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Future Envy
One of the reasons I haven't really attempted much in the way of Capital SF Science Fiction--aside from the fact that my science knowledge is sadly lacking, and that I have a tendency to blend genres--is that when I start to think in an SF mode I get caught up in setting in such a way that little things (like, oh, story and characters) start to suffer. Things like where people live and work, how they move around, what their cities look like: those are the things that get me excited about the future. Things like Soleri's arcologies, for instance, which posit an idealized city without cars and with a tiny ecological footprint. Or the skyscraper farms I posted about a while back. This, to me, is where the sensawunda lives, in concepts that may never come to fruition, but reflect a basic optimism about what people and societies are capable of accomplishing assuming will and means, and in some cases, what they're already doing.
In recent weeks it seems like there's been an explosion of this stuff on the 'net. Geoff Manaugh at BLDGBLOG has been talking about this stuff for a while: witness posts like We Will Migrate Into the Sky, which talks about concepts for post-disaster housing (see also this post at io9 (more on them in a second) about a San Francisco-specific solution to the same problem), or this one about Amsterdam's plans for a city beneath the city, or this post about a modular housing concept.
Manaugh also does the Entropist feature over at io9, the new Gawker blog about all things science fiction. There's a fair amount of uninteresting (to me) stuff to wade through at io9, but ideas like using magma as printer ink (part of Manaugh's Top 5 Ways to Hack the Surface of the Earth feature), or Annalee Newitz's post about concept art for an eco-friendly urban makeover, or LKATAYAMA talking about a planned "layered" hotel/housing complex on a ski mountain in Norway--that is the stuff my own SF dreams are made of. Screw flying cars, I want floating countries (see also here), repurposed garbage, eco-towers, and power plants that run on (living!) trees.
Another blog that recently launched is grinding.be, which, like so many good things, is Warren Ellis's fault. He brought together a group of folks to keep an eye on the way humanity is changing. It's one of my favorite blogs currently. The grinding.be folks post about architecture and urban living, too, but they also talk about transportation, like GM's "skateboard" concept, and cars-on-a-stick. They also point to other blogs, like WebUrbanist talking about modern, sustainable treehouses; Neil Spiller at the Hybrid Debate Blog (sponsored by Lexus?!?) talking about how hybrid cars might change the urban landscape (see more concept art at Spiller's Flickr account); and Neatorama giving us a look at the green (in all senses of the word) roof of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
I think that my problem with SF may be that I don't want to write about worlds like those above so much as I want to live in them. But thanks to all those links up there, if I ever do flesh out one of the skeletal concepts I've got with actual PEOPLE, I have no shortage of ideas about where they might live.
In recent weeks it seems like there's been an explosion of this stuff on the 'net. Geoff Manaugh at BLDGBLOG has been talking about this stuff for a while: witness posts like We Will Migrate Into the Sky, which talks about concepts for post-disaster housing (see also this post at io9 (more on them in a second) about a San Francisco-specific solution to the same problem), or this one about Amsterdam's plans for a city beneath the city, or this post about a modular housing concept.
Manaugh also does the Entropist feature over at io9, the new Gawker blog about all things science fiction. There's a fair amount of uninteresting (to me) stuff to wade through at io9, but ideas like using magma as printer ink (part of Manaugh's Top 5 Ways to Hack the Surface of the Earth feature), or Annalee Newitz's post about concept art for an eco-friendly urban makeover, or LKATAYAMA talking about a planned "layered" hotel/housing complex on a ski mountain in Norway--that is the stuff my own SF dreams are made of. Screw flying cars, I want floating countries (see also here), repurposed garbage, eco-towers, and power plants that run on (living!) trees.
Another blog that recently launched is grinding.be, which, like so many good things, is Warren Ellis's fault. He brought together a group of folks to keep an eye on the way humanity is changing. It's one of my favorite blogs currently. The grinding.be folks post about architecture and urban living, too, but they also talk about transportation, like GM's "skateboard" concept, and cars-on-a-stick. They also point to other blogs, like WebUrbanist talking about modern, sustainable treehouses; Neil Spiller at the Hybrid Debate Blog (sponsored by Lexus?!?) talking about how hybrid cars might change the urban landscape (see more concept art at Spiller's Flickr account); and Neatorama giving us a look at the green (in all senses of the word) roof of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
I think that my problem with SF may be that I don't want to write about worlds like those above so much as I want to live in them. But thanks to all those links up there, if I ever do flesh out one of the skeletal concepts I've got with actual PEOPLE, I have no shortage of ideas about where they might live.
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I have this problem sometimes as well.
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Particularly Archigram, with their walking city, their instant city, their suitaloon...
(Not a lot of links that capture the full wildness of their ideas, but the Wikipedia article is a starting place. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archigram)
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Sorry, you've tapped into one of my manias, now :)
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In fact, I'll probably be seeing both of them at a Thursday night get together (with alcohol) this week.
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