There's a great moment in The Hobbit when Bilbo Baggins is exploring a stinking troll cave and finds an ancient Elven short sword, lost for centuries, buried under the muck. It’s Sting, baby. And nobody wonders whether Sting will be less powerful than all the flashy new swords on the market. They assume that it’s more powerful.

Daniel Wilson is the bestselling author of Robopocalypse, How to Survive a Robot Uprising, and many other books. A former roboticist, he is now a full-time science fiction writer. Here he tells us about researching his latest novel, The Clockwork Dynasty , a thriller about ancient technologies that comes out today.

In some of the most engrossing worlds ever imagined—Star Wars, The Hobbit, and even Dune—the older something is, the better. The characters in those stories respect the achievements of their long-disappeared ancestors, and they honor the technological feats of heroes whose deeds have turned to legend.

Maybe we’re drawn to these stories because they’re so different from our own society, where we’re obsessed with the latest, freshest version of any gadget—and it’s off to the trash heap with whatever falls out of date. If Bilbo had found an iPhone in that cave, I highly doubt it would have been worth wielding for the rest of his adventure and then passed down through his family.

In my latest novel, I wanted to capture that feeling of awe for the past and bring it into our present. The Clockwork Dynasty acknowledges that our ancestors had incredible technological triumphs—and imagines that some of them are still walking among us, machines disguised as people. Older than cities, these avtomat (a Russian word that can mean robot) fight their own ancient wars in the shadows, even as they quietly go about shaping our civilization in the image of a world they lost millennia ago.

It’s an epic, sprawling exploration of our familiar history, haunted by nearly immortal robots who revere humanity while being superior to it. The avtomat are both our servants and our masters. Alternating between the past and present, we see these humanlike robots secretly serving the great empires of antiquity and, centuries later, struggling to survive as they finally begin to run out of power. And, as the modern-day survivors cannibalize each other for energy, a human scientist risks her life to help find the origin of the machine race and the key to saving it.

It’s a fun concept, but “older is better” only works in fiction, right? That's not what I found during my research for this novel.

Ancient technologies as inspiration

Buried in conspiracy theories and ancient alien scenarios, I found real examples of ancient technological artifacts beyond our modern comprehension.

Probably the most famous example is the Antikythera mechanism, discovered submerged in a shipwreck off the Greek islands in 1900. This was before scuba diving, so sponge divers pulled it up from under 150 feet of water just by holding their breath. It was brass and complicated, and nobody had the faintest idea what it did. Today, the Antikythera mechanism is known as the world’s first analog computer. It’s capable of predicting astronomical positions and eclipses. But we needed 80 years to figure that out—eight decades to advance science, invent computers, and catch up to the progress of scholars who probably died sometime around 100 BC.

How many other artifacts are hiding in plain sight, incomprehensible to us because we don’t have the technological prowess to understand what we are seeing?

Historical records abound with tales of ancient robots, called automatons (or automata). Golden birds, talking servants, mechanical musicians, and armed knights fill history books across every age and culture of humankind.

Some are (or have become) mythological, like the tripedal servants who were created by Hephaestus to assist the gods of Mount Olympus. Others are legends passed down through history, such as the pneumatically powered singing birds and wine-servants of Alexandria in the second century BCE. And many more are real, documented artifacts, like the walking (and pooping) mechanical duck of Jacques de Vaucanson in the 1700s.

The drive to create miraculous machines in our own image is timeless and pan-cultural.

It is staggering to think Homo sapiens have been around for at least a hundred thousand years. And yet we've got only five thousand or so years of written history, leaving a lot of blank slate. I get goosebumps contemplating what civilizations rose and fell, what brilliant people lived and died, and what amazing inventions and accomplishments our ancestors created.

History is more mysterious and astonishing than we’ll ever know. Legendary relics lurk in our forgotten past. And thinking of them inspires awe and humility.

Although we live in a society that worships the bleeding edge of technology, I have done my best to inject a respect for the past into The Clockwork Dynasty.

Listing image by Doubleday