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"I've come across more and more people who've actually tried reading science fiction and can't make it make sense."
- Samuel R. Delany
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| Concrete Boxes | ||
| Self storage for your body - living space designed for people who spend most of their time ignoring their surroundings anyway. |
I couldn't resist adding this one. We already have living spaces like this (lots of us have lived in them at one or another point in our lives). But this definition and quote narrow it down considerably to the bare essentials: self storage for the human body.
| Earth is old and crowded and awfully beat up. Most of the population lives in little concrete boxes for years on end, circulating from the kitchen to the bathroom to the virtual reality hookup, over and over, except for their lifetime's seven "outside years" during which they supposedly earn enough for their ninety-odd years on the dole. |
| Technovelgy from Earth Made of Glass,
by John Barnes. Published by Tom Doherty Associates in 1998 Additional resources -
|
Not really cheery, is it? On the other hand, if all you do is watch TV in your apartment, maybe this is all you really need. Think about it: you can get a nice 10'x10' air-conditioned self storage unit with lights and an electrical outlet for less than $100 per month. What do you pay in rent every month?
The notion of spending your lifetime in a box, cut off from the world and from others, was explored almost a century earlier in the prescient The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster.
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'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
'...a new plastic with the characteristics of an avian eggshell.'
'It was a pushpot, which could not possibly be called a jet plane because it could not possibly fly. Only it did.'
'She wouldn't stop until Antar had told her everything he knew about whatever it was that she was playing with on her screen.'
'Does thinking you're the last sane man on the face of the Earth make you crazy?'
