One of the ‘sneakier’ element of the Ice Age in Scarlet series (and a homage to the way that literacy disappeared from the Greek World following the Bronze Age collapse) is that over the course of the series what you and I might think of as ‘literacy’ disappears.
It’s not a quick event and it’s phased through the books. The survivors of the Catastrophe have all the same skill sets as they have pre-Catastrophe and literacy disappearing isn’t down to any great ‘forgetting’ of the skills of the past.
It’s just that those skills have lost their utility over time and the crew of the Manta in Cloud Surfing operate almost their entire command structure (which is mostly communal) through ship based social media. Crew unhappy with a decision? You’ll find out by the stream of irritated emojis drowning your wrist comm in red.
Snail ship coming out of Mars Terminus? Picture on the same and a screeching warning drawn from a socially contextual computer experience.
Why would this happen? Let me explain.
One of the things I’ve noticed recently is that in a fair old number of areas of human knowledge, words have begun to be borderline for getting information across, or indeed cannot be used due to lack of precision.
My particular experience is contracts and regulation where no matter how carefully you craft a particular provision some idiot will find a way to misinterpret it.
Instead they’re being replaced by two things. The first being mathematics and computer coding, the second being horrible jargon filled nonsense infiltrating and poisoning academia from the social sciences whose main purpose is to hide rather than reveal meaning except to the cognoscenti, and which I suspect will eventually become extinct as the parameters of what is possible using the limited acceptable vocabularies are reduced in a similar way to the word ‘Crimethink/Goodthink’ works in Newspeak.
That’s at the technical end. At the other end of the spectrum we have emojis and the like used for day to day expression on social media. They say that a picture can tell a thousand words and they’re right. A well timed emoji or meme can carry far more meaning than a misspelled and badly written missive whatever the medium.
Why describe how you feel in a language you can’t use formally and therefore struggle to get across your exact meaning, when there’s a ready made gif just waiting to be used.
Coupled with this, there’s the ‘consequences’ of writing down what you actually think, rather than the non specific ‘feeliness’ you can put out with a picture. There’s s drift away from people actually feeling comfortable engaging in writing. After all it’s entirely possible to lose your entire career through an ill-thought out written response. Language is becoming a minefield in a way that pictures cannot (at least in quite the same way despite the attempts of the language police over who can use what pictures as a form of communication.)
Similarly the number of people who’d engage in long distance conversation by choice is falling away. When’s the last time you had a good long conversation on the phone rather than a back and forth over a messaging service? What good is it to say ‘I saw a great Tik Tok video yesterday, it was X, Y, Z,’ when you can just copy and paste a link and show!
So, divergence. Language becomes technical at the top end, language becomes simple at the other.
So taking this tendency to its reductio ad absurdum I have the human survivor societies in Ice Age fall head long (over two hundred years…) down that particular divergence.
The tendency is of course accelerated by the new options available due to the general appearance of magic. Lots of which falls directly into the ‘technical’ area. There’s no ‘magic class’ or ‘born powerful’ types in Ice Age. You know the words, you know the structures? You could make the world disappear if you wanted. It’s just tough to get it right as the mid era novels make obvious (particularly those around the ‘Tower’ period where some of what general availability of basic magic to Union society are examined.)
Anyway. That’s all I wanted to say today. I’m going to be recommending a couple of new books but for now you should check out Rebecca Crunden’s books. I’m working my way through them but my particular favourite is below – a wonderful three hundred years post Magical invasion story that I enjoyed immensely.
Back to Watcher. When everyone sends paper letters by courier. Because I’ve wiped out everything bar hardline communication at this point. And I find the idea of couriers working through a snow storm amusing.
Ice Age in Scarlet 