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"There's no point in making a mistake unless you understand the mistake so that you don’t make it again."
- Alfred Bester
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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. |
| 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?
| Solar House Concept Unfolds Solar Panels Like A Flower |
| San Fran's Tiny Homeless |
| Rotating House in Bosnia |
| Voyager Luxury Space Hotel Launches In 2023 |
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Science Fiction
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'The Enforcement Droid series 209 is a self-sufficient law enforcement robot...'
'Buses without drivers moved close to the curb and stopped at intervals.'
'... infected males were more than 46 times more likely to become pack leaders than uninfected males.'
'He had left Earth to get away from its gravitational field...'
'Faster the cubes moved; faster the circle revolved; the pyramids raised themselves, stood bolt upright on their square bases...'
'Life experience is linearly additive, but the correlation of memory impressions is an unlimited expansion.'
'I grabbed two Syntho-Steaks out of the freezer...'
'...we've promised him a generous pension from the royalties.'
'What fabric can take that kind of a load? Synthetic spider silk.'
