Our favorite fat merchant in Arvanneth says:
"'...he got permission to use the telegraph. Marvelous innovation you've got there, sir, marvelous.'" (p. 39)
- and:
"'...sir, haven't you heard about wireless telegraphy? A recent Killimaraichan invention. We in the Guilds know little more than the fact that it exists.'" (p. 41)
So there has been some very recent technological progress but why were these (re)discoveries not made much earlier? Over ten thousand years are believed to have elapsed since the beginning of the Ice Age.
The Winter Of The World and Twilight World are almost companion volumes about survival during an Ice Age and after a nuclear war, respectively. Unfortunately, Anderson's non-fiction work, Thermonuclear Warfare, refutes Twilight World. See here.
That is all that there is time for this evening. I wanted to post once more about The Winter Of The World before signing off.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I don't think ten thousand years is necessarily too long a time period for lost technology to be reinvented. Not if the Dark Ages which came following the coming of the Ice Age and the fall of our civilization caused most of what was then known to be lost. There would be a desperate struggle for bare survival in the first centuries after the Ice came, after all. Whole libraries, for example, would be burned to provide fuel for heating. Esp. if there was complete illiteracy. And so on and on.
Before there could even be a literate class, some kind of law and order would need to be restored over territories with sufficient resources for such things. A process which, again, needed centuries.
A few places, like New Orleans/Arvanneth, survived to become the nuclei of new civilizations, but even in them much time was needed. And much would still have been lost even in Arvanneth.
Sean
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