When I was a kid, I was an avid reader. Anything about space, other planets, lost places–those were my favorite kinds of stories. The early Heinlein “Future History” stories, the Foundation Trilogy, Andre Norton’s Galactic Derelict. But I was influenced the most by a little-known author named H. Beam Piper. His Terran Federation stories and novels made a deep impression. He seemed to base them on historical cycles, i.e., that given a similar set of historical frontier circumstances, similar themes (the British Empire, the plight of indigenous races when a more technologically advanced races invades and “colonizes” its land–or their planet) will be repeated in the new, future setting.
Another story which impacts this particular diorama, is his short story Omnilingual. This story is about a future archaeologal expedition on the planet Mars. They have disovered the remains of a Martian city which has been dead for an estimated forty thousand years. Planetary dust, as Mars became more and more desert-loike, has been slowly burying the city’s buildings. They find that the dust and sandstorms have buried the first, five floors of all the multi-story buildings of the city.
The crux of the story involves a woman linguist. The other scientists think she is risking her reputation trying to collect and collate, and hopefully decipher, bits and pieces of the written Martian language they find on various scraps of paper and torn, decayed pieces of books found while excavating around the half-buried buildings.
The dilemma she faces is: To trranslate the Martian writings, you need a key; a point of mutual reference. But if the last Martian writer died forty thousand years ago, thousands of years before the first human being, how could you know what the letters meant? Which were numbers, which were words? If you found a book with a picture of a man on a horse, if you had no idea of what the letters of the caption mean, how could you know if the caption said “This is a man on a horse,” or “This is a photograph of General So-and-So at the Battle of…”?
Anyways, I got to thinking that an archaeological dig on a distant planet would run into the same problem. How would they know what those foundations were from? A temple? A thermonuclear reactor? What if they weren’t “foundations” at all? What if they were the roofs (or tops) of an underground facility? Would we be able to recognize the features of alien “control panels”? What if they did not follow “our” concepts of what control panels “should” look like?
So…the story the dio is supposed to be saying is: Here is a team of Terran archaeologists making their first examinations of what is left a long-dead, technologically advanced, civilization. Head of the team is the woman with the clipboard, which will show a diagram of the “foundations.”
Any thoughts on this would be appreciated. Speculation and dialogue, too.
I am thinking of this diorama as a snapshot of a much larger story and would like to incorporate hints of other themes into this (with, I don’t know…visual clues). Gender equality being shown by having a woman in charge being one example. And the girl with the wrench. The women aren’t there for “window dressing.” They are hardworking equals on the team.
