Stories about precursors and forerunners appear frequently in science fiction (and fantasy). Why? For one thing, it’s just way cool to think that ancient civilizations and species might have risen and vanished long before we arrived on the scene. This is true in our real world. Why wouldn’t it be true of galactic civilizations? Also, relics of otherwise extinct civilizations play well in plots.
Consider these five works that employ this plot device in five distinct ways, using the existence of ancient forerunners to explore different speculative possibilities:
As a Commentary on Mortality…
It is said that a man once wished for something that would cheer him up when sad and bring him down to earth when he was too cheerful. He was given a ring inscribed with the motto “This too shall pass.” So it is with civilizations: they all seem to die, save for the ones too recent to succumb to natural processes.
“This too shall pass” is a running theme in the works of Andre Norton1, from whom I stole the term “forerunner.” Forerunner served as her catch-all term for the many civilizations that rose and fell before the present day of her various novels. Galactic Derelict, for example, involves humans using time travel to appropriate a starship once crewed by the long-vanished alien Baldies. Ensuing mishaps provide a pointed lesson in the ephemerality of civilizations.
To Provide Convenient Shortcuts…
On occasion authors need to introduce advanced tech for plot purposes, tech beyond what the setting otherwise provides. One answer is to assume relics that have exactly the properties required (sturdy relics left over from past civilizations).
Robinette Broadhead, protagonist of Frederik Pohl’s 1976 Gateway, hails from a civilization whose best technology is barely up to the challenges of interplanetary travel. Rather conveniently for humans with interstellar ambitions, the long-vanished alien Heechee2 did not tidy up their Solar System asteroid base before they abandoned it. The base contains a thousand functional starships. Climb in a ship, push a few buttons, and you’re on your way to an unknown, pre-programmed destination. What’s in store at the other end? Possibly untold riches…or perhaps a horrible death.
To Serve as Valuable MacGuffins…
Forerunner sites seem to attract looters more often than they attract archaeologists. Looting—who can get there first and find something valuable, then protect it from rivals?—is the impetus for a great many SF plots.
In Melissa Scott’s Finders, the possibility of a big score keeps terminally ill Cassilde Sam and her partner Dai Winter on the trail of Ancestor relics. To date, their success has been marginal at best. Aware she will soon die, Sam is determined to leave Dai financially secure. An opportunity to do so presents itself—but there’s a catch… Sam and Dai will have to reconcile with their estranged lover, Summerlad Ashe. Is wealth sufficient motivation to overlook past conflict and seemingly irreconcilable differences?3
The “Sealed Evil in a Can” Scenario
Too many ancient civilizations were prone to burying poorly labeled existential threats in what subsequently turned out to be insufficiently well-sealed tombs. If this were true of our own world, the profession of archaeology would much more dangerous than it is.
Alan Dean Foster’s 1971’s “With Friends Like These…” is the rare story about someone who frees sealed evil knowing full well that it’s evil. The evil is humanity. Long ago, the galactics confined warlike humanity to Earth. Faced with the even more aggressive Yop, the aliens conclude that freeing humanity is a price they are willing to pay for salvation from the Yop. However, humans have been trapped behind an impenetrable force field for millennia. Evolution has had its way. The humans the galactics free are not quite the same as the humans first walled away.
The Search for Illumination/Enlightenment
Deciphering an unknown script recording an unknown language would seem to be an impossible task. This story tells how some scientists managed the feat.4 This may sound as if it would be a dry and boring tale, but it isn’t.
In H. Beam Piper’s 1957 “Omnilingual,”5 (collected later in Federation) the challenge is not finding Martian records. The Red Planet is littered with repositories of ancient wisdom. The problem is, those records are written in a language unlike any on Earth and, having nothing analogous to a Rosetta Stone to serve as intermediary, translation appears permanently stymied by this insurmountable difficulty. It falls to archaeologist Martha Dane to do what her skeptical male colleagues cannot do: spot a shared element in Martian and Terran documents that will allow her to crack the puzzle of the Martian language.
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There are just a few possibilities. No doubt some of you have favourites that I did not mention. Comments are, as ever, below.
In the words of fanfiction author Musty181, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll “looks like a default mii with glasses.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis) and the 2021 and 2022 Aurora Award finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award, and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]Norton loved forerunners and I could probably pull all my examples from her works.
[2]There were later novels that elaborated on this setting; what I’m describing is true of the first Heechee novel.
[3]Yes, prospective wealth will lead people to overlook a LOT. In fact, “Finders” is less about “working with the enemy” and more about “repairing the One True Triad.” Good thing that there’s a legitimate big bad out there or this novel would be all about personal growth and romance while treasure hunting.
[4]There’s another story about deciphering Martian, George O. Smith’s 1943 “Lost Art,” in which the Martian technical documentation is comprehensible but not comprehensive. Luckily for the characters, the story is a comedy, so nobody dies in the process of discovering certain undocumented features of alien technology.
[5]There’s one great example of real-world decipherment of an unknown script and language: Linear B (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_B#Michael_Ventris'_identification_as_Greek). There’s also a great example of script not yet deciphered: the Indus script (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script). Several people have claimed to have done so, but no solutions have been generally accepted.
Yeah, the word “forerunner” makes me think of Andre Norton first!
PS: Nice to see tor.com back up!
Per the Little Black Rule, Traveller‘s Charted Space is littered with the relics of extinct species, a few with science way beyond the Third Imperium’s. And some of them may only be mostly extinct…
Very interesting topic. There are many examples that come to mind. For example, David Brin’s progenitor books have a long prior history that is being discovered. Larry Niven’s Ringworld books have the Slavers, who have a long prior history. Vernor Vinge’s novels, A Fire Upon the Deep, and the other Zones of Thought books. Babylon 5 (not a book) has long prior histories and archaeologists finding hidden mysteries. And Andre Norton, of course, as mentioned previously.
Schmitz had “Old Galactics” in the Trigger Argee stories.
There are quite a few deciphered written languages, such as the one the literal Rosetta Stone gave the key for. Also the Anatolian languages.
“an unknown script and language: Linear B” The essential key was that it wasn’t an unknown language. Also, I’ve recently seen a statement that ‘Kober’s classification tables” were much more important that is generally stated.
The Mass Effect computer RPG series combines most of the above with an answer to both the Fermi Question and “Why are all starfaring species so relatively close in tech level to one another?”
The protagonist spends the first game learning that the forerunner species everyone knows about and (think they) cribbed technology from wasn’t the first one. Which leads directly to their learning of a serious (and recurring) Sealed Evil in a Can problem.
Alan Dean Foster has a forerunner species in his Humanx Commonwealth series that left various things behind, including entire planets that are also devices, after it encountered some Unsealed Evil that needed canning. And a couple of forerunner species that exterminated each other leaving surprises for the unwary to stumble across
“The Search for Illumination/Enlightenment”
Lovecraft’s AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS provides an interesting example of a different kind of illumination/enlightenment, as the discovery of the lost civilization of the Old Ones in Antarctica reveals just how puny and insignificant humanity really is in the grand scheme of things.
And let’s not forget the cinematic forerunner species: The Krell. They left behind a device, which was self repairing so that’s why it’s still working, that drives the plot. Oh, and the movie is Forbidden Planet.
Babylon 5 and the “Elder Races” of whom the Vorlons and the Shadows were among the youngest (and Lorien was the Eldest). Constant source of inscrutable mystery, occasional source of invaluable help, occasional source of sheer terror.
“At the Mountains of Madness.” Now there’s an long-vanished elder race for you. (Unfortunately they didn’t clean up their shoggoths…) I do hope Guillermo del Toro eventually gets to make the movie he wants to from AtMoM.
In our present world, which Tolkein said was “the end of the Sixth or beginning of the Seventh” Age of Middle-earth, the Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, even Hobbits, all seem to have vanished a long time ago.
And you could also make an entire list of Jack McDevitt’s ancient alien leavebehinds.
Forerunner ruins and technology form the basis for Paul McAuley’s Something Coming Through and its sequel Into Everywhere.
Martha Wells’ Books of the Raksura are set in a world that’s littered with the artifacts from dead civilizations (as well as dying, evolving and thriving ones). The ones actually referred to as Forerunners are the joint ancestors of the Raksura and their nastier, sentient-eating cousins the Fell. The Forerunners left some lovely Canned Evil for their descendants to deal with.
John Barnes A Million Open Doors has interesting alien artifacts popping in as a subplot. I don’t remember them showing up in the later books.
J. P. Hogan wrote the “Giants” series involving the discovery of alien relics on Ganymede. I’m not sure if Clarke’s “Rama” stories are in the same class. Bear’s “Eon” novels feature future humans returning to a more current Earth. I do find the continued revelations that are being reported about certain Hindu texts to be interesting with their descriptions of advanced pre-historic civilizations and the technologies that were available. Conspiracists speculate about recovered artifacts being held by Governments for reverse engineering. In John Varley’s “Mammoth” a time loop delivers the impetus for the advanced technology.
Footnote #1: Norton loved forerunners and I could probably pull all my examples from her works.
Yup. That’s where I would have to go. I’ve read them all, remember some fondly, and frankly do not recall any other examples I might have come across.
p.s. I second Jens’ comment about TOR being back. Yesterday was quite worrisome!
A couple of older examples:
In Larry Niven’s “Known Space” stories, there is often a reference to the Thrint (aka Slavers), who flourished ~1.5 billion years ago. A number of the stories involve what happens when somebody is careless with an artifact from that period; e.g., in “The Soft Weapon” a ~handgun made by one of the slave species explodes in its would-be user’s hand because the holder didn’t respond in the language of its makers. World of Ptavvs is about what happens when someone opens a stasis suit containing the last survivor of the species.
In Theodore Sturgeon’s “Killdozer”, an early-model D7 becomes the title character when an enclosure containing the last of a species of disembodied electronic intelligences is opened; the ?creature? has just enough effect over the material world to push and pull on the bulldozer’s controls, using it as a fighting machine.
I’m not sure whether you’re willing to count the last two examples; is there a separate column coming for animate/sentient relics?
Of course, Stargate (specifically the TV version) is entirely built around this concept.
A personal favourite (and controversial) version is actually Star Wars; the old (pre-Disney) EU/Legends continuity has lore relating to the Celestials (not yet confirmed or denied in the new canon), an ancient supercivilization that ruled the galaxy 100,000 years ago. The Celestials were Force-wielders (the “Ones” seen in The Clone Wars are described as “what the Celestials grew into”), and are sometimes credited as “inventing” the Force itself. One of the Celestials’ “client species”(*) were the Rakata, who “created” the Dark Side (possibly by “hacking” Celestial technology) and used it to overthrow them and establish their own Empire. Modern Force-using traditions seem to be derived from a Halo-like backup plan implemented by the Celestials; a series of colossal arks collected Force-sensitive individuals from a dozen worlds and isolated them on Tython for generations, while the Rakata gradually lost their connection to the Force (like a cosmic wifi password being changed).
The Jedi (and Sith) are the inheritors of the Celestials’ technology, which they call the Force. The midichlorians aren’t “organisms” as the Jedi think, but biomimetic nanotechnology far beyond anything in the “fallen” galaxy.
(* In true “Ancient Astronaut” fashion, I have Crackpot Theories(tm) about this: I think the Celestials weren’t a species at all, but a coalition, akin to the Republic –the “less-intelligent client species, propped up by the [human-like] Celestials” [so identified by the human-supremacist Empire] were likely full members, which means that states like the Gree Enclave or the Killik Colony or [possibly] the Kathol or Sharu aren’t just fallen/primitive species, but full-on remnants of the first galactic supercivilization.)
I’m not sure they count, but Rendezvous with Rama popped into my head almost immediately.
@19: Yes, and it’s also an unusual variant in which the mysterious ancient etc. etc. turn out to have been just as fallible and short-sighted as we are–they just had a lot more power. Stargate Atlantis, in particular, is about cleaning up after them.
I’m following a series of adventure logs by Dingo Doodles, called simply D&D Story, that chronicle a homebrew world littered with artifacts left by the mysterious Foreclaimers. Their true nature and the unfinished business they left behind are becoming increasingly clear.
The makers of the gates in Cherryh’s Morgaine books (beginning with Gate of Ivrel.) The Progenitors in Brin’s Uplift books.
I don’t think Rendezvous with Rama counts as long-vanished forerunners as the aliens in the ship are a current bunch, if long-established, minding their own business travelling from one place to another and still looking to the future (I haven’t read the sequels so don’t know if in fact they are now extinct).
2001: A Space Odyssey is more about forerunners… they came to earth a couple of million years ago, or whatever it was, and got involved in our development. But I guess they too are still around, even if standing back somewhat at the present time.
Halo has Forerunners who had their own Precursors. They’re also another example of leaving behind mistakes for other people to clean up.
#15 “J. P. Hogan wrote the “Giants” series involving the discovery of alien relics on Ganymede….” See also Farmer in the Sky where an exploring Boy Scout finds ” artifacts of an alien civilization, including a working land vehicle that has legs, like a large metal centipede.” “Heinlein also postulated that the surface of Ganymede was volcanic rock like the Moon. Subsequent discoveries have shown that Ganymede’s crust is actually almost 90 percent ice or frost, covering a subsurface ocean.” Also by Mr. Heinlein Lost Legacy postulates 2 generations of quasi forerunners as the story opens.
Leigh Brackett wrote at length about forerunners. Some long gone, some still around in her writings.
Daniel Keys Moran has The Old Human Race which got enslaved by aliens who stole a bunch of humans from Earth, TOHR became independent, and had a star empire tens of thousands of years before Humans from Earth began reaching for the stars on their own. It’s unclear how much of The Old Human Race’s DNA is in our make-up from the penal colony TOHR set up here, where there were already Cro-Magnons. Most of the history is in his novel The Last Dancer.
In a sense, the original “Planet of the Apes” movie was one of these, from the Apes’ point of view. Some of the Apes knew the truth. The rest were kept in ignorance.
The sci-fi Fire Dancer series by Ann Maxwell has references to previous civilisations and how finding things from those times can be good or troublesome.
The long, complex, and marvelous Schlock Mercenary by Howard Tayler includes a twist on the forerunner trope that I’ve never seen elsewhere (ROT-13 to decode): Gur sberehaaref ner fgvyy nebhaq, ohg gur ynfg srj fvg nebhaq qbvat abguvat zhpu. Gurl sbhaq gur frperg bs vzzbegnyvgl naq unir ybat fvapr qvfpbirerq vgf qenjonpxf. Bar bs gurz qrpvqrf gb nyyrivngr gur oberqbz bs rkvfgrapr ol wbvavat Gntba’f Gbhtuf. N erpragyl qrirybcrq grpuavdhr sbe erfgbevat qrnq crbcyr gb yvsr hfvat jung vf rffragvnyyl n qngn onpxhc unf na hasbeghangr qenjonpx sbe guvf punenpgre: yvxr nyy bs uvf fcrpvrf, ur crevbqvpnyyl jvcrf uvf bja zrzbevrf nf n fnavgl-fnivat zrnfher, ohg gur erfgbengvba grpuavdhr vf abg pnyvoengrq sbe gung. Fb vafgrnq bs gur nzvnoyr trrmre jub znqr sevraqf nzbat gur Gbhtuf, gur zrqvpny grnz vf pbasebagrq jvgu na natel naq fhfcvpvbhf zvyvgnel pbzznaqb jub unf ab vqrn jung’f orra tbvat ba sbe gur cnfg srj zvyyvba lrnef.
And of course, Piper’s Earth people are abandoned Martians.
“If this were true of our own world, the profession of archaeology would much more dangerous than it is.”
Well, there are the thought experiments on how to warn future generations about nuclear waste dumps, that spawned ideas about green cats and stories about treasure hunters in those future generations going “wow, look at how hard it is to get into this place, something really valuable must be in here” and ignoring the superstitious locals going “um, about that glowing cat…”
I just got finished reading Jack L Chalker’s Well World series (the 1st 5 books) and the Markovians are a good one to talk about.
In a similar,but slightly different vein – Juniper Time, one of Kate Wilhelm’s earlier novels, has the discovery of an ancient alien artifact with mysterious symbols that need to be translated… until it turns out the artifact is not so ancient or alien after all.
Glad to see the Foster story mentioned. Read that a long time ago and it was one story that really stuck with me.
And how could we forget the Strugatsky Brothers, with poor doomed Lev Abalkin in Beetle In The Anthill, a man with unknown genetic interference from the Wanderers, the Forerunners of the Noon Universe? It’s one of the few SF stories to have made me weep. Does he ever know whether or not he is set to trigger some unknown doom for Earth? Excellency kills him before he ever finds out.
Stellaris (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellaris_(video_game)) has Forerunners galore; it’s central to the game that you are a noob in an ancient galaxy. And there’s plenty of Sealed Evil In A Can, leading to a lot of mass destruction in your early naive playthroughs, when you tend to open everything you find.
(The game invokes many classic SF tropes, by the way. It’s kind of a compendium of them.)
In the Boundary series by Eric Flint and Ryk Spoor, the alien forerunners dropped the dinosaur killer asteroid 65 million years ago. That was just one incident in a local war that destroyed them all.