There’s nothing strange about using archaic language in an archaic story. But Kim was set and published a solid century after thee/thou had fallen completely out of favor. OP wanted to know why Kipling used archaic language in a story that was not set in that archaic period.
That’s a reasonable question, and it did have a reasonable answer, as explored in the rest of the thread. But it’s not just “it uses old language because it’s old.”
Did you read past the title? “Thee” and “thou” were archaic even in 1900, as OP said.
My big issue was that that book did not need a villain in it.
It’s the ultimate Person Vs. Nature story. A few hundred desperate survivors struggling to hold on and support each other in the face of history’s greatest disaster.
And then halfway through a stock Evil Politician shows up out of nowhere and promptly turns half of them against the other half for no good reason. It felt like Stephenson lost a bet and had to insert a random TV Trope into his sci-fi epic.
My big issue was that that book did not need a villain in it.
It’s the ultimate Person Vs. Nature story. A few hundred desperate survivors struggling to hold on and support each other in the face of history’s greatest disaster.
And then halfway through a stock Evil Politician shows up out of nowhere and promptly turns half of them against the other half for no good reason. It felt like Stephenson lost a bet and had to insert a random TV Trope into his sci-fi epic.
Just move on, guys. Some of y’all are pining after this one series like a 30-year-old who can’t get over the girl who dumped him just before senior prom. There are thousands of other amazing books out there.
I think it’s going to be a long, long time–decades at least–before AI is capable of generating anything that I’d be interested in reading much of. In a good novel, every detail has to hang together and reference what’s come before and what’s still to come. The kind of little glitches that we’ve learned to pick out in AI-generated art will stick out like a sort thumb in a novel-length written piece.
It may be earlier that AI learns to reproduce the most formulaic, uninspired novels. The dregs of the romance genre, for example. (Nothing against actually good romance novels.) I’m not personally worried about that, because I don’t care about those books.
Is that the James Patterson, creator of James Patterson’s Bookshots?!?