WeepingElf wrote: ↑Tue May 20, 2025 6:09 am I have to think of Always Coming Home by Ursula K. LeGuin here. It is set in a far future, long after our industrial civilization is gone, among people who are not urbanized and industrialized, yet have access to early 20th century level technology such as electric light and railways.
What has always struck me about Always Coming Home (at least for me) is how little impact that technology seems to have on the Kesh culture as a whole. They make some use of batteries and battery-powered electrical devices (the main example that I remember is an electric loom for weaving cloth), but have no power grid or similar infrastructure, although they do make some use of water power (e.g., for milling grain). The one railway, only mentioned in passing, is a single line shared between them and a neighboring people; the rails are wood, since there is no industrial-level metallurgy, and of the only two trains, one is powered by a steam engine, but the other is pulled by mules. Other than that, much of their lifestyle is essentially preindustrial, focused on handicrafts, agriculture, and animal husbandry, combined with hunting and gathering wild foods.
At the same time, there is a parallel machine culture of computers and robots (the City of the Mind), devoted to collecting information, that functions separately from humans; they provide larger human communities with a network terminal that lets them search for information and send messages to each other if desired (the book was published in 1985, so this was pre-Web in the real world), but the Kesh seem to make little use of it, except as a source of a lingua franca for (the interface language) for communicating with outsiders, a means of emergency communications with other peoples if needed, and a curiousity. (The other main culture described, the Dayao, try to use information from the network at one point to create weaponry, but lacking industrial infrastructure and an industrial mindset, have only limited success.)
Overall, I felt that the batteries and electrical devices, the train, and the City of the Mind could all have been removed from the book, and much of the culture of the Kesh as described could have remained almost the same, given their mentality and lack of focus on technology. (Some elements of their lifestyle would be more labor-intensive; e.g., weaving with hand-looms instead of the power looms, although even this was not done on an industrial scale.)
The original edition of the book included a tape cassette, "The Music and Poetry of the Kesh", including dialogue and lyrics entirely in the conlang; I own the 1986 paperback edition, which did not include the tape, but more recently I was able to acquire two copies of a CD version that was made. Unfortunately, those CDs were in my car when it was totaled in an automobile accident a month ago, and both were destroyed. I think that the CD is still available online, so I may try to get another copy.(The novel also features a conlang named Kesh.)
The CD liner notes contained some information about the songs and poems, but did not include complete transcriptions for the Kesh, let alone glosses, although some of the material is found in the book (mostly in English, although one or two bit are in Kesh), and I was able to pick out a few words from the book and glossary. One of the things that I found most interesting is that some of the tracks lean into the "anthropology of the future" element of Always Coming Home, with background noises (nature sounds, conversation) meant to make it sound as if a time-traveling anthropologist simply showed up in a Kesh community and turned on a tape recorder.