(ii) HG Wells: 802,701 AD;
(iii) Poul Anderson: Archopolis and the Coral Palace.
(i) It was strange there in the very depths of the town, with ten miles of man's handiwork on every side of us, to feel the iron grip of Nature, and to be conscious that to the huge elemental forces all London was no more than the molehills that dot the fields.
-copied from here.
(ii) "Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness...
"For such a life, what we should call the weak are as well equipped as the strong, are indeed no longer weak. Better equipped indeed they are, for the strong would be fretted by an energy for which there was no outlet."
-HG Wells, The Time Machine (London, 1973), 6, THE SUNSET OF MANKIND, p. 39.
(iii) "She did know that [the towers] went on beyond sight, multiplied over and over around the curve of the planet. Archopolis was merely a nexus; no matter if the globe had blue oceans and green open spaces - some huge, being property of nobility - it was a single city."
-Poul Anderson, A Stone In Heaven IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 1-188 AT IV, p. 44.
"A clear dome overlooked lower roofs, lesser spires, gardens, trianons, pools, bowers, finally beach, sand, surf, nearby residential rafts, and the Pacific Ocean. Sheening and billowing under a full Luna, those waters gave a sense of ancient forces still within this planet that man had so oedipally made his own, still biding their time."
-Anderson, op. cit., V, p. 50.
Any comment by me on these passages by Conan Doyle, Wells and Anderson would be superfluous.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I agree any comment on the texts you quoted here would be superfluous. But I was a bit surprised you did not quote the elegiac description of Admiralty Center that Anderson gave us in Chapter VI of WE CLAIM THESE STARS.
I no longer care much for Isaac Asimov's FOUNDATION books, but occasionally they do contain passages worthy of admiration. Such as this bit from the beginning of Chapter 22 of FOUNDATION AND EMPIRE:
Neotrantor was the name! New trantor! And when you have said
the name you have exhausted at a stroke all the resemblances
of the new Trantor to the great original. Two parsecs away,
the sun of Old Trantor still shone and the Galaxy's Imperial
Capital of the previous century still cut through space in
the silent and eternal repetition of its orbit.
Men even inhabited Old Trantor. Not many--a hundred
million, perhaps, where fifty years before, forty billions
had swarmed. The huge, metal world was in jagged splinters.
The towering thrust of the multi-towers from the single
world-girdling base were torn and empty--still bearing the
original blast-holes and firegut--shards of the Great Sack
of forty years earlier.
It was strange that a world which had been the center
of a Galaxy for two thousand years--that had ruled limitless
space and been home to legislators and rulers whose whims
spanned the parsecs--could die in a month. It was strange
that a world which had been untouched through the vast con-
quering sweeps and retreats of a millennium, and equally
untouched by the civil wars and palace revolutions of
another millennium--should lie dead at last. It was strange
that the Glory of the Galaxy should be a rotting corpse.
Of course Asimov and John Campbell, who edited the original Foundation stories, had the example of the declining Westerm Roman Empire in its final years in mind. Such as the Sack of Rome in AD 410. With Ravenna (which had become the actual capital of the Empire) as Rome's Neotranto.
Ad astra! Sean
I was focusing on man-nature interactions, not on rise and fall of civilizations.
(i) The city was still like a mole hill to the forces of nature.
(ii) Man had conquered nature and lost his strength.
(iii) Man had conquered nature but it waited to return.
Kaor, Paul!
Dang! Only goes to show how dense I can be. I read what you wrote and missed your point.
Ad astra! Sean
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