Well, I have finally settled down a bit and I have started a long-term book project. I believe it will take me no shorter than 6 years to write. The book is something along the lines of "Rebuilding civilization in 10,000 pages". It's not so much a book I believe will sell(much)...but I want to see what kind of civilization with science, technology, architecture, and culture can be put into 10,000 pages. Consider it speedrunning building a civilization in 10,000 pages.
For this project, the goal is to maximize the general quality of life and build up civilization assuming some bizarre disaster happened and most buildings were flattened and all the science buildings exploded. It is a hypothetical project amongst hypotheticals projects...but I need something to keep me busy.
For this, knowing the various technologies, their constriction, their difficulty of being built through different regions throughout history would be highly important. Discovering how the Byzantine culture used technology, the Achaemenid empire built their technology, the ancient Chinese and Greeks...seeing how much I can take from those cultures, how much I could take from modern-day pragmatic building and weapon construction, along with food distribution(analyzing how cultures distributed food without most preservatives or refrigeration is highly important and should not be lost knowledge)
More or less the goal is to pick from a wide variety of civilizations and hodge-podge them in together to get a decent quality of life within 10,000 pages. Keep the best/most simple structures and foods. Add in as much medical knowledge as possible (as many surgeries which could be done without anesthesia..or perhaps how quickly could one make anesthesia from wild plants if at all possible)
Do you have any series of books to recommend?
Hi there - we're happy to approve your question related to your creative project, and we are happy for people to answer. However, we should warn you that many flairs have become reluctant to answer questions for aspiring novelists and the like, based on past experience: some people working on creative projects have a tendency to try to pump historians for trivia while ignoring the bigger points they were making, while others have a tendency to argue with historians when the historical reality does not line up with what's needed for a particular scene or characterization. Please respect the answers of people who have generously given you their time, even if it's not always what you want to hear.
Additionally, as amazing as our flair panel is, we should also point out that /r/AskHistorians is not a professional historical consultation service. If you're asking a question here because you need vital research for a future commercial product such as a historical novel, you may be better off engaging a historical consultant at a fair hourly rate to answer these questions for you. We don't know what the going rate for consultancy work would be in your locality, but it may be worth looking into that if you have in-depth or highly plot-reliant questions for this project. Some /r/AskHistorians flairs could be receptive to working as a consultant in this way. However, if you wish for a flair here to do this work for you, you will need to organize this with them yourselves.