As previously discussed, it’s possible to do such a thorough job of destroying a civilization that all knowledge of it is lost…at least until inexplicable relics start to turn up. One example: the real world Indus Valley Civilization, which might have flourished from 3300 to 1300 BC, across territory now found in western and northwestern India, Pakistan and northeastern Afghanistan. It was contemporaneous with the civilizations of Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China. History did a thorough enough job of erasing the Indus Valley Civilization from the records that when modern archaeology began to study it, it wasn’t at all clear whose ruins were being explored1. It just goes to show that no matter how great a civilization might be, time is greater.
Thanks to the exploits of 19th-century archaeologists (many of them no better than Indiana Jones, digging for statues and jewelry while ignoring evidence of daily life), lost civilizations were common features of 19th-century adventure stories. The trope was imported wholesale into early SFF. Do you remember your first SFF lost civilization? I remember mine, which was thanks to Scholastic Books: the enthusiastically pulp-ish Stranger from the Depths, by Gerry Turner.
A mysterious relic reveals to humanity that there was an ancient civilization that arose before modern humans evolved in Africa. “Was”…or “is”? Ancient does not always mean vanished. These ancient aliens have, in fact, survived(!!!) in well-concealed refugia. Humans have now stumbled across them. Will humans survive the discovery?
Here are a few of my favourite SFF lost civilizations:
C. L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry and Northwest Smith inhabit settings that are two thousand years apart. Jirel’s people live in a world they believe to be demon-haunted. Smith’s people have arrived at a different conclusion.
Man has conquered Space before, and out of that conquest faint, faint echoes run still through a world that has forgotten the very fact of a civilization which must have been as mighty as our own.
The evidence in the stories suggests that not only were creatures other than Men responsible for some of those forgotten civilizations, but that Jirel was not so very far off the mark when she thought demons haunted the relics of the past. And for the record, I would like to note (again) that while Jirel faces her challenges with bravery, determination, and cunning, Northwest is a dim-witted genre-blind charmer who strides obliviously into traps and lets his women die to save him.
James P. Hogan’s first novel2, Inherit the Stars, reads more like 1940s puzzle SF than the Disco-era book that it is, but it was still a diverting debut. 21st-century humanity is faced with a seemingly insoluble mystery: a 50,000-year-old space-suited human corpse on the Moon. The age of the body is undeniable, but so is the fact that there is no evidence on Earth of a civilization capable of putting a man on the Moon 50,000 years ago. At the same time, humans are clearly the product of a terrestrial evolutionary lineage hundreds of million of years old. How to reconcile the irreconcilable?
In Michael P. Kube-McDowell’s Trigon Disunity trilogy, the Earth receives mysterious signals from the stars and sends out its first interstellar mission to seek their origin. The expedition finds extra-solar colonies that are clearly the last remnant of a star-spanning civilization that has otherwise disappeared. What erased this civilization? And how can humans prevent a repeat?
Enigmatic relics provide both the title of Sarah Tolmie’s remarkable debut novel, The Stone Boatmen, and evidence that some great civilization once spanned the world. The ship Aphelion sets out to discover what it can, in the process discovering that there are at least two other cultures (in addition to the city that launched Aphelion) that are also amnesiac children of that great vanished power. Ages of isolation have insured that the three cultures will develop in very different ways. The novel’s braided stories spin a gentle tale of lost cousins rediscovering family, one enchanting enough to earn a glowing blurb from Ursula K. Le Guin herself.
I am certain some of you are astounded that I didn’t mention some old classic—She, for example, or a widely beloved Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan novel3. Embrace what’s apparently the custom and point out my egregious oversight in comments!
Photo: Saqib Qayyum (CC BY-SA 3.0)
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a finalist for the 2019 Best Fan Writer Hugo Award, and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]Archaeologists can be quite resistant to explanations that conflict with cherished origin myths or racist presuppositions. Earlier archaeologists tied themselves in knots trying to find an explanation for Great Zimbabwe that didn’t involve giving the credit for the impressive structures to Africans.
[2]Hogan began his career as a hard-SF author whose prose was never better than serviceable but whose settings and plots could be diverting. He ended it embracing some intensely dubious and troubling scientific and political opinions, so I would recommend avoiding his later, post-'90s work—the joke at the time was that Hogan turned out to be Y2K incompatible.
[3]I have never read any Tarzan novels but I am absolutely certain at least one lost civilization must turn up in one novel or another.
I’ll give Hogan this: he didn’t try to make humans not indigenous to Earth, which was a reaky idea at best when Niven used it and utterly indefensible when Weber yanked the dust sheet off of it.
@1: Even better – all the stodgy old scientists in the Hogan book insist that the evidence needs to be interpreted based on well-established science (evolution, relativity) turn out to be right.
One of my favorite lost civilization stories is “Letter to a Phoenix” by Fred Brown.
Lost civilizations are in so many Tarzan novels that they’re part of the formula.
Humans being extra-terrestrial didn’t make sense when Niven did it. You can track our lineage back to the Cambrian.
An aspect of Letter to a Phoenix that might raise eyebrows today is the part where the narrator off-handedly mentions he’s been preying on teen aged girls for 180,000 years.
I won’t discuss much, because its a massive spoiler, but The Gandalara Cycle by Randall Garrett and Vicki Ann Heydron has a really interesting take on things. It’s also an excellent series in its own right.
@@.-@: Le Guin also did that. Did she ever handwave it?
I liked The Stone Boatmen but I would have liked it better without the prologue in the world-spanning civilization. It’s possible I just misunderstood it.
Jack Mcdevitt plays in this arena, if set thousands of years into the future. He does so with characters who are archeologists.
I’m reminded of a SFBC offering; John Brunner’s Total Eclipse. I remember reading it and not exactly liking it, as it was a downer of an ending.
A 1970s-era Brunner that was a downer? Are you sure?
I always get Total Eclipse mixed up with the earlier Bedlam Planet, also a ton of yucks. Both are set on a planet orbiting Sigma Draconis and I think Brunner used the same name for the FTL drive in both.
Norton’s Forerunners are the first I remember, and they weren’t the only lost race in her work. Many of her stories involved wandering around ruins. Which, when you think about it, implies a VERY hostile universe.
Does Dragonflight count?
Yeah, the mean time to failure of a star spanning civilization in Norton isn’t that long. The Baldies were kicking ass and taking names ten thousand years ago but by the 20th century all that’s left is ruins and some automated facilities.
My first sfnal lost civilization story was probably (likewise thanks to Scholastic) Lester del Rey’s Attack from Atlantis, about which I remember precisely nothing. That or Joseph Greene’s first Dig Allen book, The Forgotten Star, which had the remnants of an ancient people living inside an asteroid.
The lost (pre-human) civilizations were one of the things that really drew me to Lovecraft back in the day — exploring the ruins of impossibly old cities in Mountains of Madness or Shadow Out of Time.
Speaking of Niven, there’s also World of Ptavvs, with the lone survivor of the race that ruled the galaxy a billion years ago.
And at risk of sounding like a broken record, M.A.R. Barker’s Tekumel is a series of civilizations built on the ruins of lost civilizations, themselves built on the ruins of even loster civilizations and on and on.
And yeah, in Burroughs’ Africa you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting some colony of lost Crusaders or Roman legions or even Atlanteans that had somehow managed to stay entirely cut off from the outside world while preserving all of their traditions completely intact.
@@.-@: if Phoenix had married 18-year-old girls, would that have been okay?
@16: or a lost civilization of dead cats.
One of the first I recall is When Worlds Collide, and After Worlds Collide. Not quite lost Earth civilizations but lost non the less.
Heinlein also dealt with this concept: I seem to remember in “Rocket Ship Galileo” they discover lunar caves that are attributed to a lunar civilization. In “Farmer in the Sky,” they discover what they describe as “a hangar for space ships” and find a working centipede-like land vehicle. In “Space Cadet,” there is mention of the cadets studying the long-vanished “Selenites” (lunar inhabitants) and a mission to the asteroid belt uncovers evidence that the asteroids were once an inhabited planet (which is named “Lucifer”) that was somehow destroyed by its civilization.
I loved Ganpat’s many lost civilizations, starting with Harilek.
Norton was one of the first that came to mind for me as well. I loved the sense of depth it gave her universe.
There is no way I can remember, at this remove, what my first Lost Civilization book was, but I do know that Stranger From the Depths was certainly among the candidates. Neighbor had the book, and I read it a few times as a child. Cue about 20 years later, and I found a pristine copy at a yard sale; it now resides in a place of pride in my collection. Still a pretty entertaining read, too.
As for Norton, I haven’t read it in probably 35 years or more, but I vividly remember a scene in, I’m pretty sure it was Forerunner Foray, where the main character is psychically reliving the experiences of somebody who was (deliberately?) walled up into the now-ruined structure they’re investigating.
@18 that would be sad & great at the same time
@9: I enjoyed “Total Eclipse” – a total downer of an ending of course, but fascinating archeology.
Although Piper may not have had Phoenix in mind, there’s an early bit in Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen when the lead is trying to work out when he has been carried to that mentions an issue with Lost Great Industrial Civilizations of Earth, which is that they’d leave evidence behind that we don’t see,
I think my first encounter with a lost civilisation would be the ruins that feature in Norton’s Catseye. I certainly encountered other lost civilisaions in her work, but that is the first of her books that I read.
Thomas Harlan’s In the Time of the Six Suns trilogy belongs on this list. Background–the Japanese and Nahautl meet up on the west coast of North America and eventually create a star spanning empire. In the process of colonizing, they run into a long dead civilizations that also spanned the stars. Humans are behind, and every time they bump into these artifacts, it’s nasty. Wasteland of Flint, House of Reeds, Land of the Dead. Highly recommend them.
Samuel R Delany’s Nevèrÿon books may not quite qualify, since the main action takes place within the civilization; it is only lost from the point of view of the framing appendices. Still, within that not-yet-lost civilization, we got to see proto-anthropologists teasing out its earlier, already nearly lost underpinnings. Verdict: Nevèrÿon is a story of lost civilizations.
Oh, and Carl Barks’ Uncle Scrooge comics are also littered with lost civilizations of one stripe or another.
A. Merritt’s novels are wonderful exemplars of the Lost Civilization trope.
The earliest Lost Civilization I remember reading about was “Lost Legacy” by Heinlein. A few more short stories that I read early on that touch on LC’s are “Lost Art” (George O. Smith) and “Omnilingual” (Piper).
Somehow novels about LC’s didn’t attract my attention as much as shorts.
The Illuminatus! Trilogy is probably one of the most fun LC’s I can remember, although there’s so much crammed in that book that it’s not fair to call it an LC story.
Oh also Daybreak: 2250 AD by Andre Norton was in my dad’s library, but I am ashamed to admit I couldn’t get through it.
I personally like the idea of the Heechee; an ancient star-spanning civilization mankind is just scratching the surface of understanding; when they find that they had basically run into something so frightening that they dug themselves a hole and pulled the hole in after them.
Frederic Pohl’s Gateway has humans exploring a parking-lot of derelict ships from a lost civilization, all programmed to slowly warp back to their star-system of origin. But there is no way to tell what ship goes where. Explorers take a risk trying out the ship, it may take years to go there and come back, and their supplies run out and they die.
The British movie Quatermass and the Pit (1967; in the U.S. retitled as Five Million Years to Earth) postulates that a neighbourhood in London called Hobb’s Lane has strange, “demonic” goings-on which are actually the result of a crashed Martian ship, from a dying Martian civilization, that influenced the development of certain promising hominids. But the ship is still potent with psychic energy that controls people’s minds, as everyone is descended from the influenced and manipulated hominids…
What a coincidence! The commenter just before me mentioned the Heechee (the lost aliens from Frederik Pohl’s Gateway at the same time I did. (sorry, his name is spelled with a k).
Ahh, Hogan. When he went crazy he really went crazy
The Baldies and the races they and the Terrans were trying to … pillage, were my entré to Andre Norton, SF and the idea of leftover Tech that seemed beyond mortal ken. That was in the early sixties when I was coming into my teens. I kept reading SF, preferring the hard stuff and then I hit on the cover image of Hogan’s book that became the Gentle Giants of Ganymede series. Inherit the Star’s iconic cover. Was it Tommy Lee Jones’s character in Space Cowboys that mimics the cover as the eventual ending to that movie?? Seems that’s who it was. But that last shot of him in the movie immediately made me think of Hogan. I wasn’t turned off by Hogan’s … viewpoints … as I was his failure to write interesting puzzle books beyond the GGoG books. He tried, he failed, I moved on. But the whole idea of connecting fact to fact to fact in a SF book, well I was just blown away. Isaac Asimov always claimed a SF murder mystery was quite possibly the hardest niche to write well. What is archaeology, other than a murder mystery gone massive?? I was interested in the Pre-Columbian Indians of Central and South America when I was just getting into SF. In thinking back as to why I didn’t continue in that reading niche, I can only think I preferred a genre vs. a non-fiction interest because ultimately, the answers in the stars were in the author’s heads and sometimes, they stayed there. Leaving me to imagine and to try and piece the clues together.
I had never heard of Sarah Tolmie- new book to try!
@11, @13. As an example of Norton’s optimism, note that in at least four of her novels, the long vanished and forgotten civilization whose ruins that are being explored is that of future Earth.
Ytarzan annd the jewels of Opar book ,#5 lo
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It just hit me that C.J. Cherryh’s ‘Morgaine’ novels are lost civilization tales, with the original lost civilization being the one which the qhal discovered, and the second one being the post-collapse qhalur civilization.
Those books are spine-tinglers, the very idea of a good, dedicated person having to be utterly ruthless for a Greater Good that her victims could never comprehend gives me goosebumps.
There are the Draconaeans of Marie Brennan’s Lady Trent Victorian-explorer/adventurer analogs. Evidently, they built a vast, wonderful civilization, then…. not.
The cover of Stranger was … eye catching.
Boundary by Erik Flint and Ryk E. Spoor centers around the discovery of something impossible right on the K-T Boundary. The paleontologist who discovers it is careful to describe it in dispassionate, noncommittal terms, but anybody who reads her paper realizes that she found a space alien who died while fighting off a horde of predatory dinosaurs with a space gun. (Not a spoiler; this is the cover image of the book.) The book chronicles the hunt for more signs of this lost civilization now that people know what to look for. There are three more books in the series, but I haven’t read them yet.
@36 You mean everyone in London is descended from forebears who were psychically modified by the crashed Martian spaceship?
Probably the first ones I read were A. Merritt’s “The People of the Pit”, “The Moon Pool”, “The Dwellers in the Mirage”… I’m surprised there’s anyplace for “normal” people to live given that half the Earth seems to be misty pits or valleys full of the remnants of powerful ancient civilizations.
H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines and She are of course both lost pre-historic civilizations in Africa.
Star Trek has tons of ancient lost civilizations, many of them Human or close enough you can’t tell. They get around Humans evolving on Earth by some alien race and/or the ancient “gods” terraforming planets and planting Human colonies. Possibly the creepiest is only hinted at: “What Are Little Girls Made Of” has Ruk as the sole surviving android servant of the Old Ones.
Charles Sheffield’s Summertide series has giant ancient Artifacts (capitalized), on planetary scales, left behind by something else.
More recently, James Gunn’s Transcendental series has multiple ancient civilizations, and a rotting Galactic empire built around not interacting with those ruins for their own survival; insert protagonists who break everything.
Alastair Reynolds’ Revenger and Shadow Captain have light-sail spaceships scavenging little ancient ruined treasure worlds.
The Tarzan stories are great pulp adventures, at least as good as his John Carter stories, with the one giant caveat: I don’t think Burroughs intended to be unkind or bigoted, merely used what he understood of Africa at the time, which wasn’t much, but by any modern read they’re very racist, the most racist you can get. The Africans range from a few advanced people in lost civilizations, some tribes bright and decent but uncivilized, to some half-assed colonial wannabes, to the most excessive savage stereotypes you’ve ever seen. Honkies in them are always better than anyone else except the lost civilizations.
@47: in “Quatermass and the Pit”, human intelligence in primates seems to have arisen due to the Martian influence, so, sorry Olduvai Gorge, the black monolith landed in England. However, the dead-Martian-influenced race riots are limited to London, at least initially. The Martians are insect-like and the problem is that they had an instinct to kill the us-not-like-us; this also appears in the humanoid-insect Zhuik (good guys) in Trek novel “Debtors’ Planet” and in both cases is said to be about preventing mutation, so it sounds like a thing that social insects really do?
@48: I live in what used to be Roman Britain – near to Glasgow – so that’s one lost civilisation underfoot; at least for buried treasures or trash, and, I don’t know if anyone checks whether, say, abandoned mine tunnels hereabouts actually are unoccupied now. I’m not planning to…
Surprised that no one had mentioned the Krell from Forbidden Planet, though I guess that’s a movie rather than a book.
Another lost civilisation that I recall fondly are the Silurians from the Doctor Who story, The Cave Monsters. These were the dinosaur descended former rules of Earth who put themselves into hibernation to escape the disaster that was going to destroy the dinosaurs. Unfortunately for them the mechanism that should have awakened them afterwards failed and they slept for millions of years, until humans disturbed them.
Animation has the great Franco-Japanese children’s series Mysterious Cities of Gold with its ancient Incan solar powered ship and flying Golden Condor plane and the Olmec Flying Head battleship.
And add Douglas Adams to the list of “Earth colonised from outside” writers – we’re all descended from the Golgafrincham telephone box repairers and hairdressers.
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Terry Pratchett’s third (?) novel, Strata, features long dead alien empires that have left strange and enigmatic remains. And there are the mysterious and long-lost Jokers in his Dark Side of the Sun.
Then there are numerous SF stories in which humans venture out to the stars only to discover that a previous iteration of human civilization had been cruelly imperial, and the aliens have neither forgotten nor forgiven…
So Onwe of my Favorites in by Jim Butcher. His code of Alera series talks about old conquered and forgotten civilazations. But the real gem is their own history that has been lost, it is based on the lost legion. Really starting in book 2, there are talks about the ancient alerans reffered to as the romanics, and there are discussions about them as a separate culture. It is one of those back ground plot lines that just keeps adding in little was throughout the story moving forward. Forgetting they were a ROMAN legion after some 2000 years af civilization.
I also loved the fact that we as readers could have some information that the people within the story didn’t but could find out and change everything.
Norton was also my first thought; ISTM that practically every straight science fiction work involves dealings with the ruins of a past civilization, inhabited sometimes by the last few tech-able people (who are often a bad lot, cf Star Born), sometimes by the less-technical descendants of a tech civilization (or subjects of that civilization, as in Ice Crown), and sometimes completely abandoned but still dangerous (e.g. Lord of Thunder — I still think the tension as the characters walk the spiral gates would make a great movie).
@41: I remember that in <i>Star Rangers</i> (one of the first Nortons I read, and an astoundingly vigorous stomping on racism for 1953) but hadn’t realized she’d played that card several times — interesting.
@53: are those really remains? IIRC the book starts with (and takes its title from) a crew that is creating ancient remains for a planet that doesn’t have them.
@27: I don’t know Pennsylvania minerals, but I am unconvinced by Piper’s geology. Readercon now takes place at a hotel set into the side of a former quarry, where I’m amazed at how far the bare granite(*) (unprotected by plants or even soil) has weathered, cracked, and slumped in maybe a century — and this is in Quincy MA, close enough to the sea that it was much cooler last weekend than Boston proper; I’d expect inland PA to weather faster due to more-extreme temperatures. I also wonder whether Morrison could distinguish between an overgrown ex-quarry and a steep hillside; in the Barron River gorge, there’s a clear progression from bare stone to heavy overgrowth in a short distance downstream from the falls.
(*) AFAIK: granite is what Quincy is famous for, but I’m not an expert.
Earlier archaeologists tied themselves in knots trying to find an explanation for Great Zimbabwe that didn’t involve giving the credit for the impressive structures to Africans.
Not that impressive. Dry-stone structures up to eight metres high? That’s less impressive than the kind of thing Bronze Age Atlantic cultures were building thousands of years earlier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broch
And Great Zimbabwe was built at more or less the same time as Lincoln Cathedral and Tenochtitlan and Krak des Chevaliers. Plus, worth noting that the local inhabitants, when asked “who built Great Zimbabwe”, would tend to reply “We don’t know, not us.”
@54: Dickson sid a few things like that, though his humans tended to be victorious anyway.
Oh, another one: Somewhere in Alan Dean Foster’s Journeys of the Catechist series there’s a civilization that was deliberately lost by the people who built it, for reasons that sufficed. (But I won’t spoil it.)
@@@@@ 45:
“The cover of Stranger was … eye catching.”
More like eye-popping.
@57 Not to mention Angkor Wat
Yes, ‘Letter to a Phoenix’ was an extremely clever short story, although a bit depressing. It was written in the interesting period in the 1940s when science fiction was reacting to the news of the development of atomic weapons.
And I think that the narrator was perfectly logical in his rationale for always marrying a girl who was as young as possible – for the discrepancy in their ages not to become too obvious too quickly, as he didn’t age and she did. He didn’t have any reason to follow your woke ideas. No doubt Lazarus Long followed the same life path.
As a pre-teen, I had a pulp-bound, 1/4” thick Tarzan comic that featured one of the ubiquitous Lost Roman Legions living in Central Africa. Tarzan knew and liked them (“Ave Tribunus! Quo vadis?”), helping defend their secret from greedy Euro-Yankee Archaeologist/Privateers. I loved it. Wore it out. Wish I still had it, but decided I was too grown up for comic books and pitched it. 50 years later, I’m gobbling up comics and graphic novels again!
I’m reminded of Julie Czerneda’s “Stratification”, “Trade Pact” and “Reunification” trilogies. Lost civilization, the Hoveny (or Hoveny Concentrix), who turn out to be not-so lost, after all. I am an unabashed fan of her stuff.
Re: @3. I completely agree.
And Haggard’s stuff is all about lost civilizations (I luahged myself silly at watching Richard Chamberlain doing those movies. He was so good at understated comedy. (he may still be, for all I know…)
@58,
No doubt there were other impressive structures around the world. I think in the case of Great Zimbabwe and other African archeological sites, the denial of black provenance was meant to whitewash history and imply that Africa had been a land of savages before Europeans came and forcibly brought them into the modern era. The desired implication is that our ancestors weren’t bad people (and please ignore archeological evidence to the contrary.)
Even now, some parts of the southern United States literally teach about the favour granted to black Africans in bringing them to the US as unpaid servants.
Acknowledging lost civilizations in Africa would emphasize the the actual genocidal consequences of colonial behaviour.
————————————-
And FWIW, Time Traders by Andre Norton touched on lost civilizations and was my first exposure to that idea.
Let’s not forget the abandoned city-maze on Lemnos in Robert Silverberg’s The Man in the Maze! Enigmatic though it remains at the end of the novel….
The mention of The Man in the Maze –which I haven’t read — reminds me of a George R R Martin short story whose name I cannot recall.
It that takes place in some maze-like ruins near a spaceport, where due to some Kafkian circumstances the protagonist cannot get a ride. They’re of course ruins left by a long-dead civilization, and they end up having portals that open on different worlds and, IIRC, even different times.
@Thomas Goodey no. 63: In one of Heinlein’s stories Long raised somebody as a daughter, then married her as an adult, sired children on her, and sang her childhood songs to her as she died of old age.
That’s creepy, and it shouldn’t take being “woke” to figure out why.
As for a grown man marrying a sixteen-year-old girl, I can’t think of a time in the West when it wasn’t considered to be risky, from the Middle Ages until now. Even if it was legally and morally acceptable, since pregnancy tended to immediately follow if not accompany marriage, a sixteen-year-old wife tended to break down and die at a relatively young age–and if she didn’t, she grew up, and decided that she didn’t want to be tied to some old dude when she was still full of juice, and inspired songs about cuckoldry. Betrothing girls that young or younger to grown adults wasn’t unusual in many periods, but they tended not to marry until at least 17.
Very young marriage tends to be a thing in the West where marriage is one of the few things you can do with your life because economic independence isn’t possible. Note that places in the U.S. where it’s considered to be okay to marry that young or younger tend to have lots of poor people.
I don’t see a mention of The Expanse yet. Maybe people don’t like it as much as I do. And you have to get to the third book (Abaddon’s Gate) before it becomes obvious that the advanced civilization implied in the first two books is truly lost. Which becomes an important plot point in the fourth book (Cibola Burn, perhaps my least favorite).
I’m only as far as the sixth book (Babylon’s Ashes), but the epilogue seems to imply that it becomes important in the next story arc…
Ha! SftD was my first vaguely adult science-fiction novel. I read that in second grade and never looked back.
Nobody’s mentioned Shangri-la? From Lost Horizon by James Hilton, 1933.
Planet of the Apes (the first one)
@69, In the Middle Ages and early modern times girls married as young as twelve. Fifteen was the age expected by the English Court of Wards who dealt with propertied orphans. Some people were certainly aware of the dangers of early childbirth but many apparently didn’t think about it or didn’t care. Women as well as men.
Tepper had the Arbai in at least three of her novels. Alan Dean Foster’s Found series had at least one lost civilization.
There’s Pern, in which the Ninth Pass characters rediscover Landing, the first and largest settlement of the original colonists from 2500 years earlier, buried beneath volcanic ash. It had definitely been lost (*), and although not a “great” civilization by most SFnal standards, it’s darn impressive to Jaxom et al — extent of the settlement, durability of the materials. There were 6000 colonists to start with, and although the major Holds have populations of that magnitude (**), the private houses (well, quonset huts) of Landing made it bigger.
(*) Since Pernese civilization never got around to reinventing “historian” as a career.
(**) By inference, given the stated size of the Weyrs, appetites of the dragons, hence the necessary agrarian foundation.
I suppose we also have to differentiate (do we?) between “lost civilization” in the sense of “well, SOMEBODY must’ve left all these ruins around” vs. “lost civilization” in the sense of “our ancestors were the XIV Legion in service to Caesar Augustus; we got stuck in this isolated valley and have kept our traditions intact while avoiding contact with the outer world for the last 2,000 years”.
@77/hoopmanjh:
There’s always a hazard in dividing tropes too finely, but yes, I concur, because they produce different story dynamics (potentially; or they may just be window-dressing for a dungeon-crawl).
* The ancients: they’re dead, and the surprise is which of their relics can move the plot. Consider the so-called Ancients from Stargate SG-1.
* The remnants: the surprise is that they still exist. Consider the people of Abydos from the Stargate movie (1994) who speak a recognizable-to-a-genius-linguist version of ancient Egyptian. Or the coelecanth.
There are approximate real-life examples of both. There are stone temple complexes in central America and southeast Asia that were swallowed by the jungle and even the locals forgot about their own heritage. (The civilizational equivalent of “gee, I had no idea Gramps kept this in the attic”, I guess?) Or in Egypt by the sand. Or in Rome because the place was depopulated, then rebuilt in strata a half-dozen times (consider the Domus Aurea, one of Nero’s architectural follies, which was filled with earth — but not demolished — by his successors — and rediscovered 1400 years later).
@64–I adored the conversation that occurred when Tarzan, having beaten the leopard and the armed men, was thrown to *the dreaded wild apes!*. I am paraphrasing, of course, but it went along the lines of ‘how’s Aunt Edith, her hip still bad?’ ‘wait a moment, we saw you at the last dumdum!’ ‘Yeah, wasn’t that a hoot? Say, I have a freshly dead leopard if you want it if you’ll help me scrag the dude in the purple chair’ ‘Dude, I’ll do him for free, he poked me while I was in the cage yesterday’. As I said, I was paraphrasing. Of course, I read the actual book TARZAN AND THE LOST EMPIRE, which had more detail than the graphic version.
We also have the endlessly reiterated Arthur C. Clarke AGAINST THE FALL OF NIGHT IN THE CITY AND THE STARS etc. etc. etc.
But newer writers could have fun with the Silurian Hypothesis. The Boring Company is going to go rather deep, or so I’ve heard…
I haven’t come across many who can plumb those depths of time and yet still leave the reader hungering for more, quite like HP Lovecraft.
Arthur C Clarke’s The Star was a great short story hinting at how tragically inaccessible civilizations might be across the galaxy, so that we’ll only ever find their ruins or they ours.
Nobody mentioned Tolkien? Numenor? The lost Elven kingdoms before that? Arnor?
No better than Indiana Jones!? Who saved the world from Nazis, Thugees, Nazis (again) and Russian Communists in the movies, and more in books and games?
If Jones had been crushed by a stone in the opening credits, the Nazis still would have been melted at the end of the first movie.
How about Isaac Asimov’s Nightfall?
Their archeological history showed stacks of lost civilizations.
Then they find out why.
Has anyone read The Ice People by Barjavel? It’s one of my favorites but it never makes any of these lists. Two ancient people from Earth awaken in modern day after being found in the Arctic Circle.
One of the first lost civilization tales I read—outside the Tarzan books—was A. Merrit’s Dwellers in the Mirage. Kraken worshipping Mongols in a hidden Alaskan valley, oh my!
@@@@@ 18, jmeltzer:
@@@@@16: or a lost civilization of dead cats.
I think it’s called Bubastis.
@@@@@ 48, mdhughes:
The Tarzan stories are great pulp adventures, at least as good as his John Carter stories, with the one giant caveat: I don’t think Burroughs intended to be unkind or bigoted, merely used what he understood of Africa at the time, which wasn’t much.
The first edition of the first Tarzan book had Tarzan menaced by a tiger. By the second printing that African tiger had mysteriously gone extinct.
Wow, have not thought of The Ice People in almost half a century….
I wonder, could I come up with five French SF novels that I’ve read for an essay? Without mentioning Merle twice, I mean?
Piper’s point wasn’t that the quarry could not be erased by weathering in time, but that the weathering that could erase the quarry in the future, would also erase the natural mountains Morrison could see and recognise, and geologically he was right. That whole landscape of ridge-and-valley Central Pennsylvania is eroding, but he could recognise locations identical to those he knew.
There was no way to square the circle between what he could see and what he remembered, using only forward or backward time travel. Either direction resulted in nonsense.
The main thing I remember about The Ice People is that, even as a teenager, I thought the very last bit about rioting college students saving the world made no sense.
It was written in the late sixties. Rioting college students were generally assumed to be saviours.
Okay, I’ll mention Tolkien, then:
This is how Englishmen feel about Roman ruins: they seem to want to tell us about their builders.
See also Weathertop, the watchtower at Amon Sûl; the pukel-men, analogous to the megaliths of England, and also the worn kings on old cathedrals; and the crossroads on the old road to Osgiliath. The whole landscape of Middle Earth is many-times-over postapocalyptic.
Speaking of many times over: A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter M Miller and Anathem by Neal Stephenson.
88: Lucky that the human activity in the region was not such to alter erosion patterns despite thousands of years of divergence. Although I imagine it differed in details.
The beautiful dead cities of Barsoom just beg for archaeological investigation.
In Charles Stross’ “Missile Gap,” the heroes find some truly disturbing ancient ruins. More would be a spoiler…
What I find fascinating about Star Trek lore is how there’s one single Lost Civilisation that’s responsible for all of the humanoid races the characters encounter. When they can’t find any other life form they class as intelligent, they decide to meddle with each biosphere they’ve encountered so that an intelligent, humanoid species would evolve. Apart from some clues left in the modified DNA and a single holographic message, their “inheritors” (the Federation, the Romulans, the Klingons, etc) don’t seem to have identified any other trace of this Lost Civilisation.
Mary Gentle’s Orthe books, where an ancient civilization becomes truly, tragically lost.