Science fiction is all about a Great Forgetting age where records are lost etc and sometimes it's natural disaster and sometimes it's revolutionary action but in our world it's apparently for tax write-offs
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I’ve felt for a while that when the end of our civilization finally happens with inexorable momentum, it’s not going to be dramatic and poetic. It’s going to be slow, annoying, frustrating, oddly boring shit like this. Erosion wrought by the most IRRITATING people in all of creation.
I remember an SF tale in the 90's where characters in a future Cyberspace had to delve deep into wild and dangerous archives filled with treacherous logic traps and voracious viruses for data that was otherwise lost to their modern age. That seems to be our future!
It would be nice if it was that exciting. In reality, the job is done by banal changes in technology like database storage formats, machine language incompatibility and plain ole removing archival content from internet access. Petabytes of human knowledge passively disappeared.
There was some dystopia fiction about Govt records being stored in a toilet block. But surely that would only happen if the person couldn't use a mobile phone, and had to take his own reading material
Honestly to me (someone who attended Clarion) most of SF reached an endpoint in the 90s, around the time that people started to include in their criticism what authors were like in real life. But, also, topics were mostly exhausted.
Well, they've decided that things people have not seen aren't worth ever showing to them (Coyote versus Acme), and now they've decided that things people have already seen aren't worth ever showing to them again (https://MTV.com, https://VH1.com). What's left for them to sell except Star Trek action figures?
Ready Player One, except all the people trying to figure out Halliday's game can't actually access 90% of the 80s games and movies/shows he was obsessed with because they've been writ off by various corporations over the years, so no one understands his pop-culture references.
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"Hubbard's texts have been engraved on stainless steel tablets and encased in titanium capsules underground. "
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trementina_Base
A Deduction for Leibowitz
An Audit for Leibowitz