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Comment by reitzensteinm | Hacker News Reader

Are there any works of fiction like this? A broadly competent medieval society that has scarce supplies of recovered present day technology.

There is no end to post apocalyptic fiction but usually it's set fairly soon after the collapse, or the technology uncovered is mysterious and futuristic.

Good chance I'm outing myself as an infrequent reader of science fiction asking this!

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Check out /A Canticle for Leibowitz/. Each time CollapseOS comes up, I picture a team of monks cycling alternators around the clock to keep a system powered while another compares parchment to a vacuum-tube display.

I think for its chosen niche, the key qualities are (1) low power draw and (2) the ability to boot and be usable with no on-disk storage. The z80 system has that, but you could build something much more powerful. Burn the OS into a rom, have it copy into ram at boot.

It's not quite a medieval society, but The Windup Girl https://www.goodreads.com/cs/book/show/6597651-the-windup-gi... feature a post-climate change world where most energy comes from beasts of burden, but there are still a few rare computers and staggeringly expensive carbon-fuelled vehicles.

His Shipbreaker series is really good too. other authors: The world made by hand, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1689657.World_Made_by_Ha...

Eternity Road, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/128533.Eternity_Road

Perhaps worth mentioning that Ship Breaker is YA fiction, and it shows IMHO.

The criminally underwatched "See" is one such fiction. It might be somewhat cheesy but I loved the worldbuilding.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Connecticut_Yankee_in_King_A... isn't quite that but is a fun take on the time traveller, by Mark Twain.

You might want to check out Eric Flint’s 1632 series. A small Virginia mining town is sent back in time and translocated to 1631 Germany, the series goes into how they try to build up a more technologically advanced civilization. S. M. Stirling‘s Nantucket series is somewhat similar. Nantucket is sent back in time to 1250 BC and they try to build a society there. David Weber’s Safehold series has a different premise, it’s set in the far future on a planet with medieval level technology. A lot of it is about the protagonists trying to build up their tech level.

I found Souls in the Great Machine by Sean McMullen to be an interesting take on this.

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