In the Book of Ruin novels, I portray a post-apocalyptic world that emerges from our modernity. I enjoyed speculating about what would be different and familiar, forgotten and remembered. I am surprised, however, about what depictions upset readers. Some have objected to my claim that those living during dystopian times would forget how to make smokeless gunpowder and magazine-loading guns. I laid out my arguments for why I believe this in a past blog. (In my latest novel, RangerKnights, a Teutonic gunsmith, several hundred years after the Flash, finally rediscovers smokeless gunpowder and carbine manufacturing).

A reader recently took issue with another aspect of my worldbuilding – that the English that NATO Americans spoke in Germania evolved into a separate language called American. In my first novel, The Book of Ruin, the break between English and American was not complete but had begun. I slipped in a twisted Easter egg when I wrote that a university and boarding school were nestled inside the English Quarter, so named because the classical language of learning was English. The English Quarter is based on the Latin Quarter. During the Middle Ages, European universities were said to exist in Latin Quarters since professors and students spoke and studied in Latin.

The reader who took issue with me wrote, “Any event originating from the sun that disrupts life on Earth is not likely to alter language sufficiently to be considered a new language.” Although he did not say so, he probably was upset that in the novel RangerKnights, Americans in the United States also no longer spoke English. Instead, they spoke a creole, as different from English as the Haitian tongue is from French. I understand why many living during our relatively stable, modern age see society as resilient. But I see culture, which includes language, as fragile.

All languages evolve. They are never static. We probably would have a hard time understanding the English spoken in Shakespearean England. As a white rookie police officer from the Midwest, I did not always understand the African-American English spoken in Miami-Dade’s innercity. Although all Germans learn in school what is called High German and hear it on TV and radio, regional dialects persist. A German from the northern part of the country traveled to Bavaria. When he checked in at a pension, the clerk talked to him in Bavarian. He said he did not understand her. She replied, “You are in Bavaria now… and people speak Bavarian here! Get used to it!”

An empire’s language can become a lingua franca, a common second tongue that different peoples speak to communicate. Alexander the Great’s conquests made Greek a lingua franca. Roman legions and straight roads pushed Latin to the top of the language heap. Arabic spread far and wide during the Islamic Golden Age. The British and American empires made English the modern lingua franca.

But what happens to a lingua franca when an empire falls, roads crumble, fleets and planes no longer sail and fly, Internet, TV and phone networks permanently crash, and another great power does not fill the vacuum? The lingua franca splinters and mutates in all sorts of ways. This is what happened to Latin after the Roman Empire fell. Latin became French in Gaul, Italian on the Apennine Peninsula, Spanish and Portuguese in Iberia, and Romanian in Transylvania, Moldavia, and Wallachia.

Worldwide empires fell in my novels. A continual series of solar storms destroyed power grids and electronics. Holes in the ozone layer created cancer zones. The world was reduced to city-states and regional startups.

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I must add a postscript. Two women book reviewers from the United Kingdom took issue with a scene in RangerKnights where a female warrior protagonist wearing a full-body burqa sneaked into an enemy town. After reaching a safe house, the character removed the burqa. She discovered that blood had stained her pants from the pelvis to the knees. “I guess my period started a little early,” the character said, doubling over with laughter.

The scene jarred the reviewers and colored their entire view of the novel. One said the scene was “not at all realistic.” Both reviewers said the book could have benefited from a female editor and beta reader.

My editor is female, and several of my beta readers are women. The scene is based on an actual event described in Ashley’s War, a non-fiction book about the first American women who went through Special Forces training and deployment. Author Gayle Tzemach Lemmon described the incident this way:

“And then she looked down and saw that her pants were soaked in blood from her waist to her knees…And then she burst out in laughter. She had been out there in the field for well over twelve hours and had somehow missed the fact that her period had started hours before.”

 I partnered up with several women during my thirty-year career policing Miami-Dade County. Several told me it was not uncommon for a female cop to approach another to ask if she had any protection because a stressful event, such as a physical confrontation or foot chase, had triggered an early period. One particular partner also said that such incidents, for her, could start a second cycle in the same month on occasion.

The post Like Viruses, Languages Are Forever Evolving first appeared on W.G. Hladky Author.

In my first two novels, society has forgotten how to manufacture smokeless gunpowder. Firearms are mostly black-powder muzzle-loaders, and cartridges are unreliable. Because black powder is dirtier and can cause modern guns to jam if not explode, most would not be practical in the world I created. However, a couple of my readers disagree. They believe the ability to make smokeless gunpowder and use and make modern guns would survive a collapse of civilization. (Yes Don, somebody else thinks like you).

Maybe the ability to produce contemporary propellant and guns would endure, but I think it is highly unlikely. Knowledge disappears or goes into hibernation when societies fail.

Historian Bryan Ward-Perkins said the fall of Rome included a collapse of “material sophistication.” People reverted to a standard of living typical of prehistoric times. An archaeologist pointed out that the fall brought about the loss of texts, practical skills and institutions that produced writings on how to get things done. Talking about that era, Thomas Cahill said, “A world in chaos is not a world in which books are copied and libraries maintained. It is not a world where learned men have the leisure to become more learned.” Ward-Perkins stated, “The main lesson I think we should learn from the collapse of the Roman Empire…(is) a realization of how insecure, and probably transient, our own achievements are…”

The fall of Rome wasn’t the only time “civilization” collapsed. Eric Cline pointed out eleven-hundred years before the birth of Jesus, earthquakes, drought and marauders known only as “Sea Peoples” brought about the “the abrupt and cataclysmic end…(of) the civilized world of the Bronze Age… No more Minoans or Mycenaeans. No more Trojans, Hittites, or Babylonians. The thriving economy and cultures of the late second millennium B.C., which had stretched from Greece to Egypt and Mesopotamia, suddenly ceased to exist, along with writing systems, technology and monumental architecture.”

If our civilization ends and the electrical grid disappears, our information may evaporate more quickly than the Latin and Greek ideas did because it is stored digitally. Scientific data stored on floppy disks already have been lost due to disk deterioration.

Widespread death after a collapse of the modern world would accelerate the loss of knowledge. One reason why many would die is that humans don’t do well when faced with deadly threats. Psychologist John Leach said only ten percent of people, when threatened, control their fears and act rationally. I believe these are the people that keep the human race going. Another ten percent of the population, Leach said, become hysterical. The rest, eighty percent, do not survive because they are stunned, bewildered and are so overwhelmed, they do not act. For example, only one out of three hundred worshippers attempted to disarm the gunman who opened fire in the Al Noor mosque in New Zealand.

We today do not appreciate how much our institutions – military, police, courts, hospitals, government alliances – have reduced the threats to our lives.

Due to the degradation of sanitation and medical infrastructures, pestilence also would contribute to population decline. The Black Plague arrived in Europe in 1347. Before it ended, the disease killed 25 million Europeans. The continent did not regain its population until the 16th century.

War would do its part. Genghis Khan’s invading armies killed 40 million people. So many people died – 11 percent of the world’s population – that huge swathes of cultivated land returned to forest. The Vucari in my first novel, The Book of Ruin, used Genghis Khan’s Eurasian steppes to invade Teutonic-America.

However, Roman and Greek knowledge did return to Europe eventually. It came back along  three basic pathways.

One, it hibernated in Christian monasteries until clerics discovered ancient manuscripts in church libraries. In 1417, a papal secretary found languishing in a German monastery Lucretius’ philosophical poem, On the Nature of Things, written 1,400 years earlier. Lucretius, a Roman, talked about atoms, the earth as a planet and ideas that support the belief that each person is endowed with the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. His words influence Shakespeare, Galileo, Darwin and Jefferson.

The second way ancient knowledge returned was through Ireland. Thomas Cahill argued because Catholics in Ireland enshrined literacy as a central religious act, their clerics kept Latin literature alive by copying “everything they could get their hands on…Europe would hardly have developed its great national literatures without the example of Irish, the first vernacular literature to be written down. Beyond that, there would have perished in the west not only literacy but all the habits of mind that encourage thought.”

In my book series, Orthodox clerics similarly protect modern knowledge by writing The Book of Ruin and preserving pre-Flash manuscripts in a floating monastery.

The third way ancient knowledge got back to Europe was through Islam. While Europe withered in a Dark Age, Islamic scholars preserved Greek and Latin writings on philosophy, astronomy, geography, mathematics, science and medicine. Scientific discoveries flourished during Islam’s Golden Age. Algebra, chemistry, azimuth, zenith, alkaline, zero and algorithm are Latinized Arabic words. One writer claims Islamic scholarship jumped started the European renaissance. I am exploring a similar cross-pollination in my third novel, RangerKnights.

I kept these histories in mind as I spun my tales. I made choices. Some pre-Flash technology and customs survived in whole or in part. Others did not, including – and I apologize to gun enthusiasts – smokeless gunpowder and most modern pistols and rifles. Smokeless gunpowder will be rediscovered in my third novel, which takes place 250 years after the first book.

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