 |
Shelter After Katrina
In the wake of hurricane Katrina, and the flooding of New Orleans, hundreds of thousands of survivors have been left homeless - probably for many months. Large areas have been devastated, without any services. Readers wrote in suggesting that perhaps science fiction writers had some ideas that could be of practical use, given that these writers had imagined devastation on an even greater scale in many books and stories.
Easily errected temporary quarters should be first on the list; Robert Heinlein wrote about
knockdown cabins before World War II gave us the Quonset hut. Government procurers should be scouring military bases for similar items for rapid deployment in the affected states.
In his 1992 novel Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson writes about the U-Stor-It apartment:
Storage places like these are always partially empty; perhaps the additional units could be rented for the next six months by the government.
In his 1998 novel Idoru, William Gibson wrote about the micro-bachelor:
There have been a lot of complaints about traffic in the newly-crowded cities of Houston and Baton Rouge. Encourage car pooling, and then temporarily convert parking structures to housing - killing two birds with one stone.
There is an interesting analog to the U-Stor-It "apartment" that is a real product - the Quik House, a prefabricated kit house made from recycled shipping containers. The basic model has three bedrooms and two and one-half baths in 2,000 square feet.
Hiro Protagonist and Vitaly Chernobyl, roommates, are chilling out in their home, a spacious 20 by 30 in a U-Stor-It in Inglewood, California. The room has a concrete slab floor, corrugated steel walls separating it from the neighboring units and ... a roll-up steel door that faces northwest, giving them a few red rays ... when the sun is setting over LAX.
(Read more about the U-Stor-It).
He used most of his first month's salary to lease a micro-bachelor in a retrofitted parking structure on Broadway Avenue, Santa Monica. … The floor of his apartment was terraced against the original slope of the parking garage.
(Read more about the micro-bachelor)
(Quik House)
The port of Houston handles more foreign tonnage than any other American port; they must have many hundreds of empty containers awaiting use.
(Micro Compact Home m-ch)
Another futuristic product, the m-ch Micro Compact Home, is a 2.6 meter cube that provides a double bed on an upper level and working table and dining space for four or five people on a lower level. The kitchen bar is arranged to serve these two levels. The m-ch is built complete and can be placed anywhere on a level site.
Finally (and as a last resort), John Brunner wrote about paid-avoidance zones in his 1975 novel Shockwave Rider. In the novel, the Great Bay Quake had finally happened in California; the scale of the disaster was too great for even the government to handle. So the government set aside particular areas that would never receive any more than basic services - electricity and water - period. And each resident was paid a small stipend to forego modern living.
Thanks to the readers who wrote in with suggestions for this topic. Take a look at additional reader comments on Katrina shelter.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 9/8/2005)
Follow this kind of news @Technovelgy.| Email | RSS | Blog It | Stumble | del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit |
Would
you like to contribute a story tip?
It's easy:
Get the URL of the story, and the related sf author, and add
it here.
Comment/Join discussion (Back On) ( 17 )
Related News Stories - (" Living Space ")
Sky City's 220 Stories Are Go
'It rested among green parklands and... stood in total isolation, a glittering block of whites and flashing windows dotted with colors.'- Pournelle and Niven, 1981
Very Large Structure - A Megamachine
'Soon the city was lumbering in hot pursuit, a moving mountain of metal which rose in seven tiers like layers of a wedding cake...'- Philip Reeves, 2003
Ten SF Houses Of The Future
Ten science fiction classics from ten science fiction authors.
Blueseed Offshore Floating Corporation Ready By 2014
'...new islands bringing life to a watery desert.'
Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
Current News
Is Noam Chomsky As Paranoid As Philip K. Dick?
'I'm Bill Behren... Operator of fly 33408...'
Low-Cost, Implantable Electronics Get Closer
Better coatings need to become a reality.
'Marauder's Map' Created By Carnegie Melllon
'Is that Dumbledore in his study?'
Cheetah Cub Robot From PKD's Android Dreams
'What about an exact electric duplicate of your cat?'
Dead Cellphone? Try Solar-Powered Public Charging Stations
'Then he saw the geek ... leaning against one of the slender stalks of a sunshade-photocell collector...'
Hungry? Grow Nutritious Insects At Home
'...I balked when my wife served me termites.'
Snowboarding On Mars? Heinlein Was Ready
How long ago did Robert Heinlein write about skiing on dry alien worlds?
Orwell's '1984' Hits Bestseller Lists Thanks To PRISM
'There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.'
Roboroach Control? There's An App For That
'A cable, here, from the controller to the interface plug... wires from that to the brain.'
Court OK's DNA Collection Like 'Gattaca'
DNA sampling is not the same as fingerprinting.
Squid Vs. Whale Diorama Liked By Humans, Aliens
'Everything was ready, awaiting the Overlords' pleasure...'
Iceberg Harvesting Off Newfoundland's Coast
'Five hundred billion gallons worth of Antarctic iceberg had been towed into Santa Monica Bay.'
Sony's A4-Sized Flexible Digital Paper Notepad
'...he would plug his foolscap-sized Newspad into the ship's information circuit and scan the latest reports...'
Contact Lens Video Display Electronics Now Transparent
'He realized that it was not quite a clear lens. Speckles of colored brightness swirled and gathered in it...'
Tesla's Supercharge Station Plan
'To recharge the batteries, which can be done in almost every town and village...'
Millimeter-Scale Computing For 'Internet of Things'
'In their megalomania they thought to make the very sand beneath their feet intelligent...'
