Try Chris Beckett's 'Eden Trilogy'. Very clever framework: to summarize - a spaceship and crew gets lost on a faraway planet. One couple survive. They produce a dynasty, and then three generations later, the children of the survivors try to understand what happened. The survivors have undergone severe de-industrialization and have lost most scientific knowledge: they're effectively back in the Stone Age, with some relics of future tech.
The clever bit here is that the story is therefore both set in the future (spaceships) and in the past (a pastoral society).
Knowledge is kept alive by story-telling, and the participants are highly sensitive to how their actions will appear in future stories: a type of heightened self-awareness.
Another additional feature: some brilliant descriptions of a very odd planet-scape. I found it really came alive in my mind.
Finally: Beckett is acutely aware of the political implications of story-telling and its near cousin, religion.
Beckett's written half a dozen novels, but this trilogy is clearly the best of the lot.
|