✾ Aura, a Lady.

thinking about the fantasy/scifi idea of "the ancients". like you come across some old old ruins and/or artifacts that were built by a civilization that's no longer around. common tropes:

• the ancients were Wise and have something long-lost yet important to teach the characters of the story's present day. maybe (zzzzzzzzz) a prophecy.
• the ancients possessed a "technology level" beyond that of the present day that made them enviably powerful. or maybe just one specific gizmo.
• the ancients were wiped out by a catastrophe, either of their own doing, or that of the present day story's antagonist(s). or maybe just some inescapable world thing, earthquakes or whatnot.
• despite their power the ancients were socio-culturally-emotionally flawed in some way that makes them kind of tragic; maybe they practiced human sacrifice, or made a pact with a dark power, or maybe that so-called advanced technology was a seriously sharp double-edged sword.
• the ancients and their society were a monolith; there were no discernable splinter groups, subcultures, contradictory or contested ideas.
• the ancients are presented in a mythic sense; ie there is not much work done to humanize them, we hear about their Great Deeds but not their everyday lives.
  • as a result the ancients are usually a very Serious people, implicitly. the voices of the past are stern, all other vestiges of their humanity have faded away.
• the ancients were completely wiped out; somehow, none of them survived and became ancestors to people still living today, none of their stories are alive among us today in any recognizable form.

spelling these out mostly just to give each one a good solid kick and ask what unproductive prejudices and boredoms (they're cliches, after all) they introduce. and what interesting stories we might tell without those.

also thinking about all this in light of Graeber & Wengrow's "The Dawn of Everything", which peels back our myths about human (pre)history layer by layer to show that ancient humans were way way more interesting and varied than most people give them credit for. highly recommended.

thinking about how to do this in Pilgrim Sky in a way that wasn’t shitty, and I don’t know I succeeded, but definitely what I tried to do was to present society as partly determined to the relationship with its environment?

In Pilgrim Sky, the ancients are a neoliberal nightmare that is enabled by a completely different technological context that is inaccessible to their descendants. It is implied that they broke into the dead (?) parallel universe the setting occurs in with nanoswarm technology in tow that they could control and interface with at will, and a plan to use it to turn inert matter into livable space. The moment they encountered friction in their plan (in the form of an Irradiated Zone that disrupted the nanoswarm for several generations), their inability to deal with sudden extreme scarcity exacerbated the cultural and political divisions that were ever-simmering, but muted.

By the time they reach an area where the (largely autonomous) nanoswarm finally works, they have fragmented into successor states, and war then wipes out records and completely changes the technological context for their descendants for hundreds of years, as they lose the know-how, technological concentration and other intangibles that allow them to access the full capabilities of the nanoswarm and instead are forced to rediscover how to interface with it from scratch.

A lot of work was put into putting the lie to at least some of these tropes:

• The ancients weren’t “better, but”; any dweller of the spiral would kill to live in a society described accurately as that of the ancients, but it is clear as day that this was not a society of “utopia, but for this one little detail” — it was a society with deep-seated issues and irreconcliable differences that were being papered over by blind belief in unassailable technological superiority.

• The ancients are not unknowable: they were just regular people living in a different technological context, and if there are difficulties in understanding why they do what they do it’s because it is materially hard to reconstruct that context — what records exist are rare and hard to read.

• The ancients don’t have a "higher technological level”, whatever it means; they definitely “had it easier”, but human ingenuity has adapted to the knowledge and context available to them, and while there is no post-scarcity society in the “current-day” spiral, thousands of years later, technology is in some ways comparable, differently built, or even in some cases reaching heights that the ancients could not (especially around Core tech, which makes mechs viable in the setting, which was not actively in use in the prior millenium).

The example to all this is the idea that an ancient can opener would look nothing like a modern one — it would look like a soft plastic star-shaped thing that would extrude sapient congealed nanoswarm arms to open any container. If a modern inhabitant of the spiral came across it a millenia later, with nanoswarm not as controllable or as immediately abundant, and can openers that are simple blade-and-lever affairs as we have today, it would just look like a weird soft plastic coaster doing nothing and would never think to associate its shape to the idea of can opening. But that doesn’t mean that a technician or an archaeologist couldn’t discern what the design was for or eventually find a record that showed it in action.

I literally wrote a short piece about exactly all of this, showing two poor dorks and their relationship to queerness, history, and all of these concepts rolled into one little important moment.