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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: 2) by frojack on Monday September 18 2017, @07:56PM (3 children)
The whole ancient technology bit gets really old, and is often over used. Especially when said tech is somehow carried through secret history, known to only a few, or found in some cave on earth, or something similar.
The appeal to ancient technology lost to modern science is so pervasive in Sifi and poorly educated people.
More plausible are the found tech on other worlds (Alien, Prometheus etc). Still the same problems though. Where did the original owners go? How good was their tech if we keep finding them dead among their surviving tech.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Grishnakh on Monday September 18 2017, @08:11PM (2 children)
The whole ancient technology bit gets really old, and is often over used. Especially when said tech is somehow carried through secret history, known to only a few, or found in some cave on earth, or something similar.
You act like the entire idea is ridiculous. Why? You seem to be assuming that good tech couldn't possibly be lost somehow, or that cultures don't regress, stagnate, or disappear.
I'll give you one real-world example of actual ancient technology that's now mostly lost: Roman concrete. It's better than the concrete we have now (doesn't degrade in saltwater, quite the opposite in fact), and, for about 1000 years, we didn't have any concrete at all, between the fall of Rome and the invention of Portland cement. We still can't quite make concrete as good as the Romans, though in recent years we've mostly figured it out, but we don't bother really trying to re-create it because we're cheap and lazy and we don't care if stuff falls apart in 50 years as long as it costs less, because the managers who made the decision will be long gone by then.
There's other stuff that's clearly inferior to older technology: computer keyboards for one. Show me a brand-new laptop with a keyboard as good as the Thinkpads had in the early 00s; you won't find one. Desktop UIs are another: they all were much better in the mid-00s. OS UIs (e.g., Windows 8/10) have gone down the tubes, and website UIs are unbelievably bad now for the most part.
How about electric streetcars? We used to have those decades ago, but they were killed off because the automakers wanted everyone to drive cars.
Of course, the idea that the ancients had anti-gravity tech or something like that seems pretty ridiculous. But I think the idea of a story about some alien civilization with lost technology isn't so far-fetched at all; we have clear examples on our own world of civilizations collapsing and losing technology. Technology isn't perfect and won't prevent its makers from being killed by things
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday September 18 2017, @11:38PM (1 child)
You need to check your facts.
Roman Concrete is neither unique. 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.
Volcanic Ash and Sea Water located close enough together to make concrete economically.
Then you turn a discussion of Lost Ancient Technology to keyboards. WTF!!???
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.
So again I ask, what is a "clear example" on our own world of civilians collapsing and losing technology?
Pyramids? Nope. Slavery combined with any of a dozen methods.
Stone Henge? Nope again. Serfdom, religious zealotry, and stone axes
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(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.