JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1116

Frank R. Paul (again!) put his indelible design stamp in this fantastic cover art for Edomnd Hamilton’s (1904-1977)¹ story “Cities in the Air” that appeared in the November 1929 issue of Air Wonder Stories.  I don’t have access to the content of the story, but at base it seems, at the very least, that the city footprint underneath the floating city has got to be New York.   Some of the geography looks a little off, but if the City was allowed to return to its less-people origins, this is sort of what it looked like.  And since bridges are still standing though not necessarily buildings, and being that there so much lush green growth, something awful must’ve happened to reduce the population of Metropolis.  (Manhattan Island seems pretty identifiable, as does Staten Island, part of Jersey City, plus Brooklyn and the Bronx, plus the upper island of Manhattan….there’s no chance I think that there is not New York City.)

So something big indeed must’ve happened to get everyone up in the floating NYC replacement–not the least of which would’ve been the discovery of some sort of gravity-negating something.  I’m not sure what the point of all of that is, exactly, unless these new floating cities are cultivating the Earth, or something, Eden-zing it. perhaps the cities were on the go, somehow, though a sudden start or stop or dip or thrust or whatever might prove devastating, unless there was something invented that would ensure certain laws of motion wouldn’t apply to anti-graviationally-platformed floating cities of the future.  And if it wasn’t going to move, why would you want to go through all of that effort in removing everyone to  giant floating city and keep it in the same pace, hovering above its former self.

But in this sort of future, everything and anything is possible, so I guess it all makes sense as long as you can adjust definitions and “criteria of validity” at will.    I would like to see the city plan for the interior of the place–we can already see that it is ringed with enormous buildings, but I’d like to see center-city, especially the reason for the hole in the bottom of the floating city donut.  (I’m thinking that this could also classify in the rare cross-sub-category joining the History of the Future posts with the History of Holes–History of Future Holes.)

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Notes

1.  Hamilton’s bibliography is located (at least) here.