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"Does it open a new horizon for my thinking? Does it lead me to think new kinds of thoughts, that I would not otherwise perhaps have thought at all? These qualities are what [make] science fiction ...unique."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Sunparlor | ||
| A vast esplanade enclosed in glass, to permit sunbathing without leaving an immense building. |
The idea of a "sun room" is obviously not unique to science fiction, but it is presented in the story as a medical necessity for the human animal in a particular setting; in this case, a life lived in an artificial environment, a single immense building.
| “The sunparlor is not crowded at this hour,” suggested Cartex. In a cubic city nothing is more than two miles from anything else. The average distance is about half a mile. The doctor was of a methodical as well as a nervous turn of mind, for, as we strolled along he laid down lines along which we were to talk. I did not fully follow him, because a woman and two children in rose-silk knitted bathing-suits and slippers came out of an apartment and sauntered along the passageway in front of us. They made a charming little group, not out of place on any sea-beach, but singular indoors. Then, suddenly, my breath was taken away, for the passage debouched on a great esplanade forty feet wide and two miles long, roofed, floored and walled with glass. Roof and floor were translucent so that we could see other levels under and above us. At first this made me dizzy but one soon grew used to it. We had come out about halfway up the wall, facing southwest, so that we were a mile high and the view was magnificent. We looked across North River and New Jersey exactly as one might from an airplane. I had been up in an airplane over New York more than once so that I recognized the terrain. But I recognized nothing else. We were above the southern end of Central Park, but New York City was gone. Manhattan Island was a well-kept meadow, grassed, treed and parked. |
| Technovelgy from The Cubic City,
by Louis Tucker, D.D.. Published by Science Wonder Stories in 1929 Additional resources -
|
The reader of the original story in Science Wonder Stories is given a great visualization of this scene:
(Sunparlor in 'The Cubic City' by Reverend Louis Tucker, D.D.)
The author adds the following description:
The inner half of the glass floor rose a trifle and was filled with steamer chairs; and in these chairs, basking in the spring sunshine, lay quite a number of people in bathing suits, while others strolled along the pathway.“Sunbathers,” said the Doctor. “The glass is quartz glass and lets in the actinic rays. Everyone who can get the time takes a sunbath every day. All doctors prescribe it.”
“The place does not seem crowded,” I remarked.
“The population of this floor is a hundred thousand. It has eight miles of glass promenade all exposed to the sun’s rays every day. It could accommodate a hundred thousand reclining chairs; but we find two rows of twenty thousand each enough except on Sundays. The sunbathers on week days are mostly women and children.”
Compare to the sun-room from Foundation by Isaac Asimov.
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'Joe got out the gravity-simulator harnesses...'
'You couldn't have the capstone without the pyramid to hold it up.'
'the unobtrusive inspections with tiny remote-cast snoopers...'
I'm hoping that this procedure becomes a normal part of medical practice!
'... nothing was perfected until M. Pantalon announced the completion of his automatic valet.'
'...its streets were of remarkable width, with few or no buildings so high as mosques, churches, State-offices, or palaces in Tellurian cities.'
'...it was all composed of tiny, identical cubes, carefully laid to form a tilelike surface.'
