Bruce Sterling's book Schismatris, when the technologically advanced decedents of humanity returned to earth: > "Do you see the cable system? The mausoleum ha

Bruce Sterling's book Schismatris, when the technologically advanced decedents of humanity returned to earth: > "Do you see the cable system? The mausoleum has an information line, the only one in the village. Whoever lives there holds all links to the outside world." > [...] "Stability," he said. "The Terrans wanted stability, that's why they set up the Interdict. They didn't want technology to break them into pieces, as it's done to us. They blamed technology for the disasters. The war plagues, the carbon dioxide that melted the ice caps... They can't forget their dead." "Surely the whole world isn't like this," Vera said. "It has to be. Anywhere there is variety there is the risk of change. Change that can't be tolerated." "But they have telephones. Aircraft." "Enforcement technology," Lindsay said. > [...] The parting had come with hatred: with those in space condemned as antihuman thieves, and Earth's emergency government denounced as fascist barbarism. Hatred made things easier: easier for those in space to shrug off all responsibility, easier for Earth to starve its myriad cultures down to a single gray regime of penance and pointless stability. > But life moved in clades. Lindsay knew it as a fact. A successful species always burst into a joyous wave of daughter species, of hopeful monsters that rendered their ancestors obsolete. Denying change meant denying life.