Our hero, Donner, the Un-Man, having been rendered unconscious, wakes up strapped to a chair in a bare room full of dust and cobwebs with cracked plaster and a broken window too dirty to show whether there is light outside. He deduces that he and his captors, who are present, are in one of the abandoned parts of Chicago that some agricultural organization will eventually buy from the government, miles of ruined buildings inhabited only by rats. Donner reflects on "...the weary creak of a joist..." (p. 25) etc.
What is the imaginative appeal of abandoned buildings? Nature reclaims the works of man. The buildings themselves remind us of the human past. They were once lived or worked in. We either know or can imagine their histories.
For fictional purposes: Are empty buildings haunted? Do time travelers pass through them? Might a momentarily glimpsed time traveler be mistaken for a ghost? How does a time traveler perceive a building as he travels futureward through it?
"'The dim suggestion of the laboratory seemed presently to fall away from me, and I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky...'"
-HG Wells, The Time Machine (London, 1973), 4, p. 24.
"...the noise and vibration came to a ringing halt.
"Sunlight streamed in through the porthole.
"'No house?' asked Hull.
"'A century is a long time,' said Saunders."
-Poul Anderson, "Flight to Forever" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 207-286 AT CHAPTER ONE, p. 211.
See also The History Of A House that Jack Havig time travels through.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Abandoned buildings or cities? I thought almost at once of one of the few times in his FOUNDATION books that Asimov rose to elegiac writing: his description of the ruins of Trantor that we see at the beginning of Chapter 22 of FOUNDATION AND EMPIRE.
Ad astra! Sean
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