Zero gave me this book, and I’ve been reading it on and off being so tied up with work. I remember reading it and feeling I was tossed back into the darker years of the Dark Ages. It’s something I’ve always liked about post-apocalyptic settings: you are forced into a dystopian future which, being dystopian, finds its underpinnings in the worst periods of human history, in this instance reflected in 10th or 11th Century Europe.
What fascinates me about these settings is how authors envision the behaviours of the various actors on the metaphorical stage; intellectually-able but fascinated with preternatural myths, seeing the symbolic in everything, even in the abused, silvered sliver of candy wrapping. Such a “dark age” is not merely a situation bereft of real knowledge and science, but a situation in which the participants are bereft of the intellectual capacity to grasp the possibilities of science beyond myth-making. [more..]
