Shame of the Cities
Some of my friends are tired of me bitching about city life, telling me how they’re there for “social” reasons. Yeah. Too bad they can’t tell me their neighbors’ names on either side of their house or across the street.
My neighbor in Pahrump, a small town 70 miles from Vegas, is “Dan.” I chat with ex-Navy retirees there who have an active ham radio club. I know several people with windmills and solar panel systems. One of my closest neighbors is broadcaster Art Bell, who has the biggest antenna farm in town. He doesn’t know me from Adam, but my Internet provider, Air Internet, connects to me from a tower on his property.
Urban centers are breeding millions of new cases of tuberculosis on romanticized mass transit systems as people are forced to ride in standing room only commutes thanks to fuel price hikes. Good luck curing the ever more resistant strains of bacteria being generated thanks to improper use of antibiotics.
Wealthy First World imperialists are meddling in the overcrowded impoverished toxic slums of the Third World. Overpopulation, food rationing, regimentation, energy production past its “peak,” and other vital resources are being exhausted. Ripped from today’s headlines, right?
Yes. But also from the pages of that “escapist” literature of ideas, science fiction. From books published over fifty years ago.
Robotics visionary and space empire novelist, Isaac Asimov, wrote the following in his 1953 classic book, The Caves of Steel:
Jessie spoke in a soft voice that gained in strength and articulateness as she went on.
“It’s these people, these Medievalists; you know, Lije. They’re always around, always talking. Even in the old days when I was an assistant dietitian, it was like that. Remember Elizabeth Thornbowe? She was a Medievalist. She was always talking about how all our troubles came from the City and how things were better before the Cities started.
“I used to ask her how she was so sure that was so, especially after you and I met, Lije (remember the talks we used to have), and then she would quote from those small book-reels that are always floating around. You know, like Shame of the Cities that the fellow wrote. I don’t remember his name.”
Baley said, absently, “Ogrinsky.”
“Yes, only most of them were lots worse. Then, when I married you, she was really sarcastic. She said, ‘I suppose you’re going to be a real City woman now that you’ve married a policeman.’ After that, she didn’t talk to me much and then I quit the job and that was that. Lots of things she used to say were just to shock me, I think, or to make herself look mysterious and glamorous. She was an old maid, you know; never got married till the day she died. Lots of those Medievalists don’t fit in, one way or another. Remember, you once said, Lije, that people sometimes mistake their own shortcomings for those of society and want to fix the Cities because they don’t know how to fix themselves.”
Hollywood made some money bringing Asimov’s I, Robot to the screen, directed by Alex Proyas and starring Will Smith. The Bicentennial Man with Robin Williams didn’t do so well. There was a 1964 b&w BBC TV adaptation of The Caves of Steel, starring Peter Cushing as Elijah Bailey, but it was lost. BBC made up for that disaster, in my opinion, by creating a lively 1989 audio drama that has not been equaled to this day.
MP3 1 min 34 sec
