our technological civilization ended in 1998 - in SM Stirling's Emberverse timeline;
the city of Ys, founded in the fifth century BC, was destroyed by the sea at the end of the fourth century AD;
Rome was founded in 753 BC and its Western Empire was in retreat from northern Europe when Ys was destroyed;
Technic civilization, succeeding Western civilization in the twenty first century, will end with the Fall of the Terran Empire in the mid-fourth millennium.
These are weighty matters for fiction primarily intended to entertain.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
And, of course, we have Isaac Asimov's First Galactic Empire, which we see in its early centuries in PEBBLE IN THE SKY and during its decline and fall in the first three FOUNDATION books. I simply wish Asimov had managed to handle such "weighty" matters better and more plausibly!
No real need to again rehash Asimov's weaknesses as a writer--we have both listed them elsewhere!
Sean
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