Over the holiday I basically chewed through the Treegrave Universe by Derin Edala, and I am Obsessed with the stories' theme about the scope of history; what's remembered, what isn't, and what gets misremembered.
I read it out of its proper order, starting with "Child of A Wandering Star". For those that don't know, it's told from the perspective of a young bug-like alien, after she finds what she and her people believe to be an egg from space that's laid a baby star.To the reader, though, it's immediately apparent that it's actually a human astronaut.
It was also not so much apparent as just logical that this had to be set in our future-- because obviously, we in the year 2025 do not have the technology to send colonists to any planet outside of our solar system. (Fuck, even within it, frankly). But how far? Realistically, I'd say centuries, if not more, but it's not uncommon in the genre to skip the realism on that front. So I continued to be occasionally surprised-- not hugely, just a little 'oh!'-- as it became apparent just how much more advanced the human colonists' technology was.
Clearly this was further than I had necessarily anticipated, but because of the non-human POV and the language barrier, it was hard for me to still make any real sense of the type of society the astronaut "Smon" came from. But I assumed, again, well, probably the near/recognisable future of an extant human country. Even as Smon warned their alien friend off making assumptions based on her own background and biology, I was doing the same.
… and then I picked up "Time To Orbit: Unknown", which is following another ship in the same space colonization program, and I go. Oh.
We are CENTURIES in the future. How far in the future is never actually mentioned, as far as I can recall-- that would be like me casually mentioning in my internal narration how long it's been since the fall of Rome or the Qin dynasty of China. It's generally not relevant day to day, and for the kind of historians (or amateur history nerds) who do care, they know that info well enough not to need to specify. But it's definitely been a while. Long enough that huge swathes of information of our current "pre-Neocambrian" society to have been lost to the mists of history. That might indicate it's been a LONG time (800-1000+ years)… Or it might be shorter than that, and a consequence of digital information not surviving the climate crises and world conflicts that broke out.
But the world world is different. Markedly so. Some modern countries still exist-- Korea, Germany, and Japan are mentioned. Others have changed or evolved-- a big portion of North America is flooded, and it seems Texas is the dominant (or only?) country remaining on the continent, and Mars, while its own independent colony, was originally colonized by Korea and maintains strong ties. There are a bunch of NEW ones too, like Antarctica, and the Moon, and the space-elevator stations, or the giant floating islands made of genetically engineered mangrove (?) ecosystems used to manage our ocean environments (!).
That last one is where our protagonist Dr. Aspen of the Greaves Cluster hales from, and their narration makes it clear that this country-- and all others-- have existed long enough to develop their own unique languages and cultures. There's a gender trenery, though other gender options are common. There are new religions and governments and social orders. There are laws and regulations around tampering with peoples' genetics or neurology-- and equally people looking to flaunt those regulations, both for benign and selfish reasons. Social mores on everything from marriage, nudity, sex work, and funerary practices have altered hugely, and are by no means monolithic.
All of this is fascinating and exciting, but mostly mundane to our protagonist and their shipmates. But stuff Aspen finds weird? Those fingernails people used to have. They're so thing and they grow so fast and they're the wrong colour!
Throughout TTO:U, we're occasionally blindsided by the characters' misconceptions and musings and questions about modern day life. And as someone with a hobbyist interest in history, I KNOW that we know so little, really, about what things were like even 200 years ago. I'm always wondering what the historical record preserved, what it didn't, and what we've massively misinterpreted because we just have too little data. But there's nothing like reading characters excitedly discuss how the installation and playing of Doom was a computer consecration ritual to wonder what we got wrong about, say, Mesopotamian temples.
(Hell, me even just saying it this wayconflates multiple cultures that existed over the course of centuries into a Single Thing, "Mesopotamia". Which is exactly! what the characters in the book! Do to us!)
and then. AND THEN. You get into 'The Void Behind', which is set just as far in the future from TTO:U as it was from our time, if not further. And now they have misconceptions about them. About the Earth as a whole, the far-away origin of humanity, dozens and dozens of generations behind them. They've built up origin myths about the "first crew"; misconceptions about Earth culture ('most kids were orphans'); seeing their first non-human mammal is a Coming of Age moment that really freaks most of them out. And it's unclear how much of this is is just the natural time wearing at the past, and how much it was deliberate propaganda to build specific narratives-- the answer is somewhere in the middle, i'm sure-- but it's so fascinating to see laid out.
It makes me feel very small. Like I'm standing in the middle of a vast river, and I can look just behind me or in front of me, but beyond that, it's just mist.
