Future Cities

Roger Elwood also edited an anthology called Future City although that was not one to which Poul Anderson contributed. However, Anderson described many future metropolises. We notice two features of the built-up area where Svoboda's departmental tower is located.

First, even from here, nature is visible. Although the tower extends as far as he can see:

"...through airborne filth...past the floating docks, on the world's eastern edge, he could see the mercury gleam that was the open Atlantic.

"Dusk was creeping over the planet. Spires etched themselves black against the surly red remnants of sundown." (1, pp. 8-9)

Secondly, the social division between Lowlevel and upper-level exactly corresponds to the physical levels of the city's architecture:

"Highlevel walls and streets began to glow. Lowlevel was a darkness beneath, and a muted unending growl of belt-ways, generators, autofactories, sparks to show a window waking to life or a pedicar headlamp or the flashbeams of men going in cudgel-armed parties for fear of the Brotherhood." (p. 9)

 

This same social-physical hierarchy exists in the megalopolis of Niyorek in Anderson's The Corridors Of Time.