Author: Mark Renney
This is how I see it. The land mass is vast and the population is sparse. The people are scattered across it and the Settlements sprouted where something was still standing. Amongst the ruins of housing estates and of larger buildings; hospitals, schools and factories. They built up against the old walls and shored up the dilapidated and rickety structures, recycling what could be salvaged from the rubble.
Later, they improved on these early makeshift shelters building bigger and better and a hierarchy was quickly established based on one’s usefulness, abilities and skills. But once the Settlements had taken root and the heavy ground work had been done this hierarchy began to change and the Scholars took control.
Now don’t get me wrong, I know that what the Scholars did is important. They were the gatherers of our history. They quite literally instructed the people to go out and find it. To search for the literature, for the books and the newspapers and the magasines, for any scrap of paper with words printed or written on it. No matter how degraded or unreadable, the instructions were for the people to bring it back. The search was hard and time consuming. After all, the Alteration had consisted of much flooding and water and paper don’t mix; the one turns the other to mush.
But the people trekked far and wide and they did manage to search out all of the surviving literature and they brought it back and it was enough. And the Scholars put it in order, into sequence so that we wouldn’t forget how much people were capable of, how much they had achieved. The Scholars preach this is to what we should aspire, to keep on building bigger and better.