my favorite fictional transportation invention was by Jasper Fforde. If you’ve read his Shades of Grey series (it’s the You Can’t See Color series, not the Bad BDSM series, and actually good to read. my favorite books right now) it’s basically a very very fancy conveyor belt that has higher speed lanes (like 50mph lanes) as you get toward the center, and all you do is step on and whoosh off from Reading to Cardiff. Except it’s also made of gel and eats people if they fall asleep on it. Science fiction and stuff.
i like the fiction because it gets our minds churning about “well, how could we do that IRL? is it possible?” about all sorts of things.
Asimov was writing about that kind of thing in The Caves of Steel a decade before Fforde was born, and almost fifty years before Fforde published his first novel.
Arthur C. Clarke used moving walkways in Against the Fall of Night (later rewritten as The City and the Stars) in 1948.
Heinlein wrote The Roads Must Roll in 1940.
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis depicted moving walkways on film in 1927.
H.G. fucking Wells used them in 1887 and 1889 in A Story of the Days to Come and When the Sleeper Wakes.
Moving walkways have been in science fiction since the very beginning.
I’m frankly surprised Verne didn’t invent them in Paris in the Twentieth Century, but that’s probably more futurism than science fiction, so he wrote about asphalt, and cars, and gas stations, and high speed trains, and elevators, and fax machines, and something quite close to the Internet. In 1860. But, alas, no moving walkways.
my favorite fictional transportation invention was by Jasper Fforde. If you’ve read his Shades of Grey series (it’s the You Can’t See Color series, not the Bad BDSM series, and actually good to read. my favorite books right now) it’s basically a very very fancy conveyor belt that has higher speed lanes (like 50mph lanes) as you get toward the center, and all you do is step on and whoosh off from Reading to Cardiff. Except it’s also made of gel and eats people if they fall asleep on it. Science fiction and stuff.
i like the fiction because it gets our minds churning about “well, how could we do that IRL? is it possible?” about all sorts of things.
You sure this isn’t a vore spinoff of the twilight spinoff ?
I haven’t actually read twilight or the bad bdsm one so like I’m not 100 percent sure, but if it is it’s at least got a good sense of humor about it
Asimov was writing about that kind of thing in The Caves of Steel a decade before Fforde was born, and almost fifty years before Fforde published his first novel.
Arthur C. Clarke used moving walkways in Against the Fall of Night (later rewritten as The City and the Stars) in 1948.
Heinlein wrote The Roads Must Roll in 1940.
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis depicted moving walkways on film in 1927.
H.G. fucking Wells used them in 1887 and 1889 in A Story of the Days to Come and When the Sleeper Wakes.
But he didn’t invent them either. The first moving walkway was designed and built in 1893 by Joseph Lyman Silsbee.
Moving walkways have been in science fiction since the very beginning.
I’m frankly surprised Verne didn’t invent them in Paris in the Twentieth Century, but that’s probably more futurism than science fiction, so he wrote about asphalt, and cars, and gas stations, and high speed trains, and elevators, and fax machines, and something quite close to the Internet. In 1860. But, alas, no moving walkways.
We already got people conveyors. I’m talking about fancy people eating people conveyors. Also abstract transportation.