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.
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.