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A Fantasy of a Sane Transit System, Part I.

June 29, 2016 by Exangel

by Rustin Wright.

Daviesville is a midsized city surrounded by small towns and farmland. It’s about a hundred years old. Cold winters. Hot summers. Pretty much middle class enough. Back in the late 1800’s it had a cute little trolley but nobody really thinks of that as anything but a curiosity. Like barber shop quartets and Worth ballgowns. The city also expanded swiftly in the nineteen-fities through the seventies, deeply entranced with the idea of the car but low enough on capital to, thankfully, never really build the kind of loopy, impassable-right-of-way sprawl which now hobbles so many other places.

In 2003 a citizen’s group starts to agitate for Daviesville to finally build a mass transit network. The population is aging, the local highway system isn’t that great anyway, and since the terrible earthquake of ’98 there has been an obvious need to rethink how the city works. Daviesville is also a city of small manufacturers and used to the idea that people should be able to develop a competency, figure something out, and build it for themselves. Call it the Show Me City.

So this citizen’s group starts to argue. What should they build? The vague ideas that they have don’t seem to add up to anything very coherent. After a couple of years of this they realze that they’re not really getting anywhere. So they start to look around. Surely there are thousands of people out there who are experts in using all of these modern technologies that the factories of Daviesville use every day. To use those same things, like modern adhesives and flexible plastics, to build diverse, modern mass transit.

Instead they find a handful of manufacturers, all of them with defense contractor mentalities. All of them thinking in terms of cost-plus construction, building not for best function but for what sounds best in a proposal and is best for the careers of the people making the decisions.

After a while they reach a shocking conclusion.

Almost every high school in America teaches at least one class in how to build, modify, and run automobiles. Something like three thousand colleges teach classes in the same. Countless tens of millions of people are happily experimenting and puzzling and connecting with each other every day of the year working to make cars better, more fun, less expensive, and suited to every possible job, budget, style, or means of manufacture. Meanwhile the number of high schools teahcing how to innovate and experiment with mass transit vehicles is…zero. The number of colleges? Maybe fifteen. All oriented towards training their graduates the conservative mindset of those defence contractor-style billion dollar corporations. The number of backyard experimenters? Maybe fifty in the entire United States.

So the first step is not to decide what to build. It is to realize that we have absolutely no idea of what is even possible.

Filed Under: EAP: The Magazine, Summer 2016: I Want the World.

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In This Issue.

  • Who Was Dorothy?
  • Those Evil Spirits.
  • The Screaming Baboon.
  • Her.
  • A Tale of Persistence.
  • A Conversation with Steve Hugh Westenra.
  • Person Number Twelve.
  • Dream Shapes.
  • Cannon Beach.
  • The Muse.
  • Spring.
  • The Greatness that was Greece.
  • 1966, NYC; nothing like it.
  • Sun Shower.
  • The Withering Weight of Being Perceived.
  • Broken Clock.
  • Confession.
  • Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse.
  • Sometimes you die, I mean that people do.
  • True (from “My Life with Dogs”).
  • Fragmentary musings on birds and bees.
  • 12 Baking Essentials to Always Have in Your Poetry.
  • Broad Street.
  • A Death in Alexandria.
  • My Forked Tongue.
  • Swan Lake.
  • Long Division.
  • Singing against the muses.
  • Aphorisms from “What Remains to Be Said”.

In The News.

That cult classic pirate/sci fi mash up GREENBEARD, by Richard James Bentley, is now a rollicking audiobook, available from Audible.com. Narrated and acted by Colby Elliott of Last Word Audio, you’ll be overwhelmed by the riches and hilarity within.

“Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges is your typical seventeenth-century Cambridge-educated lawyer turned Caribbean pirate, as comfortable debating the virtues of William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, and compound interest as he is wielding a cutlass, needling archrival Henry Morgan, and parsing rum-soaked gossip for his next target. When a pepper monger’s loose tongue lets out a rumor about a fleet loaded with silver, the Captain sets sail only to find himself in a close encounter of a very different kind.

After escaping with his sanity barely intact and his beard transformed an alarming bright green, Greybagges rallies The Ark de Triomphe crew for a revenge-fueled, thrill-a-minute adventure to the ends of the earth and beyond.

This frolicsome tale of skullduggery, jiggery-pokery, and chicanery upon Ye High Seas is brimming with hilarious puns, masterful historical allusions, and nonstop literary hijinks. Including sly references to Thomas Pynchon, Treasure Island, 1940s cinema, and notable historical figures, this mélange of delights will captivate readers with its rollicking adventure, rich descriptions of food and fashion, and learned asides into scientific, philosophical, and colonial history.”

THE SUPERGIRLS is back, revised and updated!

supergirls-take-1

In The News.

Newport Public Library hosted a three part Zoom series on Visionary Fiction, led by Tod.  

And we love them for it, too.

The first discussion was a lively blast. You can watch it here. The second, Looking Back to Look Forward can be seen here.

The third was the best of all. Visions of the Future, with a cast of characters including poets, audiobook artists, historians, Starhawk, and Mary Shelley. Among others. Link is here.

In the News.

SNOTTY SAVES THE DAY is now an audiobook, narrated by Last Word Audio’s mellifluous Colby Elliott. It launched May 10th, but for a limited time, you can listen for free with an Audible trial membership. So what are you waiting for? Start listening to the wonders of how Arcadia was born from the worst section of the worst neighborhood in the worst empire of all the worlds since the universe began.

In The News.

If you love audio books, don’t miss the new release of REPORT TO MEGALOPOLIS, by Tod Davies, narrated by Colby Elliott of Last Word Audio. The tortured Aspern Grayling tries to rise above the truth of his own story, fighting with reality every step of the way, and Colby’s voice is the perfect match for our modern day Dr. Frankenstein.

In The News.

Mike Madrid dishes on Miss Fury to the BBC . . .

Tod on the Importance of Visionary Fiction

Check out this video of “Beyond Utopia: The Importance of Fantasy,” Tod’s recent talk at the tenth World-Ecology Research Network Conference, June 2019, in San Francisco. She covers everything from Wind in the Willows to the work of Kim Stanley Robinson, with a look at The History of Arcadia along the way. As usual, she’s going on about how visionary fiction has an important place in the formation of a world we want and need to have.

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