
Pyramids? Nope. Slavery combined with any of a dozen methods.
Stone Henge? Nope again. Serfdom, religious zealotry, and stone axes
Wrong again: these technologies were also lost. People forgot how to do them, and never did them again. Hint: if you can't very quickly repeat making or doing something, then you've lost that technology. We still don't know exactly how those things were built, though we do have very good ideas now, after thousands of years, including plenty of time for archaeologists to analyze them with the benefit of modern technology. But the civilizations that built those things lost the technology, as proven by the fact that they never built things like them again.