Wednesday 1 April 2020

Post-World War III Urbanization

Poul Anderson, "Un-Man" IN Anderson, The Complete Psychotechnic League, Volume 1 (Riverdale, NY, 2017), pp. 21-100.

Although "Un-Man" plunges directly into action-adventure fiction, it cannot help telling us something about the daily life of the future. An apartment building two miles long and three hundred stories high, "...a city in its own right..." (p. 22), standing in its own park, overlooks the corn fields of Midwest Agricultural which stretch beyond the "...far horizon..." (p. 21)

An entirely different world from the devastation of the opening story, "Marius," but is it credible just a few decades after nuclear bombardment?

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

This hugely colossal apartment building reminded me of David Wingrove's urbanized Chinese ruled Earth in his CHUNG KUO series. Or Asmiov's Trantor.

I don't think such a recovery of the kind described in "UN-Man" was necessarily impossible, given advanced technology and some luck.

Ad astra! Sean