What If Written Language Was Never Invented?

The cost of this system, Naomi documented carefully, was real and significant, and she resisted the temptation — common, she noted self-critically in her field notes, among researchers from literate societies visiting oral ones — to romanticize it as costless or superior. Innovation moved slower. A new astronomical correction, once verified, took nearly two full generations to propagate fully through the reciter network and fully displace the older, slightly less accurate calculation method it replaced — a timeline that would have taken a literate society perhaps a decade, limited only by how fast corrected texts could be copied and distributed.

Access was also more unequal than her own society's literacy, imperfect as that was, had managed. Memory-keeper training began in early childhood and required a specific kind of cognitive aptitude and family connection that, Naomi documented with some discomfort, functioned as its own rigid caste system — arguably more rigid than literacy-based class structures, because a memory-keeper's entire value lay in decades of specialized training that could not be acquired later in life the way an adult in a literate society could, at least in principle, eventually learn to read.

"You ask if we wish we had what your people have," Adama said to her, near the end of her second season, after she had finally worked up the nervousness to ask directly. "I do not know how to wish for a thing I have never lost. But I will say this: when my teacher died, four years before I was fully trained, his knowledge did not die with him, because it lived in six other minds at once. I have met your historians. They tell me entire libraries have burned, and taken everything in them with the smoke. We built our system, long ago, to make sure fire could never do what fire has apparently done to you more than once."