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| PHOENIX from https://pixabay.com/en/phoenix-bird-legendary-mythical-1301889 |
I
don’t want to waste effort reviewing all the things that went wrong on Earth
during the 21st through the 24th centuries, since you can read about that in
the above summation of My Future History.
I will only say that the effect of “radiant” bombing and also of an
uncontrollable new weapon invented by the Techno-Warlords – a pseudo-organism
called a self-replicating nanobot – put the finishing touches to the
destruction in the period called the Apocalyptical (last half of the 24th
century). At that point much of Earth
became uninhabitable, leaving only a gaggle of disconnected entities, with some
areas remaining less damaged than other (the British Isles, Australia, Japan, portions
of North America and other continents).
These areas existed in isolation, without the ability to trade or even
communicate with other parts of the world, and they were ruled mostly by
tyrants who jealously guarded whatever remnants of technology they could
glean. There was no longer an internet
and most libraries and seats of learning had been destroyed.
So
how could any vestige of civilization and knowledge be kept alive? Here the easiest thing to do is to quote from
My Future History:
“Throughout
the Second Dark Age there endured a minority of people who valued reason, compassion,
freedom, and order and who never entirely lost their faith in human
nature. Overwhelmed by the misery of the time, these people had to
go underground, communicating by a primitive shortwave radio relay network in
places where parts for the equipment could be fabricated or
scavenged. These people had acquired a name: the Underground Archivists, composed of
teachers, writers, librarians, scientists, and information
technicians. ... The Archivists took inspiration from works of 20th
century Fantasists like Fahrenheit 451 and The Mote in
God’s Eye and began to collect and secrete any knowledge of the past
that seemed to them useful for the future. They would hide books or
any format of compressed electronic information that they could acquire; they
would even scrounge pencil stubs and stray scraps of paper from old middens and
copy out by hand material they thought worth preserving. They placed
their hoards in any container that they thought might protect them – oil drums,
shell casings, coffins, the husks of now-useless refrigerators and electronic
devices – and hid them in old bunkers, caves, bank vaults, abandoned subway and
utility tunnels. Then they died, leaving their caches behind for
subsequent generations to rediscover.”
This
is why you’ll find passages in The Man
Who Found Birds among the Stars like this one (from the incomplete second
part):
“Robbie sprawled on the couch and started
scrambling idly through the links. For a
while he listened to GovNews’s daily review of the contents of the most
recently discovered Underground Archivist caches; the wide-ranging nature of
what those remarkable people had thought worthy of preservation never ceased to
fascinate him. This time there were 22nd
century maps of a Devastation Zone city called Atlanta, along with the
blueprints of some of the commercial buildings built in that era. There were photocopies of a dozen 20th
century publications called “comic books” (although the commentator noted that
the name was mystifying, since the content of these works of graphic fiction
appeared to consist almost entirely of depictions of horror and violent crime,
with very little humor). In Nipon a
collection of vids had come to light illustrating an incredibly grotesque sport
called sumo, accompanied by a book detailing its history and rules. And there was a unique vid that had
bioscientists quite excited; it showed the extinct three-toed sloth moving
through a sector of the Amazen rainforest that was now a dry wasteland …
“And, unearthed in an
archaeological excavation that was ongoing in the Safrisco salt marshes of the
West Ammeriken Coast, an especially significant historical find – original
records from the late 23rd century detailing the last days of an institution
called University of California. The
cache included a five-year diary written by the last Chancellor of the
University. The journal ended abruptly
at 22 March 2290, the day when the series of earthquakes had commenced that
brought an end to civilization on the Ammeriken Pacifik Coast. The Old Ammeriken States had been facing
continental civil war at that time and no resources were available to rebuild
anything destroyed by natural calamities.
It was all prime stuff.”
But there was more to
the salvation of civilization than simply the preservation of data and
artifacts. Among the ranks of the
Archivists were some inspired, genuinely creative individuals who chose to
produce a new canon of literature and other art forms that could form the basis
of a new. humanist ethic. Not a single
one of these creators ever signed any of their works so they remain eternally
anonymous. Their works were preserved by
the Archivists in the same way that more prosaic knowledge was preserved – in
those secret caches.
The writers of these
works came to be known as the Mythmakers.
I have a lot of
information on the Mythmakers in the documents where I preserve notes for my
writing. What they wrote was mostly
fantasy fiction or variations on fantastic themes, but they also composed
poetry, dramas, and music, and produced graphic art. On Facebook I recently viewed Ursula K.
LeGuin’s acceptance speech when she was awarded the National Book Foundation’s medal for Distinguished Contribution to
American Letters. In it she “explained how authors,
especially fantasy writers, have a special opportunity to stand up to the
corporate system because they can portray a world very different from
the one we currently live in.” I think
the same is true in a broader sense – that fantasy writers have a special
opportunity and even obligation to influence the way we think about the
fundamentals of our lives. They can
become the Mythmakers of our future.
The 26th century, when civilization was coming back to
life, was a time of vigorous philosophical ferment. By the 27th century,
the Mythmaker’s humanistic philosophy had taken root, and a set of 20 Precepts
had been formulated, not as prescriptive laws or commandments but as a rational
guide to right behavior. People accepted this new way of thinking and this
enabled the unification of Earth, which had proved impossible in earlier times,
and hence qualified Earthers to attempt to fly to the stars and take their
place in the greater Galaxy. So perhaps the Second Dark Age will be worth
all the losses.
So
what are the Mythmaker Precepts all about?
Next time, we’ll begin an analysis.
