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"At its best, SF is the medium in which our miserable certainty that tomorrow will be different from today in ways we can't predict, can be transmuted to a sense of excitement and anticipation, occasionally evolving into awe."
- John Brunner
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| Farming Trantor | ||
| Taking apart a vast city, and returning to farming the land. |
Trantor was a planet the surface of which was entirely enclosed in metal buildings many stories thick.
But even galactic empires fall, and people need to farm the land for food...
 (Farming Trantor in 'Second Foundation' by Isaac Asimov) Trantor was a world in dregs and rebirth. Set like a faded jewel... it alternately dreamed of past and future... Until the decay of the Empire eventually reached it... its drooping powers had been bent back upon themselves and broken forever. In the blasting ruin of death, the metal shell... wrinkled and crumpled into an aching mock of its own grandeur. The survivors tore up the metal plating and sold it... for seed and cattle. The soil was uncovered once more and the planet returned to its beginnings. In the spreading areas of primitive agriculture, it forgot its intricate and colossal past. |
| Technovelgy from Second Foundation,
by Isaac Asimov. Published by Doubleday in 1953 Additional resources -
|
Philip K. Dick described this development in his 1954 short story The Turning Wheel:
Ahead was the Detroit area, named, so it ran, for some now-forgotten spiritual leader...
He dropped his ship down. An open field lay to his right; a robot farmer was plowing with a metal hook welded to its waist...
Below his ship, the barren countryside spread out, ugly and bleak. Great red spots that hadn't yet been overgrown, and slag surfaces were still visible - but by this time most ruins were covered by soil and crabgrass. He could see men and robots farming; villages, countless tiny brown circles in the green fields; occasional ruins of ancient cities - gaping sores like blind mouths, eternally open to the sky. They would never close, not now.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Second Foundation
More Ideas
and Technology by Isaac Asimov
Tech news articles related to Second Foundation
Tech news articles related to works by Isaac Asimov
Farming Trantor-related
news articles:
- Farming Detroit Like Trantor
- Agrarian Detroit, Your Harvest Home
- Detroit's Urban Agriculture Ordinance
| MK-V Smart Tractor - Fully Electric, Farmer Optional |
| Vertical Farm In Singapore's Output Is 1.5 Tons Per Day |
| Mashambas Skyscraper Farm Design Wins |
| Self-Driving Tractors From China Plan Ahead |
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'He was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of glittering white porcelain.'
'I don't have to tell you about the seven two-mile-diameter orbital mirrors...'
'The robant and the tiny old woman entered the control room slowly...'
'Guy named Otto Octavius winds up with eight limbs... What are the odds?'
'It is as you thought when you constructed the time crystal, my master Vaylan.'
'This was their world, their planet — this swift-traveling, yet seemingly moveless vessel.'
