So, hivemind question. Suggestions for stories about post-tech human societies on exoplanets? I have Beckett’s Dark Eden and a lot of Le Guin short stories. Settings where the human colonists have been cut off for a long time.
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Seeing most of the stuff I've read already mentioned, but if generation-worldships are allowed, Elizabeth Bear's "Jacob's Ladder" trilogy could qualify.
My 100% favorite is probably John Varley's Steel Beach. Not only do you get your post-tech society, you get Hildy Johnson as your protagonist navigating it, and so many of the ideas are even more relevant today! https://varley.net/novel/steel-beach/
If you mean literally post-technology, i.e. humans living as animals, then IIRC one of Stableford's Daedalus series is like that.
If you just mean regressed from star faring to less advanced technology then there's a million of them. I have an unpublished one myself, which I would be happy to...😀
Imagine being part of a colony stranded on a planet due to collapse of the parent civilization. This concept has been the subject of many stories, but theres plenty more there. How would the two (or more) cultures evolve? Could they find a way to communicate over the vast stretches of space?
David Brin's Glory Season fits the bill; technologically regressed matriarchal eugenics. Sheri Tepper's Grass with its parasitized nobles. Lots of people already mentioned Pern.
Alfred Bester's Tiger Tiger (now The Stars My Destination) has something like this in the first place he jaunts to (they tattoo him) but I haven't read it for ages. Hitchiker's Guide is a weird example as they are still on earth but earlier in time? Wyndham's Survival as an odd one maybe?
Not this exactly, but A Fire Upon the Deep has a really cool take on physical reality places various tech constraints on civilizations. The Zones of Thought.
Andre Norton's Star Born, a vintage novel set 3 generations after a colony ship that secretly escaped a fascist earth and settled on a planet that has ocean dwelling sapient inhabitants and ruins from another species
I think the Steerswoman series, by Rosemary Kirstein, fits. Certainly, the people on the planet don’t know they are a colony. Although I haven’t read the last book (I only just found out it’s been published), so I don’t know quite how the story resolves.
It’s only a minor scene but the “flippers” in Baxter’s Manifold: Space count. (I’ve been wondering if you’ve read the prior book, as the intelligent squid are similar to Children of Memory’s… they even do that thing with inheriting a name across generations like Portia)
You mean as in after they lost or got rid of the high tech, right? The answers here are mixed on that.
I'm only up to the end of Book of the Long Sun, but Book of the Short Sun is what you describe, I believe. The isolation happened during the travel to the exoplanet, not on it, though.
Tech remnants, but GRRM’s Bitterblooms story and Windhaven with Tuttle, David Weber’s Armageddon Reef series(but the main character is an android, and there’s secret tech/reasons).
Margret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Darksword series(but +magic which is how they got there).
Old school Dathomir from the “Courtship of Princess Leia”, though the know of tech, have force and the natives have conquered an imperial Prison, so they have some tech they cannot make/repair
There's a sense in which Aldis' Helliconia novels might count just in terms of the timescales involved, even though the humans evolved locally rather than coming from Earth.
Darkover series by Marion Zimmer Bradley? Well into the series she wrote Darkover Landfall, which was the backstory of the first human colonists, before the events of the main sequence
Starship by Brian W. Aldiss, (although you already have a ton of good suggestions here) The inhabitants of Starship are definitely post-technology, but maybe not by choice.
Anne McCaffrey's PERN series? Essentially all knowledge lost of the past until the discovery of AIVAS. Read them in the 90s not sure if they hold up today.
There's this one with an alien memory machine and a colony being searched for by a civilization of like slime molds and octo/spider/humans. Children of something by Aguyiguess Tchaikovdude or someone. Can't remember.
Sharon Shinn’s Samaria series? Engineered angels who sing commands to orbital satellites to deliver rain or genetically targeted medicine and the society that evolves around that mechanism and forgets it’s a colony. Louise Marley has a similar setting for Sing the Light trilogy
They’re both SF that people treat as fantasy because the tech looks magic to the readers and the colonists who have forgotten they are colonists. Obvious debts to Pern but interesting world building and I’m a huge fan of Shinn’s writing
A very long shot and it's going back decades, but "The Warriors of Dawn" by M. A. Foster (third book in his Ler trilogy)? The Ler themselves are, strictly speaking, a post-H. Sapiens hominin species, but there are Sapiens in this book too.
I believe that The Warriors of Dawn was the second book in M.A.Foster's Ler trilogy. Maybe the third book - The Day of the Klesh - fits the original request better.
(Also, it may not have helped that Warriors was published first (publication order: Dawn, Zan, Klesh) but is the second chronologically (Zan, Dawn, Klesh) in the trilogy. )
Absolutely McCaffery’s Dragonriders of Pern books. Agrarian colonists who purposefully set up a low-tech society for ideological reasons. Reads like a fantasy series until they need to rediscover spaceflight.
Not sure if it qualifies as post-tech, but Allen Steele's Coyote follows a crew who hijacked the first interstellar ship to colonise another planet, as it was launched by a fascist America who impoverished their people to build it. On arrival, they have to live a more or less frontier existence.
Wanted to suggest this one, as well. It starts with a small, enclosed community living an agrarian existence until a man completely unknown to them appears through a door in open space that immediately disappears. People in the community know nothing of their origins, or that of their small world.
There’s this one book I read about smart ants and another one about smart octopi. Can’t remember the name but I still have to read the third one. Maybe you’ve heard of it?
Not completely post-tech but Conor Kostick’s Epic has a degraded tech society of human colonists who are primarily low to no tech save a VRMMO which also doubles as their judicial system and economy
Oh oh OOH!!!! Diaspora, by Greg Egan. Completely and totally and utterly different idea of what a civilization can be. That's the whole remit of the book.
Oh, I got one. GRRM and Lisa Tuttle, Windhaven. Often thought it would make a decent animated series or movie. Not sure if anyone's ever thought about adapting GRRM stuff for the screen though, does anyone know if that's been tried, or...?
How about a post-human society created by genetically engineered humans? They were genetically engineered to survive the exoplanet conditions, then sent from Earth. After a time, they genetically engineered people they send back to Earth to ask why?
If you like graphic novels, Habitat by @simonroy.bsky.social
The art is excellent, also it has cannibalism and robo nuns. Technically it's set on an orbital habitat rather than an exoplanet and only some of the tech still works, but civilization is mostly back to spears and loin clothes
The latter short stories in Stephen Baxter's "Flood" series. The novels are of humanity fleeing/dying, the shorts are a few hundred years after that. One planet is tidally locked, the other not.
Indrapramit Das also has a short on a tidally locked planet, tech being reclaimed.
Imagine if groups of people crowdfunded the establishment of habitats for their people. Imagine what hitchhiking between the settlements would be like. Nudist planet. TTRPG planet. Steampunk planet. The planet of Israel or Mormon. Cyberpunk planet or Surf World. There’s a comedy in there somewhere
I feel like Becky Chambers' Monk and Robot books (A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy) fall into this category. Setting is an Earth-like planet but not Earth, no talk of space travel, and what tech there is has devolved into an agrarian nature-y sort-of-utopia. Lovely books!
The „Circus World“ books by Barry Longyear should fit. Planet colonized by a crashed starship housing a travelling circus. Totally weird but I enjoyed it in my teens.
"When it Changed" by Joanna Russ. Originally published in "Dangerous Visions" so it's pretty old.
Not truly post-tech given the existence of internal combustion engines and reproductive technology, but they were unable to maintain spaceflight and much that having spaceflight assumes.
Rand Lee's 1981 short story "Full Fathom Five My Father Lies," anthologized in Worlds Apart (on https://archive.org) Found it while backreading random Asimov's and it floored me. Settlers so far post-tech they're mystics with tech they don't understand. Genuinely upsetting but wonderful worldbuilding imo
Forty Thousand in Gehenna by C.J Cherryh has this premise. Humans and clone laborers land on a planet expecting a second ship from their government to arrive with the machines that'll make the next step of their colonization sustainable, only they never come.
It's sincerely a tough read. I was all in for the majority of the first half. Following it up with the magnificent Pride of Chanur books was the perfect pick-me-up.
It's also used as a plot point for some worlds in David Weber's Honorverse, and as a wider world building justification for David Drake's Royal Cinnabar Navy books, but they both have the exoplanets reconnecting to wider human society and tech
Charlie Jane Anders' "The City in the Middle of the Night" hits all the points in the brief. The new James Corey "The Mercy of Gods" is in the neighborhood, though isn't so post-tech.
Stephen Baxters “Landfall” was not a truly post-technology focused book, but it was a great way of closing out the “Flood/Ark” books, with each of the colonies demonstrating less and less technological mastery as time has passed.
Hyperion Cantos maybe? After the disconection of the Gates, although there was still some communication between worlds albeit extremely slow, except for the church and their archangel class ships
It’s not exactly post tech but Elizabeth Moon’s Remnant Population is a good story about an abandoned village making first contact. Iain M Banks Inversions and Matter?
Maybe more "post inflection" than post-tech, very gentle, and not explicitly human: the Monk & Robot novellas by Becky Chambers come to mind and aren't already mentioned.
If I recall correctly there are a fair number of Brian Stableford stories along these lines including some of the Hooded Swan series and the Daedalus Mission series.
(as well as humans and the native Metamorphs, there are long-established populations of several alien species that are implied to originally be from other planets)
Anderson also had a whole series of Dominic Flandry shorts where he drops in on colonies that have had next to no contact with Earth culture for centuries - standout examples to my recollection A Message In Secret and A Plague of Masters….
Indeed. And his novelette, "The Sharing of Flesh," won a Hugo in 1969. Jack Vance's The Dragon Masters also fits.
A planet in H. Beam Piper's Space Viking, Tanith, fills the bill, but it's peripheral to the manual Putin used for the bloodless conquest of the United States.
Neal Stephenson's Arbre in Anathem may also work, being high-tech and post-tech at the same time, depending on where you are and when the latest war happened. Hellacious book.
And of course there’s your (with Susan Schwartz, Judith Tarr, and SM Stirling) take on Jerry Pournelle’s Warworld. Oedipus Rex in space and then Seven Against Thebes!
Walter M. Miller, Jr's "The Big Hunger" details cycle after cycle of humans colonizing other planets, collapsing into barbarism because there are too few settlers to sustain complex cultures, then rising again.
Weren't the Pern stories something like that. Ok so there were dragons, but I'm pretty sure the moon turns out to be a spaceship and society is post-tech. It's been a LONG time though since I read them.
I really like a lot of Pamela Sargent's works, particularly the 2nd-3rd in the Earthseed trilogy, for this. Semiosis by Sue Burke has been nice too, but I haven't read the other books in the series. Both do a great job of "how do we deal with tech breaking down that we can't fix?"
I saw Alistair Reynolds mentioned twice in here, but not specifically his Revenger series. That one exists in the ruins of 5-7 prior technological peaks and collapses. Amazing texture on the worlds.
Martha Wells - Network Effect (they find an abandoned colony not too far post-tech)
M. R. Carey - The Book of Koli (post-apocalyptic Earth, but who can tell 😉)
“The Sevateem will launch an attack on the domain of the Tesh to free their god, led by the combative Andor who suspects Neeva of being a false prophet.”
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If you just mean regressed from star faring to less advanced technology then there's a million of them. I have an unpublished one myself, which I would be happy to...😀
It's about a technologically regressed civilisation living on a totally locked planet around a red dwarf flare star.
Very much in the style of Anne McCaffrey.
*sadface*
I'm only up to the end of Book of the Long Sun, but Book of the Short Sun is what you describe, I believe. The isolation happened during the travel to the exoplanet, not on it, though.
Margret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Darksword series(but +magic which is how they got there).
Bujold’s Barryar’s past
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2519823.Geta
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Integral_Trees
remember correctly
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/22549
Trader to the Stars by Poul Anderson
Deathworld by Harry Harrison
The Blue World by James Vance
Just a few of the 60s Sci-Fi books that I grew up reading!
https://galacticjourney.org/march-6-1970-march-1970-galactoscope-part-one/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windhaven
Srsly, miniseries of Fevre Dream, come on! 😀
The art is excellent, also it has cannibalism and robo nuns. Technically it's set on an orbital habitat rather than an exoplanet and only some of the tech still works, but civilization is mostly back to spears and loin clothes
Indrapramit Das also has a short on a tidally locked planet, tech being reclaimed.
https://nautil.us/whom-he-may-devour-235741/
The Torturers Apprentice.
Sorry, not helpful. But that was a very fun book.
When I saw this post, I thought, “I have lots of great ideas!” Then…that one actually takes place on earth, so does that one. He wrote that one…
Also just an amazing series.
Not truly post-tech given the existence of internal combustion engines and reproductive technology, but they were unable to maintain spaceflight and much that having spaceflight assumes.
and short stories from Baxter's flood/ark series.
A few of Karl Schroeder's specifically the Virga series and Ventus
Larry Nivens Ringworld Engineers (book 2 again) talks a bit about low tech civilisations who get by on few metals and no fossil fuels.
The Steerswoman books by Rosemary Kirstein
“GETA” aka “Courtship Rite”, by Donald Kingsbury
Maybe not 100% what you’re seeking here, but you’d dig it if you haven’t read it!
Semiosis, Sue Burke
Legacy of Heorot, Niven et Al
Friedman - This Alien Shore
Silverberg - Lord Valentine's Castle
Silverberg - A Time of Changes
Stross - Chat on
Toner - Ameranthine Spectrum
On the other hand, IIRC we never see any humans or members of the other colonist species visiting.
A planet in H. Beam Piper's Space Viking, Tanith, fills the bill, but it's peripheral to the manual Putin used for the bloodless conquest of the United States.
Ragged Astronauts and sequels.
Hot Air Balloons between 2 planets in a mutual orbit.
Damn. Got it in my head they were a regressed colony.
Need to dig it out again.
M. R. Carey - The Book of Koli (post-apocalyptic Earth, but who can tell 😉)
NB: Andor is not a planet.