The year is 2100, and the lands of the western continents are now a post-literate hellscape. They have entered what historians are calling “the Second Dark Ages”.
Roberto IV sits high on the ridgeline of a large cliff-face overlooking his old village, which he can see far below, along with a few other villages in the distance, scattered about in the countryside between the rice and tea fields. When he looks above, the clear sky envelopes his view, and he feels almost as if he would be sitting inside the few wispy clouds that exist today if the mountain that held the fortifications he occupied dared to stretch only a little bit further into the atmosphere. He is reading the introductory chapter of an important text that his father left him to study. It’s a history. This is not just any history, but a history of the Western continents. It is one of the shorter ones and is comprised of just 10 volumes (not like some of the longer ones, including the one in 100 volumes that his great-grandfather wrote). From the table of contents, he can see there are chapters on the rise of scientific technology, which brought insidiously destructive weapons, the greed-laden economic systems which left everything vulnerable to collapse, and many other distant things. But now he is about to read one of the beginning chapters, the one about the rise of illiteracy, which the author laid stress on as being the main harbinger of the ultimate destruction of those lands.
…
That, in case you haven’t figured it out, is just a little creative writing I have endeavored to have a crack at. It was originally meant simply to be used as a creative introduction to this thread, the main purpose of which is to discuss the current decline in literacy rates. This thread will still be about that topic (the current decline in literacy rates), but it can also serve the dual purpose of discussing what I wrote above, as I have decided that I might just flesh out the story.
I don’t know if I will write the story in full. I don’t have much experience writing (as many of you can tell from my posts here), but if people are interested, I might have a crack at it, because, hey, why not?
I’ve already thought up the background, some of the characters (some of which some of you may or may not recognize as real-life characters), and a little bit of the plot.
The main character will be Roberto IV, a Sotappana and historion living in the year 2100 in an unspecified Southeast Asian country which most closely resembles Sri Lanka (although I have taken some liberties and not made it exactly like Sri Lanka), who makes a living as a scribe in the fortress library created by his grandfather Roberto II, who was inspired to build it circa 2050 A.D. based on the advice of his father (Roberto IV’s great-grandfather) Roberto I, who developed the vision and plans of the library at some point in his later years.
The library contains the whole Tipiṭaka along with its Commentaries and Sub-commentaries in palm-leaf manuscript form, many of which were copied by Roberto II and many of which were sourced from local villages, where Roberto II taught the skill of making the manuscripts to locals. The library also contains many other non-Buddhist texts for preservation, including a robust section on medicine which even features medical texts from foreign lands, like the those from the Western continents which are now experiencing the “Second Dark Ages”, such as an original leather-bound copy of Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine, which was written in Latin and leather-bound in the sixteenth-century, as well as copies of the Japanese Amatsu Tatara scrolls on rice paper, and many others. Many sciences are preserved in the fortified library, and, of course, based on the advice of Roberto I, there is an elephantine collection of history books.
Some people might ask what the point of writing such a fictional work is. All I can do is assure people that while this fiction (if I choose to write it) would be open enough for non-Buddhists to easily read and enjoy, it would also feature important themes of the development of sīla, samādhi, and paññā, basic explanations of Buddhist principles, a brief overview of the whole path based on the Vissudhimagga, an emphasis on learning and literacy (one of the main themes), as well as a very heavy emphasis on the importance of the preservation of texts and knowledge.
I am out of time for today. People can discuss the issues of the declining literacy rates in society here (as this story will have that as a major theme anyway), or they can critique my writing and comments above. This thread can serve both purposes. I will return in a few days time with some resources about the current problems with literacy in society, which we can also discuss. 
Renaldo