Cities And Dark Ages

 

The Peregrine, CHAPTER IV.

We have seen that cities are important in sf but now we get a different take on them. Cities can contain large public parks. Lancaster City boundaries include a lot of countryside. I like to think that I drive through the equivalent of Central Park. Trevelyan Micah flies over the North American forest where he sees isolated houses but reflects that rapid communication and transportation and socioeconomic unity make the planet a single city. Thus, a planet-wide city is covered not with buildings but with trees.

Trevelyan says that, on an interstellar scale, the outstripping of communication by transportation could overwhelm the Coordination Service and its integrators so that what had happened on Earth during the Second Dark Ages would be repeated between planetary systems but why should it be? If individual planets are economically and technologically self-sufficient, then each planetary civilization should survive the loss of interstellar contact as a few such civilizations do even during the Long Night in Anderson's Technic History.

We are told in this chapter that, in the Psychotechnic History, interstellar emigration was driven by psychology, not by economics. Masses technologically unemployed on Earth earlier in the history found meaning in supporting themselves and their families in the colonies.