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"The first thing that's wrong with being a science-fiction writer today is that the present has caught up with the future and surpassed it."
- Peter Watts
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| U-Stor-It | ||
| A storage unit converted for use as an apartment. |
No, it hasn't come to this - yet. However, I have seen what appeared to be a former storage facility in which each unit had been converted to a small business space.
| 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 - this is a mark of distinction separating it from the neighboring units - a roll-up steel door that faces northwest, giving them a few red rays at times like this, when the sun is setting over LAX. But there are worse places to live… slum housing, 5-by-10s and 10-by-10s where Yanoama tribespersons cook beans and parboil fistfuls of coca leaves over heaps of burning lottery tickets. |
| Technovelgy from Snow Crash,
by Neal Stephenson. Published by Bantam in 1992 Additional resources -
|
It is an interesting exercise to look around, and see all of the spaces that we have for our cars - 500 square foot two-car garages, parking structures, parking spaces, parking lots. What happens when most of us can no longer afford an individual vehicle (the norm in the rest of the world)? An alert reader has pointed out that in Ursula LeGuin's Lathe of Heaven, George Orr's lawyer Heather LeLache has her office in a converted parking ramp.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Snow Crash
More Ideas
and Technology by Neal Stephenson
Tech news articles related to Snow Crash
Tech news articles related to works by Neal Stephenson
U-Stor-It-related
news articles:
- Quik House: Neal Stephenson's U-Stor-It?
| Why Not Move A Warehouse District? |
| Amazon Will Send You Heinlein's Knockdown Cabin |
| Elegant Bivouac Shelter Produces Water And Electricity |
| AI-THu Shapeshifting Transformer Home |
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Science Fiction
Timeline
1600-1899
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'What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot!'
'Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair or to perch on a flagpole in imitation of a giant bird, even in the windy city of Chicago.'
'The thirty-odd miles of The Factory’s circumference...'
'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
