Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Anyone know of post-apoc fiction that features storage units?
It feels like half the new construction in my town consists of these stupid, chunky self-storage buildings. Incredibly cheap materials. Similar but not identical layouts. They are fundamentally dead buildings, existing to facilitate brief visits and long periods of quiescence. Mausoleums for consumer goods.
This brought to mind the sci-fi tropes of “tech-mining,” delving the ruins of the past for lost and valuable resources. It’s a big part of certain genres of post-collapse sci-fi. Starsector (probably by way of Revelation Space), Hyperion Cantos, Battletech, arguably Foundation. I most recently saw a version in Iain Banks’ Matter, where an eroding waterfall progressively excavates the long-lost city buried beneath its cliff. The advanced alloys which withstood all that water are salvaged for building materials by a subsequent civilization. Evocative.
These tropes surely owe a lot to the post-apocalyptic genre. A Canticle for Liebowitz begins with a monk uncovering relics in a lost fallout shelter. Not anything useful, mind you, but cultural artifacts of immeasurable value. An apocalypse is perhaps the easiest explanation for how the ancients had something we can no longer get for ourselves.
There’s a game called Caves of Qud dotted with ruins from a long-dead civilization:
You can trudge through a futuristic jungle only to stumble upon these bones of the former world, populated by tribal robots and sentry turrets. Descend into the caves like a true arconaut, and you’ll find even greater treasure…
In our current reality, how much of that “treasure” is piled in storage units? Boring-ass grids of concrete with one, maybe two garage doors between the loot and the outside world. If the bombs dropped today, any future generations would face the most boring, practical version of tech-mining: cleaning out the attic. “Yeah, we cleared out the mutants from sector 35. Found another one of those metal crypts. Bring the boys over; we can probably find each of them a golf club.”
I remembered Girls' Last Tour had a storage units chapter, but skimming it, that is not quite right, or at least ambiguous.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link