Sci-fi Novelist Samuel R. Delany Imagines New York City Circa 3000 Future Shock by Samuel R. Delanyhe first scene of "The Graveyard Heart," by the late science-fiction writer Roger Zelazny, takes place at a party on New Year's Eve of the year 2000. It's a tale of fabulous wealth, beautiful women, and tiny ceramic dogs; of people who behave like vampires, and love that spans the centuries. It's a story I plan to reread on the big evening, as I wait to see if the lights stay on past midnight or if my word processor still works the next morning. It's hard to believe that story was written almost 40 years ago. But it's a tale to send the mind ahead to contemplate what science fiction suggests the future might actually hold, once it gets hereas, with or without us, it inevitably does. My best hope for New York City is that having persisted for a few hundred years into the third millennium, it will be remembered as the greatest city of the last century of the second millennium. In 3000 it may be recalled as rich, romantic, horrifying in many of its aspects, with a rep-utation much like the Athens of classical Greece has today, or possibly Rome; or maybe the medieval Paris of the murderer, thief, and poet Francois Villon. If we're lucky, New York City might survive as an exotic name, like Nineveh or Syberisis; but if the culture continues to change at its present rate, New York's legacy might be more like that of Cambodia's Angkor Wata deserted space, forgotten and overgrown, somewhere in the world that foreigners rarely visit. But what might happen along the way? More at http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/9952/delany.php