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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where we're obsessed with the latest, freshest version of any gadget—and it's off to the trash heap with whatever falls out of date.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: 3, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Thursday August 03 2017, @07:50AM (2 children)
> the best ideas of which came from a tiny Island called Britannia
Made me choke on my coffee. Writing as a Brit - the enlightenment, political, ethical, religious and scientific aspects, did not come from Britain. Newton, Hobbes, Smith, Hooke et alia are all big figures. But what about all the rest? Descartes, Galileo, Spinoza, Rousseau, etc.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Thursday August 03 2017, @09:13AM (1 child)
Thinkers from this small island called, well, it wasn't "called" anything, but thinkers from it were given the name of "Scotus", from the Latin, as with Duns Scotus (who was given the scholastic accolade Doctor Subtilis [wikipedia.org]). Or the Irishman, John Scotus Eriugena, [wikipedia.org] who
Actually, the best ideas, or the preservation of ancient learning and the knowledge of the Greek language, probably come from Ireland and Scotland, much as is the case today. Bloody Brexit idiots.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday August 04 2017, @01:09PM
Oh, right. Wrong millennium. My mistake.