Thoughts on stories where the ancient civilization still affecting the present with the problem that wiped it out persisting?
DELIGHTFUL. AMAZING. TOP-TIER.
I honestly just adore stories where long-gone civilizations are still causing problems.
One of my favorite examples is actually The Lies of Locke Lamora. Not necessarily causing problems, per se, but the entire city of Camorr is built around Eldren Glass, this weird material that no human methods can damage. It's literally never explained one tiny bit, but it's one of the most fascinating elements of the city to me (and there's so many good ones to choose from).
I think my personal fave is the Eldren Glass "rose garden" belonging to one of the Dons. The roses are made of glass, and their thorns absorb the blood of anyone they cut. And the Don uses it to train kids how to swordfight.
(I actually was so inspired by this the first time I read the book that it led to me creating my first ever homebrew dnd monster, a bloodsucking rose garden that's all one gargantuan entity.)
I also adore the way Red does this in @comicaurora. Voidy may have been locked up in the center of the planet, but he's still causing Problems like crazy. And there's the stuff about Ferin heritage, and also, the whole reason Erin has Voidy in him in the first place is because he wanted to explore some Old Shit.
I actually once wrote something that KIND OF fits this theme. Not really, but it is interesting to talk about, and I think you'd enjoy it. It was a short story I wrote way back in middle school titled "We only know their name for certain". The title was taken from the opening lines:
We only know their name for certain. We found it carved into every cliff face, written on every wall, visible everywhere we turned: We are human.
(Mind you, I typed this from memory before going back to check and the only thing I needed to change was the order of wall and cliff face.)
The story is essentially framed as a scientific paper or other publication by a member of an alien race that visited Earth, only to find it completely devoid of all animal life. In it, the author describes some of humans' notable constructions and speculates on their purpose.
(The list is ecclectic and rather amusing. It includes the pyramids, Mt. Rushmore, the Great Wall, the Titanic, airports, highways, and (my personal favorite) The Big House.)
Even I don't know what caused all animals on Earth to disappear in that story, but it was certainly fun to write alien speculation on human life. (It actually kind of reminds me of that genre of tumblr post where people describe modern-day things the way we often hear ancient history being described. And I wrote it years before I joined tumblr.)
