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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where we're obsessed with the latest, freshest version of any gadget—and it's off to the trash heap with whatever falls out of date.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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 03 2017, @10:33AM (2 children)
Please! Any world with "ancient relics" that people are "in awe of" is a world in decline. (I'll be happy to supply more examples, real and imaginary, and discuss counterexamples)
If you want to live in such a world because it is "romantic", then feel free, but please don't tell me it's a good idea for societies to be in constant decline. I and most others would rather have a world where things are better than ever before. The not-so-good parts of the "glorious ancients" in real life tend to be forgotten quite readily: abuse, slavery, sickness, early death for all.
Also your Antikythera example does not hold water: at first nobody could understand it because the parts had melded into a massive block of corrosion products. And then we could clearly reproduce the numbers it was calculating but didn't know their use. That's about the same as finding my tax documents, but only the numbers, and you not knowing what taxes are because you live in a post-scarcity civilization: at first you'll struggle with reading it, and then you'll know the mathematics work but not what they're good for. However, this does not signify that "ancient AC and her tax returns" are something that should be longed for.
That being said: of course such worlds make for great story lines! The struggle against the decline pairs up perfectly with the eternal struggle of good vs. evil, ancient technology is a superb deus ex machina, and so on. I didn't know about you before, but I might even buy one of the books. Mission accomplished, and that's fine with me :-)
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday August 03 2017, @03:09PM
Not necessarily in decline, but went *through* a decline, which is actually quite common. The Renaissance was after all largely Europe's importing/rediscovering of ancient knowledge that had been destroyed during the Dark Ages.
If you posit a small and sufficiently secretive advanced civilization that collapsed, such as with many Atlantis legends, then the knowledge might be completely lost, and relics that remained far too advanced to reverse engineer.
Give a group of 17th century scholar a stack of modern PCs and solar panels to power them and they could learn a bit about electricity, and a great deal about how to harness the awesome number-crunching power available, but couldn't begin to figure out how either the CPUs or solar panels operate - without sufficiently powerful microscopes tools and some theory of quantum mechanics they would just be magic blocks of slightly impure silicon.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday August 03 2017, @06:16PM
Please! Any world with "ancient relics" that people are "in awe of" is a world in decline.
Doesn't that describe the Renaissance?