Friday

Maybe an interesting start for a story here. A whole society existing in the free airspace above, say, the Atlantic ocean. Or several colonies above oceans around the world. Big flat dirigible barges for growing crops, smaller (relatively, anyway) blimps housing large extended families and the 'gravity planes' like those in the link for ferrying passengers and cargo from place to place to place. Individuals transshipping with rocket packs like the ones Warren posted about.

C.M. Kornbluth wrote a story along these lines way back called Shark Ship about an entire seagoing civilization that never returned to shore. There were many, many ships with differing levels of technology (i.e., the main ship in the story makes all their clothing from felt but encounters another ship that, having launched years later, is equipped with looms and can fashion cloth from, shit, I dunno, seaweed or something), but all of them plied specific sea lanes to gather enough food to keep going. The idea was that each ship was self-sustaining and that any ship that lost essential equipment (as the main ship does when it loses its steel fishing net) was pretty well screwed, although they could count on sympathetic thoughts from the others.

I like the idea of the same kind of thing happening in the sky. An anti-technology society that relies more on basic skills like agriculture, weather forecasting and what would really have to be considered three-dimensional sailing than they would on computers, satellite maps or even the simple brute mechanisms that keep them aloft.

Hmm.

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1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Great work.

11:08 PM  

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