Difference between revisions of "The Shockwave Rider"

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The Shockwave Rider (1975) is a science fiction novel by John Brunner.

Architecture

Utopia designer

The interrogator asserts:

You spent a full year with a Utopia-design consultancy."

The subject replies:

"Yes. I was naïve. It took me that long to realize that only the very rich and the very stupid imagine happiness can be bought tailor-made. What's more, I should have discovered right away that it was company policy to maximize variety from one project to the next. I designed three very interesting closed communities, and in fact the last I heard all were still operating. But trying to include in the next Utopia what seemed to be most promising in the previous one was what got me redunded again. You know, I sometimes wonder what became of last century's hypothetical life-style labs, where a serious effort was to be made to determine how best human beings can live together."

The dialog continues:

"Well, there are the simulation cities, not to mention the paid-avoidance zones."

"Sure, and there are the places like Trianon where you get a foretaste of tomorrow. But don't bleat me. Trianon couldn't exist if G2S didn't subsidize it with a billion dollars a year. Simulation cities are only for the children of the rich — it costs nearly as much to send the kids back to the past for a year as it does to keep them at Amherst or Bennington. And the paid-avoidance areas were created as a way of economizing on public expenditure after the Great Bay Quake. It was cheaper to pay the refugees to go without up-to-the-minute equipment. Which they couldn't have afforded anyhow."

KC Shitabrick

The façades of the remaining towers, whether homes or offices, were as blank as ancient gravestones and as gloomy. They had mostly been erected during the shitabrick phase architecture had suffered through in the early nineties. There was a more flattering term for the style — antideco — but it was too lame to have caught on. Such structures were as dehumanized as the coffins employed to bury the victims of the Great Bay Quake, and stemmed from the same cause. The damage sustained when San Francisco, plus most of Berkeley and Oakland, collapsed overnight had come close to bankrupting the country, so that everything but _everything_ had to be designed with the fewest possible frills.

In a desperate attempt to make a virtue of necessity, all such buildings had been made "ecofast" — in other words, they were heavily insulated, they incorporated elaborate garbage-reclamation systems, every apartment was supplied with a flat area outside that caught at least some sunlight, allegedly large enough to be hydroponically planted with sufficient vegetables and fruit to meet the requirements of an average family. The consequence had been to fix in the public mind the impression that any genuinely efficient building must be stark, ugly, undesirable and dull. It seemed that necessity was too hateful for anybody to enjoy being virtuous.

Precipice CA

The path had been a path. The square proved not to be a square, more a deformed cyclic quadrilateral, but it implied all the necessary elements of a public urban space. It was a great deal bigger than one might have guessed. They found this out by crossing it. Part of it, currently deserted, was paved and ornamented with flower-filled urns; part was park-like, though miniaturized, a severe formal garden; part sloped down to a body of water, less a lake than a pond, some three or four meters below the general level of the land, from whose banks steps rose in elegant curves. Here there were people: old folk on benches in the sun, two games of fencing in progress amid the inevitable cluster of kibitzers, while down by the water — under the indulgent but watchful eyes of a couple of teeners — some naked children were splashing merrily about in pursuit of a huge light ball bigger than any two of their heads. And enclosing this square were buildings of various heights linked together by slanting roofs and pierced by alleyways but for which they would have composed a solid terrace. As it was, every alley was bridged at first-story level and every bridge was ornamented with delicate carvings in wood or stone.

"My God," Kate said under her breath. "It's incredible. Not town. Not here. This is _village_."

"And yet it's got the city implicit in it — the Grand Place, the Plaza Mayor, Old London Bridge . . . Oh, it's fantastic! And look a bit more closely at the houses. They're ecofast, aren't they? Every last one of them! I wouldn't be surprised to find they're running off ground heat!" She paled a little. "You're right! I hadn't noticed. One thinks of an ecofast house as being — well, kind of one cell for a honeycomb, factory-made. There are ecofast communities around KC, you know, and they have no more character than an anthill!"

"Let's track down the sheriff at once. I can stand just so many unanswered questions at one go. Excuse me!"

See also

• John Brunner

External links

• The Shockwave Rider @ Wikipedia