When the Neoplatonic Academy was finally closed down by Justinian I in 529 CE, the philosophers and scientists from the Academy moved to the Sassanid court at Ctesiphon. Their teachings remained popular in Persia and later Iran until the 20th Century (Ayatollah Khomeini was reportedly a big fan of them, for instance), and they spread throughout the region (for instance, to Baghdad), but away from western Christendom until the Renaissance. There are some odd survivals in Lebanon and Syria (and Iran) as a result.
The analogous situation for the deep future might be if there was a Christian schismatic sect somewhere in, say, Appalachia, that included St. Einstein as one of the patrons of their sect and believed in holy relativity, as opposed to the absolute good-evil dualism in mainline Christianity. They might even believe in handling snakes, but only as a way to use them for rat control...
]]>If look at my second/third responses, they're clearly about OP's piece and foremost about SF/F novels.
They're even about quality fantasy magical systems, in a way that's a counter-point to OP's work, but in an interesting way.
A boring response would have been to link to Excession and contrast OCP stuff. I chose not to.
As an aside:
Have you read either The Farseer trilogy or The Scavenger Trilogy? If not, do so: they're groundbreaking works.
~
The crowd wanted more, so it got more. Dirk works on a different plane, and I strongly doubt he took any of what I said as a personal threat or dismissal.
It's called respect.
p.s.
And yes, Dirk, I saw the cover. You'll want Children of Dune, speech by Paul as Voice-from-the-Desert as a reply.
]]>WHilst fact-checking that, I found that there are another 2 tv series and at least one film based on the same material!
]]>Hmmm, you know, it would be rather fun if Mr. Stross were inspired to write an Arthurian pastiche as one of his Laundry series. Camelot is certainly one of the lasting tropes of fantasy. . . .
]]>On the other hand, by now so many secondary works have taken inspiration from it that it's turned into a kind of mythology after the fact.
]]>""A beginning is a very delicate time." Frank Herbert"
Full marks if you were obsessive enough to find it and work out what's happening. A clue - 13 years later it activated globally.
]]>Science fiction is the opposite, it is about a dynamic, changing, unsettling world. OMG, the computers are getting smart really fast! Things will never be the same!
]]>I think that's an overly narrow definition of fantasy. It's redefining fantasy to be only the kind that I personally dislike. Susanna Clarke, China MiƩville, Terry Pratchett, John Crowley, Felix Gilman: novels written, marketed, and lauded as fantasy, but with settings that see significant changes. Likewise the Laundry Files. Even Tolkien wrote about the permanent end of an age rather than stasis forever -- though Tolkien's background chronology does seem pretty leisurely compared to real recorded history.
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