Arthur C. Clarke once said that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. So if I whisper to a small crystal ring on my finger, then disappear, it could be magic (an enchanted ring, for example) or it could be really advanced technology (some sort of light-bending force field). It's difficult--if not impossible--for an outside observer to know for sure.
This also applies to the real world, even without magic. Bring a Medieval French peasant to the modern world, and see if he doesn't think half the things you show him are of the Devil. Clearly planes are roaring demons. Clearly televisions have captured people's souls inside little boxes. And so on. Our tech, to him, is so advanced as to be incomprehensible.
Ah, so what happens if everyone forgets how technology works? A post-apocalyptic scenario, for example. In Mad Max: Beyond the Thunderdome, Max encounters a group of feral children. They tell him their story, about flying on a giant metal bird that died, several of the children telling him this through a wooden frame they made out of sticks, complete with bunny ear antennae. They were remembering TV, but didn't have a way to talk about it beside "magic box." And that was something they'd directly experienced. Imagine if Mad Max was set a thousand years after the end of the world. What would the world look like then? How would people talk about the things they'd found, the remains of cities, nuclear dumping grounds?
I've been thinking about these things because I'm working on an after-the-end type story, but I'm not interested in setting it on Earth. I don't intend to have a giant green statue of a crowned woman with a torch mentioned in passing and the reader goes, "Oh, Statue of Liberty. I got it." I'm not going to do that because that's not what the story is about. It doesn't need to be anchored in the real world, or our current age. I don't know what planet it's set on but it's irrelevant.
Digression: I find a lot of times that people who read one of my fantasy stories, but who don't normally read that genre, tend to ask certain questions that irk me. I understand why they ask those questions, but they're usually a non-issue. For example, one I heard back in college was essentially, "This thing [word, school, social structure, etc.] wouldn't make sense back then." I italicize back then because that makes it clear to me that the reader hasn't understood my story. Sure, there are knights attacking a castle. Similar things happened during our Medieval period. That's true. It's also true that I haven't had anything explicitly magical take place, so one can't see a wizard and go, "Oh, clearly this isn't taking place on Earth." But I never said it was taking place on Earth. I constructed a world with knights and castles in it because I wanted to have knights attack as castle. I didn't set it in the real world or in our history because I didn't want to step on anybody's toes. The issue my reader had was the mention of an "Academy" that a knight had attended. It seemed that such an idea was too modern a construct to fit into my story (not even the world that I'd constructed, but the "real world"). Of course, the word "academy" comes from Plato's school of philosophy in about 300 BC, so it's been around for a while.
What irked me was that they thought I'd made an error. Rather than thinking, "Hmm, here's a medieval-type world and someone is talking about a [modern] Academy. I want to learn more about this world," they thought, "Medieval world, okay. What's that? Academy? Oh, this is wrong."
With fiction, especially fantasy and scifi, one isn't constrained to the real world, to actual historical events. If one wants to create a world with more advanced technology than Earth and have governments settle their dispute by sending platemail-wearing, horse-riding, battle-axe-wielding soldiers into combat against each other, that's fine. (In fact, there are a number of stories that use that idea.)
Back to my original topic: My current story is set far in the ruined future of a once technologically-advanced people. Their city still stands, as it was mostly self-maintaining, and many of their artifacts still function, although no one knows how they work. Imagine a room-sized microwave with an eternal power supply. I'm not sure why one would use something like that--to cook man-sized hotdogs, perhaps--but say such a thing exists. But then the people who built it and know what it is vanish. Other people stumble upon it. Maybe somebody dies in it. Imagine what those people would think about such a thing: Their fellow stumbles into it, somebody pushes some buttons or says something the computer interprets as the "On" command. Maybe it had a safety-circuit, but a thousand years have corroded it. The thing starts beeping, lights come on, and then their friend starts screaming, dying horribly, but not from anything they can see. Clearly the machine is a demon, or a god, or something incomprehensible. Can't you picture the Cult of the Microwave?
So I see the story having three main characters. The first is a guy from outside the city. He's heard stories about it, but the inhabitants--mutated remnants of the original city-dwellers' servants--are cannibalistic homicidal maniacs, so he doesn't know much. The second character is one of the mutated creatures, something part-rat, part-cockroach, and part-human. Originally designed by the city-dwellers to work in the sewers, the mutants have had thousands of years to themselves in the city, and through garbled oral histories, they know how to use a lot of the technology that's there (what isn't too complex or corrupted, anyway). Finally, we have one of the city-dwellers, just out of a thousand years of hibernation. He knows how things in the city should work, but a lot of its broken and mutated. He's not quite as lost as the villager, the outsider, but it's close.
So...yeah, that's what I'm working on/thinking about currently. Hopefully it goes well.
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