Your comments are super helpful, thank you! I will say I did not parse the technology as technology; the reading of signs on the kaleidoscopey thing I parsed as more like Tarot than anything else, and a lot of what happened in Dr. Boots' List felt to me like ritualized magic rather than a relationship to technology. (Although if you parse the core artifact as technology rather than magic, I guess if anything it's sort of cargo culty?) I also didn't get that there was alien stuff at all; I figured that the Four Pots were, if anything, some sort of crazy post-nuclear thing. I'm not sure if this is genre illiteracy on my part or what. When you explain all these things as technology, it totally makes sense, but I think I could have read it four more times and not read it that way.

At the core, though, what I was doing was reading it like an apocalypse rather than reading it like a utopia; it's both, but looking at only the former misses a bunch of it, I think. You would like Riddley Walker or at least get a lot out of it, but it's very much not a utopia, and I think that's the core difference; Engine Summer shows the possibility for the future after disaster to give us something better than we have now, and Riddley Walker shows the something worse in between.