The books
J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World (1962): “At the end of the creek they entered the next lagoon, a wide circle of dark green water almost half a mile in diameter. … as they moved along through the flat water, the sun slanting down behind them opening up the submerged depths, they could see the clear outlines of five- and six-storey buildings looming like giant ghosts, here and there a moss-covered roof breaking the surface as the swell rolled past it.”
Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip (1964): “This was habitable Mars, this almost-fertile spiderweb of lines, radiating and crisscrossing but always barely adequate to support life, no more. The Senator Taft [Canal], directly below now, showed a sluggish and repellent green; it was water sluiced and filtered in its final stages, but here it showed the accretions of time, the underlying slime and sand and contaminants which made it anything but potable.”
Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965): “He meandered gloomily in the direction of Chicken Pox Prospects’ hydro-pumping system; it was attached to their now partially sand-filled irrigation network which served all the gardens of their hovel. Before watering came sand-removal, he realized. If they didn’t get the big Class-A dredge started up soon they wouldn’t be able to water even if they wanted to.”
William Gibson, Count Zero (1986): “It was late afternoon. In a few hours, the first lights would start blinking on in the dark bulks of the projects. Big Playground swept away like a concrete sea; the Projects rose beyond the opposite shore, vast rectilinear structures softened by a random overlay of retrofitted greenhouse balconies, catfish tanks, solar heating systems, and the ubiquitous chickenwire dishes.”
William Gibson, ‘Johnny Mnemonic’ (1981): “The mall runs forty kilometres from end to end, a ragged overlap of Fuller domes roofing what was once a suburban artery. If they turn off the arcs on a clear day, a gray approximation of sunlight filters through layers of acrylic, a view like the prison sketches of Giovanni Piranesi. The three southernmost kilometres roof Nighttown. Nighttown pays no taxes, no utilities. The neon arcs are dead, and the geodesics have been smoked black by decades of cooking fires.”
William Gibson, ‘Johnny Mnemonic’ (1981): “The mall runs forty kilometres from end to end, a ragged overlap of Fuller domes roofing what was once a suburban artery. If they turn off the arcs on a clear day, a gray approximation of sunlight filters through layers of acrylic, a view like the prison sketches of Giovanni Piranesi. The three southernmost kilometres roof Nighttown. Nighttown pays no taxes, no utilities. The neon arcs are dead, and the geodesics have been smoked black by decades of cooking fires.”
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Stanisław Lem, Solaris (1961): “I unrolled a map of Solaris on the plastic surface and studied it at length. The living ocean had its peaks and its canyons. Its islands, which were covered with a decomposing mineral deposit, were certainly related to the nature of the ocean bed. But did it control the eruptions and subsidence of the rocky formations buried in its depths? No one knew.”
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Arkady & Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic (1972): “We were travelling from pylon to pylon right down the middle of the street. It had been ages since the last time someone had walked or driven down this street. The asphalt was all cracked, and grass had grown in the cracks. But that was still our human grass. On the sidewalk on our left there was black bramble growing, and you could tell the boundaries of the Zone: the black growth ended at the curb as if it had been mown.”
