Speculations on the Last Continent
An eagle eyed reader of Lost on the Last Continent offers the following speculation. In the most recent episode Colonel Lost meets, fights, and speaks to a young druzhinnik from a mythical lost city in medieval Russia.
One reader somewhat cryptically remarked that there was an astonishingly short gap of time between them. Another offered this clarification:
100 million years in the future or something, yet come from time periods only a few centuries apart. Clearly the future men weren’t randomly sampling time periods from which to abduct people, but must have specifically targeted the first few millennia AD.
In order to encourage speculation (what greater flattery can any story receive but to have readers puzzle over it?) your humble author would like to offer additional information from my notes not necessary obvious in the text.
The text gives only what Colonel Lost sees and knows, and he cannot tell at a glance necessarily from what year a man hails.
The story is set, except for the opening episode, in posthistoric Pangaea (250 Million AD).
In the episodes given so far, Colonel Lost has encountered dinosaurs from the Triassic (250 to 200 million BC), mammals from the Eocene (56 to 33 million BC) men from the Second Era (1 to 2 million AD), from the Third Era (2 to 4 million years AD), from the Fifth (7 to 15 million years AD), and from the Eighth (60 to 125 million AD), and spoken to a machine intelligence from the Fourth Era (4 to 7 million AD).
In addition, in the fight scene in the buried ruins of the Megalopolis of Phantoms, Colonel Lost has seen First Era men, Homo sapiens, from Neolithic Catalhoyuk (5700 BC); early-period Atlantis (40th Century BC); from the Gilbert Islands (20th Century BC) ; from Vineta in the Baltic (9th Century AD); Xilbalba in Precolumbian Mexico (15th Century AD); from Tokugawa period Japan (17th Century AD); from the Tsan-Chan World State (5000 AD); from the Dark Conquest period (16,000 AD); from the Patagonian Reconstitution of Man (700,000 AD). And there are 30 other men from periods not described.
Of those, three are from the first two millennium AD: the Jaguar-Knight, the Samurai, and the crossbowman from Vineta. The Samurai identifies Lost as being Portuguese, which were the only White Men seen in his islands in his day.
I suppose the Tsan-Chan barbute can count as “first few millennium” if we mean the First to the Sixth Millennium.
And, yes, Lost meets and speaks to a man from Kitezh in Rus from the Golden Khannate period (13th Century AD). They share a religion and share knowledge of certain points of reference, such as Jerusalem, Rome, Byzantium. Both are modern Europeans. Both are Men of the West.
Which is the point (or so your humble author hopes) of the scene. It is like a clean-limbed fighting man of Virginia being flung to Mars and meeting a Captain in the US Infantry. Nice to meet a next door neighbor in a strange place.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
