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"I did more research, and realized I almost would rather be a biologist than a writer, because there was incredible stuff going on!"
- Greg Bear
 |
| Trantor | ||
| A city that covers the entire surface of the planet. |
The logical extension of urban sprawl.
| Trantor... could scarcely avoid being the densest and richest clot of humanity the Race had ever seen.
Its urbanization, progressing steadily, had finally reached the ultimate. All the land surface of Trantor, 75,000,000 square miles in extent, was a single city. Its population, at its height, was well in excess of forty billions... |
| Technovelgy from Foundation,
by Isaac Asimov. Published by Doubleday in 1951 Additional resources -
|
Science fiction writers have created (mostly) dystopian stories about enormous cities; for example, The Sprawl or the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis (BAMA) from William Gibson's work and Mega-City One from the Judge Dredd comic.
Fans of sf great Clifford Simak may recall the metal calculator planet; it was a regular planet covered with machinery to a depth of twenty miles.
Harl Vincent gave a preview of this way of building in his 1929 story The War of the Planets:
Compare to planet city from The Message from Space (1930) by David M. Speaker.
Thanks to an anonymous reader for reminding me to add this idea.
Washington was one of the few cities in the world that still retained the old arrangement of wide streets, spacious detached dwellings, and pedestrian traffic. Of course, there were landing stages on all buildings for the aeros, but there was none of the closely massed, continuous building construction with roofed-over multiple moving ways and artificial temperature control and ventilation encountered almost everywhere else in the world. Here one could look at the stars without taking a long elevator journey to the roof-tops of a completely covered city.
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Trantor-related
news articles:
- China's Megacity 'Turn The Pearl River Delta Into One'
| Your Solar Electric Paint Is Ready, Larry Niven |
| How Long Till We Have These Tattoos? |
| Taza Aya Air-Curtain Tech Protects Turkey Workers |
| CoulombFly Solar-Powered Micro Aerial Vehicle Weighs 4.1 Grams |
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'...waldoes in the screen followed in exact, simultaneous parallelism.'
'Seen close it was not completely flexible, but made instead of pivoted and smoothly finished segments.'
'...great rectangular slabs of muscle, slung into a rectangular frame.'
'If the biological robots were not living creatures, they were certainly very good imitations.'
"Everybody and his dog, it seemed, wanted to live out in the country; transportation and communication were no longer isolating factors."
'... the new typewriter that could be talked to, and which transposed the spoken sound into typed words.'
