[Irrelevant]

There's plenty of stories out there with post-apocalypse scenarios, but what about when humanity reclaims what it has lost? Eventually, the roving motorcylce gangs and cannibal cults would disappear and mankind would rebuild society, right?

Think of Europe and it's transition after the Rome collapsed to the Dark Ages, to the Middle Ages, and then to the Renaissance.

Are there any sci-fi novels that explore a future where the collapse of modern society is a distant memory? Where our current top secret military sites are major archeological finds?

I can think of so many ways this could be explored. If civilization were to suddenly descend into chaos, the world would rapidly depopulate. Once the world's population plummeted below 1 billion people, alternative energy sources could reasonably sustain us, farmland wouldn't be as scarce, and the environment would slowly heal.

I can see humanity rebuilding after a major global meltdown. The chaos wouldn't last forever and we probably won't revert back to cavemen. So can anyone think of any stories that represent the "Renaissance" period of the post-Apocalypse?

[Andols]

Coldfire trilogy does in a way. Also Anathem I think would semi-qualify as well.

[Triffid]

I haven't read it, but you might want to look at Motel of the Mysteries by David Macauley.

http://www.doyletics.com/_arj1/moteloft.htm

[DailyRich]

Saberhagen's Empire of the East does this pretty well.

[owlcroft]

Keith Roberts (http://www.solaris-books.co.uk/Roberts/krmain.htm) had rather a specialty in the field. His two best-known works are Pavanne (http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/pavane.htm) and The Chalk Giants (http://www.cloggie.org/books/chalk-giants.html), each of which, though in quite different ways, traces humankind's re-ascent after a holocaust; they thus each partake of both post-apocalypse and post-post-apocalypse tales.

Less well-known but (I think) equally good is Kiteworld (http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/r/keith-roberts/kiteworld.htm), which again is set at the threshold of transition from post-apocalypse to post-post.

And I am probably missing out some similar other works by Roberts--a sadly underesteemed writer, not all of whose works I have yet gotten to.

[Jeroen]

An essential answer:

Walter M. Miller Jr. - A Canticle for Leibowitz

Starts with a monk living in a Middle-Ages like environment in Texas, and then finds a tomb that turns out to be a radiation shelter. The rest of the story I won't spoil.

[Nicolas]

Vernor Vinge is an author that might have what you're looking for. His post-apocalyptic future is an optimist one, where humanity rebuids itself in an "anarcho-capitalist" sort of way. You'll find them all in The Collected Short Stories of Vernor Vinge
There is, also, The Book of The New Sun, by Gene Wolfe, but that's in a very very far future.

Hope that helps
Nicolas

[Randy M.]

Davy by Edgar Pangborn -- a pastoral future after the collapse; the reasons for the collapse, as I recall, are never fully explained


Randy M.

[psikeyhackr]

Rite of Passage by Alexi Panshin might qualify but the apocalypse was so bad there is no habitable Earth. Most of the story takes place on an FTL space ship.

psik

[NYCfan]

There's a Jack McDevitt book whose title currently escapes me which is set a couple centuries after a collapse and concerns a quest to find a large depository of books. Also the recent book by Robert Charles Wilson, Julian Comstock, is a semi- post-post apocalypse book. It's not quite a distant memory but there is a new society that has emerged.

For a somewhat different take, but quite good, there is Iain Banks' Against a Dark Background which takes place on an Earthlike world which has a long history of collapses and rising up to high tech and then falling back in another collapse.