Friday 19 August 2022

Future City

 

A brief quotation before I depart to visit Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop:

"The price of building the Ideal Progressive City of the Future was years of living in the Chaotic Inconvenient Construction Site of the Now."
-SM Stirling, Daggers In Darkness (Eric Flint's Ring of Fire, 2021), CHAPTER THREE, p. 70.

Is that a comment on human life in general?

In my youth, there were two kinds of sf futures: future cities and spaceships or post-catastrophe survival. Which kind are we heading for?

2 comments:

S.M. Stirling said...

The Panama Pacific Exposition in 1915 was pretty much the early 20th century's ideal Platonic concept of a city -- I like it myself needless to say. From the pictures, it was extremely impressive!

Just the sort of thing to catch Teddy Roosevelt's imagination.

S.M. Stirling said...

As for price, there's a price for everything, and big things cost highly, and not only in money.