Re: (ReacTor) Five SF Novels About Rediscovering Ancient Tech

On 2024-05-09, James Nicoll <jdnicoll@panix.com> wrote:

Five SF Novels About Rediscovering Ancient Tech
>
https://reactormag.com/five-sf-novels-about-rediscovering-ancient-tech/

Iain M. Banks' _Against a Dark Background_ is set in a lone solar
system in an intergalactic void.  There's nowhere else to go.
Earlier civilizations rose and fell, and the planets are littered
with their artifacts.  The novel's McGuffin is the last Lazy Gun,
a weapon with impossible physics and a dark sense of humor.  IIRC,
among other things, the protagonist picks up an ancient high-tech
equivalent of a motorcycle.

In _Captain Future and the Space Emperor_, the villain has stumbled
over artifacts left by the ancient Jovians and uses those to walk
through walls; hit victims with a de-evolution-ator (or whatever
it was called) that has them transforming backwards through
evolutionary history, from hairy apes to reptiles; etc.

| Lanier demonstrates considerable faith in the durability of
| modern-day technology. The travelers need only hit an on-switch for
| pre-war machines to activate. Impressive, considering that the novel
| is set in the year 7476 AD.

I was already intrigued by the British TV mini-series _The Last Train_
(1999), where fifty years after the apocalypse our cryo-preserved
protagonists can just start up cars still sitting around in garages.
No flat batteries there.

| Often SF authors imagine that working alien relics will turn out
| to be doomsday devices.

_Forbidden Planet_.  Well, not intended as such.

Didn't the first three or four Pip & Flinx books already feature
two ancient doomsday machines?

The 1980s _Flash Gordon_ novels anonymously authored by David Hagberg
see humanity drawn into the fizzled-out war between the machine
remnants of two long gone civilizations.  At some point, our
protagonists find the Ultimate Weapon.  Twice, I think.

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy@mips.inka.de