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"I received a nice letter the other day from the Dalai Lama. He had read 'The Nine Billion Names of God'. It is about a computer at a Tibetan monastery."
- Arthur C. Clarke
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| Town In One Building | ||
| This is the basic idea behind an arcology, or other single structure that is intended to provide living space and mall. |
| A thing Graham had already learnt, and which he found very hard to imagine, was that nearly all the towns in the country, and almost all the villages, had disappeared. Here and there only, he understood, some gigantic hotel-like edifice stood amid square miles of some single cultivation and preserved the name of a town -- as Bournemouth, Wareham, or Swanage. Yet the officer had speedily convinced him how inevitable such a change had been. The old order had dotted the country with farmhouses, and every two or three miles was the ruling landlord's estate, and the place of the inn and cobbler, the grocer's shop and church -- the village. Every eight miles or so was the country town, where lawyer, corn merchant, wool-stapler, saddler, veterinary surgeon, doctor, draper, milliner and so forth lived. Every eight miles -- simply because that eight mile marketing journey, four there and back, was as much as was comfortable for the farmer. But directly the railways came into play, and after them the light railways, and all the swift new motor cars that had replaced waggons and horses, and so soon as the high roads began to be made of wood, and rubber, and Eadhamite, and all sorts of elastic durable substances -- the necessity of having such frequent market towns disappeared. And the big towns grew. They drew the worker with the gravitational force of seemingly endless work, the employer with their suggestions of an infinite ocean of labour. |
| From When the Sleeper Wakes,
by H.G. Wells. Published by Unknown in 1899 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the cubic city from The Cubic City (1929) by Louis Tucker and the checker-city from The Star-Roamers (1933) by Edmond Hamilton.
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| San Fran's Tiny Homeless |
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| Voyager Luxury Space Hotel Launches In 2023 |
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'the registration number which the traffic control automatically photographed as she left the controlway...'
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'Then they press one of these here thirteen buttons...'
'...without burning a single hydrocarbon molecule to injure the diseased atmosphere any further.'
'Bird-like robots now descended from the ceiling of the theatre...'
'The efficient robot waiter of the Sky Club had cleared away the remnants of an epicurean meal.'
'...in the tank the new body and the new mind and memory and life has taken almost instant form.'
'pirate three-vee satellites sanded out of orbit...'
'The atmosphere yielded its moisture with reluctance. It had to be coaxed down...'
