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"We follow the scientists around and look over their shoulders."
- Larry Niven
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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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'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?'
'It hurtled on down with inconceivable speed until it was visible as thousands of tiny robot planes...'
'Then she looked up with a smile and moved closer to the camera.'
'... folios and tapes and playable discs of platinum alloy.'
'... another corner of his mind began to think about the shields.'
