NYC 3000

[mattd]

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