BlueLancers’s original post was on a different topic (note the date) and I liked it so much then, that I quote it whenever it vaguely fits.
Ratboy and I have discussed deep history many times, last night chimera in a Harry Potter book brought the subject up again. How would our 100 generation hence descendants describe our current lab animals, like the hu-mouse?
Do you read science fiction? In an old book by H. Beam Piper, “Space Viking” he described the stories of the people of Tanith about the fall of the Federation and tha abandonment of their world.
“It takes an awful lot of people, working together at an awful lot of jobs, to keep a civilization running. Smash the installations and kill the top technicians and scientists, and the masses don’t know how to rebuild and go back to stone hatchets. Kill off enough of the masses and even if the planet and the know-how is left, there’s nobody to do the work. I’ve seen planets that decivilized both ways. Tanith, I think, is one of the latter.”
That had been during one of the long after-dinner bull sessions on the way out from Gram. Somebody, one of the noble gentlemen-adventurers who had joined the company after the piracy of the _Enterprise_ and the murder, had asked:
“But some of them survived. Don’t they know what happened?”
“_’In the old times, there were sorcerers. They built the old buildings by wizard arts. Then the sorcerers fought among themselves and went away,’_” Harkaman said. “That’s all they know about it.”
You could make any kind of an explanation out of that.”