Today’s Women in SF&F Month guest is M. H. Ayinde! Her science fiction, fantasy, and horror short stories include “The Techwork Horse” (featured on the Locus Recommended Reading List), “Blind Eye” (selected for the BSFA Award longlist), “The Walls of Benin City” (selected for the BSFA Award longlist and The Best of World SF: Volume 3), and “Worst Place Ever – Avoid!” (winner of the March 2021 Apex Magazine Microfiction Contest). A Song of Legends Lost, her debut novel and the first book in an epic fantasy trilogy, is described as “an unforgettable tale of revenge and rebellion [that] unfolds when a reckless king implements an ill-fated plan to end a thousand-year war.” It will be released in the UK next week—on April 8!—and will be out in the US, Canada, and Nigeria on June 3. I’m delighted she’s here today to share about a trope she finds particularly fascinating in “The Allure of Lost Civilisations in SFF.”

About A Song of Legends Lost (Invoker #1):

A SONG OF REBELLION. A SONG OF WAR. A SONG OF LEGENDS LOST.

In the Nine Lands, only those of noble blood can summon the spirits of their ancestors to fight in battle. But when Temi, a commoner from the slums, accidentally invokes a powerful spirit, she finds it could hold the key to ending a centuries-long war.

But not everything that can be invoked is an ancestor. And some of the spirits that can be drawn from the ancestral realm are more dangerous than anyone can imagine.

The Allure of Lost Civilisations in SFF

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by the lost civilisations trope. If a piece of media includes an abandoned ruin or an extinct species, I will devour it. If said species or civilisation was super advanced, possibly even more advanced than our own, then I will devour it with a capital D.

Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 2 Episode 11 “Contagion”

I think my twin introductions to this trope in SFF came via the Mysterious Cities of Gold cartoons, one of my favourites as a kid (more on that below), and an early episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, “Contagion.” In the latter, we are introduced to the Iconians, an advanced species with portal technology, who were wiped out hundreds of millennia ago. TNG was and is my favourite TV show ever, and “Contagion” was the first time when I can remember feeling a sense of deep history from a futuristic setting. Never before had I encountered science fiction that posited the idea of space-faring civilisations that had become extinct, and after that, I was hooked. It provided another layer to that delicious sense of being out of place and time that I craved from all SFF. I went on to spend many years seeking this vibe out in everything I read, from Greg Bear’s Eon (which blew my mind as a 14-year-old) to every epic fantasy book with a ten-thousand-year history.

Grandia

For me, the allure of stories is in their central mystery (which is probably why murder mysteries and police procedurals are one of the few genres of fiction I enjoy outside of SFF and horror). A lost civilisation asks a lot of the same questions as a murder mystery — who destroyed this thing, and why, and what was the victim like, and how did they die? Often in SFF, the answer to how they died is internal collapse or war with outsiders. I think part of this is because people often look to historical analogues like Ancient Rome for inspiration when conceiving of civilisations that rose to great heights before plummeting. Oftentimes, these fictional civilisations fall due to growing too powerful, like the Angelou civilisation in the 1999 JRPG Grandia (one of my favourite games of all time). In that game, the Icarians (who maybe flew too close to the figurative sun, geddit?!) wielded great power, which they shared with humans who then became greedy. This idea is echoed in possibly my favourite movie of all time, Studio Ghibli’s Castle in the Sky, where it is implied the Laputans abandoned their technological advancements because they saw how destructive they could be. In this way, these lost civilisations manage to be both utopias and dystopias… because so often they ascended to greater heights than our own, and yet ultimately they experience apocalypse. And we live in the aftermath (which offers an interesting spin on the idea of post-apocalyptic fiction, eh?!).

Castle in the Sky

I also love it when our own reality is the lost civilisation. Another foundational series for me was Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, set so far into our future that the Earth’s sun is dying and multiple human epochs have come and gone. There is such a mystique to this series, enhanced by a delightfully unreliable narrator and beautiful prose, and I loved how familiar concepts (such as robots) are approached and described in such unfamiliar ways. There is such a weighty sense throughout this series that humanity once ascended to great power and knowledge, but that so much of it has now been forgotten (and awaits rediscovery). This is also hinted at throughout The Wheel of Time series. Whatever you may think of Season 1 of the TV adaptation, the entire thing was worth it for me for that brief shot it gave us of the Age of Legends, when we see a city of skyscrapers and spaceships that match overgrown ruins we glimpsed earlier on in that season.

The Wheel of Time

This links with another aspect of the appeal of this trope: the idea of there being this earlier age where everything was just better. In everyday life, I find this idea pretty problematic — it’s the lie spouted by certain political entities right now, and I hear it used in online spaces as a cover for racist thinking. Too often when people say this area has gone downhill, what they really mean is, I have too many Black and brown neighbours. But I do think the idea of a past age of wonder appeals to a deeper part of our human nature, and that is the part of us that looks back fondly on certain childhood memories. The pleasure we get from nostalgia is part of what makes us human. (Nostalgia is a character in Inside Out 2, therefore it definitely is an integral part of our psychology, because the Inside Out movies are my benchmark for all matters pertaining to psychology and I will not be taking questions at this time.) I’ve always felt that the lost civilisations trope taps into that thinking on a subconscious level… because most of us can relate to the pleasure of looking back on happy memories.

As a fantasy writer, one of the easiest ways I’ve found to give worldbuilding depth is to demonstrate that other civilisations have come and gone, both because of the layered sense of history it provides, and because of the instant questions it begs. So even when I was writing as a kid, there was always a lost civilisation or three and they were always super advanced. As an adult coming back to Mysterious Cities of Gold, I knew I still loved the show, but I didn’t love the fact that it mixed the genuine history of multiple colonised peoples with made-up science fictional elements. In the show, the character Tao, whom I loved as a kid because he was one of the few animated characters in the 80s who looked vaguely like me, is from a sunken continent (called Hiva in the English dub, which is an actual part of Polynesian mythology) and his people make many of the wonders found in the series, such as the Golden Condor and the Cities of Gold themselves (which were a thing European colonisers were actually hunting for). I couldn’t quite articulate why this made me uncomfortable until I read a tweet by N K Jemisin (whose Broken Earth trilogy offers so many wonderful glimpses of a lost technological age that is central to the premise of the story). This tweet went along the lines of, “Hey, when you start saying aliens built the pyramids… that’s racist.”

The Mysterious Cities of Gold

That tweet was life-changing for me, because while I was always writing about advanced, lost civilisations, and I was also always writing about colonialism through the lens of fantasy, I had never thought about how intertwined the two were. The reality that some people think it’s more likely that aliens built the pyramids than African civilisations (which is basically what that line of thought suggests) crystalised for me exactly what I was trying to do with my fiction. It’s a bit spoilery to say so, but this is a central tenet of my upcoming trilogy, which begins with A SONG OF LEGENDS LOST. In addition, our own history demonstrates that civilisations usually fell because of invaders or because of their own imperialistic expansion that then caused them to collapse. So how could these concepts not be intrinsically intertwined?

Many of us live surrounded by physical history that we often take for granted. I used to work in Tower Bridge in London, and every day I would walk to my very modern glass office block past the partially collapsed wall of the Tower of London. That juxtaposition of ancient and modern remains endlessly fascinating to me, and I find myself returning to it again and again in my fiction. And although the civilisation that built that wall isn’t exactly lost, our current times are so different that… I dunno, maybe it is?

Photography by Avel Shah

M. H. Ayinde was born in London’s East End. She is a runner, a lapsed martial artist, and a screen time enthusiast. Her debut novel A SONG OF LEGENDS LOST, the first in an epic fantasy trilogy, will be published by Orbit (UK) and Saga Press (North America) in Spring/Summer 2025. Her short fiction has appeared in FIYAH Literary Magazine, F&SF, Fantasy Magazine, and elsewhere, and she was the 2021 winner of the Future Worlds Prize. She lives in London with three generations of her family and their Studio Ghibli obsession.