"How Do Your SF Elite Live In Your Worlds?" Topic

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When I first spotted this wargaming board, with its blend of East and West flavors …

My first thought was "Union of Allied Planets" (as in Firefly/Serenity). Either as an average suburb on one of their rich "core planets" or as a small enclave for the pro-Alliance elite in any other planet.

Then, as I looked at it more and more, it started looking like the neighborhoods seen in the 2005 Charlize Theron film Aeon Flux (the city of Bregna, I think):

Thoughts?

Thanks,

Dan

I would think there would be a better mix of English, Asian, and Hispanic cultures

I know that board is amazing

That board is amazing. I'd love to play Infinity on that.

As far as the architecture goes you never know what is going to come in and out of style. I ran across a pyramid in the middle of Rome one time when I was there. If you walk around any of the trendy neighborhoods in Pittsburgh you will see quite a few different architectural styles.

It is one of the things that makes that board look really good is how organic the thing looks. There is a cohesivenss but it is not absolute.

That is just lovely. Its like the anti-shanty town. I have to build something like that now. Dan thank you for finding such lovely models to inspire us all. Your google-fu is amazing.

Awesome job, kudos!

Shprt violent lives this is mine elite life style;)Nice board by the way

Stealth1000: "It's like the anti-shanty town"

Well put!!!

Dan

Personally I think it lacks the unfettered lack of restraint or excesses.
Who is there to say to the Super-elite "No sir, I do think that twice life sized rhino statue looks naff." I don't think Alfred Pennyworth would be valued here.
or the two-storey house for the shoulder bag size pet rodents or the theme park is missing.
Or the VTOL landing pad.

Dan this is not totally in line with this topic but just wanted to point it out as some nice terrain in 15mm to add to the list. link

very cool…and you still know a war is going on. The sand bags seem to be protecting the trees…

I see the 'elite' living in either gated communities , tower blocks ala the Barbican in London or Orbital Habitats , and the rest of us in either Mega blocks as portrayed in Dredd or in shanty towns , like Elysium .

Beautiful, I'm thinking twice as nice if I could build that for 15mm.

CzarBlood: "I see the 'elite' living in either gated communities , tower blocks ala the Barbican in London or Orbital Habitats , and the rest of us in either Mega blocks as portrayed in Dredd or in shanty towns , like Elysium ."

If the elite can't realistically live in floating garden cities, high in the sky or in orbiting stations, then I seriously doubt that they would want any of their surface communities to look like a prison. After all, they are paying good money to look like they are immune to any real world problem or threat.

The elite would want to flaunt that they are the only ones who can really afford large lots of land anyway, so they might stay way from the confined look of high-rise living (except those few times then they have to have a short presence closer to the plebs) and instead choose the illusion of more openness. That's why I love the idea of gardens and stunning landscaping (any non-utilitarian use of land for that matter) as a clear statement of their protected living status. After all, they are the few who can afford to live in a little version of paradise for themselves and their children. Green open spaces might be the ultimate statement of wealth in most futuristic worlds. I think that all undesirables would be kept out of sight, perhaps confined to incredibly crowded and deep subterranean living, with their access to the surface neatly capped off with a pretty dome (pretty on the outer side).

So I think that most of the protective measures closest to the buildings will be "invisible" until needed. The next layer of defense could be more noticeable, perhaps even visually imposing, but would have to be quite some distance away.

Thoughts?

Dan

If the shanty town is extremely crowded (one tiny sleeping room for the entire family), devoid of anything green, and made up of stacked clumsy shacks surrounded by barb wire and polluted ditches and dissected by a maze of confusing and narrow alleys …

Then the elite's secluded "anti-shanty town" community* must appear to luxuriate in openness, surrounded by manicured gardens, with trees, ponds and running streams, and composed of well-built one or two story buildings (perhaps even with a separate room for each member of the family and one or two spare rooms! ). All walkways and bridges would be neatly planned, enjoyable to traverse, and safe and secure in appearance.

What do you guys think the elite's secluded "anti-shanty town" would look like?

Dan
* That is if each family among the elite could no longer find sufficient land for each to have their own huge estate property, spreading out and isolated some distance away from the next luxuriant family estate.

Its true… The walls around today's gated communities are only close in because the people living there usually aren't actually rich. Nobody likes to be reminded of how the unwashed proles are living if they can possibly help it.

Looks like a TS TNG set for an off world city.

Why would the poor of the future be poorer than the poor of today? When has this happened before?

If you have a situation where the economy depends on people, who must be trained to a high level -- which requires good pay and decent education -- then massive slums for the workers seems unlikely.

If most work is automated, then it is also cheap, and massive slums for the workers seems unlikely.

Future mega rich might, just, hog lots of land, but the poor of the future will live well enough in high rises. Think Singapore, but with more living room per person.

Really massive income disparity cannot last without either the poor also getting better slowly, or the rich having guards. Those guards pretty quickly "do a Mamluk" and take over. So it is the best interests of the rich to keep the poor getting less poor.

How? Well, for one, continued progress is not guaranteed. Things can and do change. The Great Depression did catch many by surprise.

How could such a thing happen again? Perhaps due to reduced access to basic resources? More people, less food, water, etc to go around? Or maybe some future mega corporations might force governments to outlaw unions or any other worker leverage (like in the series Continuum) and people in the developed world might be so desperate for work that they might accept below-standard compensation and work environment?

If the current outsourcing trends continue, for example, and more and more companies continue moving overseas, I can easily envision future Americans accepting living conditions and wages worse than what our grandparents had to endure. Both parents working to bring in a combined income that is less than what the Dad used to make a few years ago. I have already experienced it and so have a few of my friends.

But, just because the work goes overseas doesn't necessarily mean it improves the lives of the poor in that country …

For now, if you need a fresh organ from a living donor, and with a procurement guarantee of as little as two weeks, just go to Shanghai and, according to government "brokers", they'll line up a donor for you, with or without their consent. And the person might already be working at a state-run slave factory, producing lots of cheap goods for you, until the very moment he gets his name called. Who's to say that, in a couple of decades or centuries, the pendulum might swing in the other direction and we might become the harvested ones instead.

It's all about the really big players (whoever they are – roles differ from one place to another and from one era to the next) and what they can do behind the scenes. But the illusion of guaranteed gradual progress will always help calm the masses (and to continue buying now because the future can only get better, right?) as long as they continue to believe that some day they'll get a shot at a piece of the pie. You don't have to share the wealth with the poor, just sell the dream properly. That's all.

And, aren't we talking SF anyway?

Dan

The Elite live in burbs just like us, drives cars similar to us, there stuff is just shinier and nicer. Then there are punks like me who embrace the kipple, the cast off outmoded detritus for the bountiful resource that it is. Punk, Tech hooligan, Hacker, Maker, Orc or any other number of names, we embrace what we can do with the resources available to us.

Here are the modest homes of the ever so humble citizens of Elysium:

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But, as nice as you try to be to the less fortunate, they still have a hard time understanding the concept that flying in uninvited, crashing into your yard, breaking into your house and using your stuff is simply unacceptable and just plain rude:

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Thank goodness for the kind-hearted security police, who are always willing to gently escort unwanted guests off your property:

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Dan

Interesting structure concept here:

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Dan

Or maybe some mega corporations might force governments to outlaw unions or any other worker leverage (like in the series Continuum) and people in the developed world might be so desperate for work that they might accept below-standard compensation and work environment?

Welcome to New Zealand.

I never actually got to see Elysium. I was to afraid that I would have too high expectations after District 9, somehow thinking it should be more of the same, but different. What if it wasn't up to it? Would that somehow tarnish my enjoyment of D9 ?(as happened with Phantom Menace)
Was it good? Would you recommend it? I ask as I respect the opinions of contributors here, moreso than of film critics.

I think Elysium was OK.
Nothing new story-wise.

I am not inclined to watch it again except maybe for the visual effects.
The flyers and VTOL style craft in Elysium itself were everything that cool sleek sci-fi ships should be.

The ending was quite Hollywood.

It is very much style over substance I feel.
D9 clearly had very clear political themes running through it, immigration and so on.
It also had a very strong lead character who we saw turn from a bad man to a good guy.
Elysium has some political commentary but not as strong I don't think (class systems and the rich poor divide in this case)

I would say watch it, but don't expect anything great.
Oh and the tech at the end bothered me a bit too.

If most work is automated, then it is also cheap, and massive slums for the workers seems unlikely

If automated work is cheap, why pay workers? Workers will be fired because automated work is cheaper; and you'll get slums for jobless people.
That is, is the SF Elite is allowed to keep all the profits of the automated work for them to build these beautiful towns.
Not a new choice to make – even in the far future.

Here Here CC
The poor can get poorer, back in 09, I had be let go from my job, because of the whole 08 bad deals going wrong, and lost over time everything, it wasn't until two years that I finally landed a job actually two of them both being part-time, now during that time between jobs if it wasn't for family the wife and I would had been living under a bridge. I am slowly gaining ground again but I will never be back to the point I was at.

Elysium is worth watching just for the space colony visuals.

Very inspiring particularly if you read Banks Culture series novels

@Cacique Caribe

I meant the design of these gated communites would be like the Barbican , walways and draping gardens , gated with massive security posts , but very well disguised.

As I write it…it depends. Most of what I write is set on the absolute fringes of explored space. 'Elites' in the UCSA are really concentrated on one or two planets. In an effort to reduce costs, human workers have been forced into obsolescence on those particular planets. The others are very much monocultures with little in the way of elites. The closest thing on, say, Lexington or Dixie, are militia officers (federal military is unfeasible), landowners, or possibly mine owners.

In the UNCS…it's different. Think USSR apparatchiks in a eurocommunist society. Elysium is not too far off, although the tech to build something that huge simply doesn't exist. At least not anymore.

Thank you for the comments on Elysium.

I think the most effective barriers are mental ones, rather like the rope barrier at the show/movie/display with a do not cross sign. IT'S JUST A PIECE OF ROPE PEOPLE!!

But when that fails a wall is a good back-up. Rather like Czarblood's version. And a good field of fire on the other side. Although when I was in India, we were visiting former generals and Brigadiers. Their walled in home had shanties on the outside face of their 2m high wall.

not sure if this is of interest. I like the song but the clip is one of my dystopian visions of Sci-fi. (Logans Run, The Island)

YouTube link

Has CC seen any Trigan Empire?

triganempire.co.uk/home

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Average people live in this

The elite live in this or this…

Not as grand in scale, but these fellas in France seem to know how to put together a nice little SF-ish upscale homestead:

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Cute, aren't they?

I can almost imagine a few inconspicuous hover drone bots somewhere in the distance, patrolling the perimeter:

TMP link

Dan

This reminds me of the terrain board in the very first post:

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Dan

"Modern" architecture: Ugly and boring. Also shows a complete lack of understanding of the "utility" of comfort, decoration, scale or the beauty of living things in living spaces. No wonder that space is empty. Who'd want to spend time there?

Cool linked article, Dan.

For a more thorough understanding of what makes living spaces livable, I'd like to recommend the following:

A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander et al

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Home: A Short History of an Idea, by Witold Rybczynski

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Home From Nowhere, by James Howard Kunstler

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By the way, pretty girls love the beach. Rich people will always have beach houses, even if the beach moves further inland.

8)

This is nice:

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Dan

The people on Bellerophon (Firefly) had the right idea:

Dan

Maybe something like the simuri house up high on it's base no stairs or ramps just a landing pad, and perhaps skywalks connected to one and another.

This is tempting:

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Dan

Polar Knights: 2184 – The New North

I think I've decided that for this project, many of the "new elite" will live offworld, in pellucidarized planetesimals, on asteroid-terraformed New Old Mars, on cloud-city airships in high-altitude/low orbital flight above Venus, in buried cities encircling the poles of Mercury, in the pleasure domes and rendered virtualities of Luna, and among the many orbitals encircling the Old Planet.

The homeworld elites will live in various places: gated communities in bucolic settings, eco-resorts on all the world's best new beaches, tax-haven offshore enclaves and engineered "freeport" island city-states, luxury orbitals and lunar condos. Anywhere away from the drowned and abandoned twencen cities along the swamped and haunted old coastlines. Also, mountain bunkers and underground cities, as a stopgap against cyber-hacking, EMP/ELF/DW weapons and total nuclear annihilation in the coming zaibatsu-superstate war of all against all.

Have you seen these?
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Sorry if this has been posted before.

A bit delicate for gaming but very nice. They remind me of one of the habitats in one of Iain Bank's books.

Also on that site, although probably NOT for the elite link

Great pics. I've always been fascinated by abandonment and decay. Great ideas come to mind in a deserted city.

Hi All,

I have been thinking about doing this for quite a while.Like the clean futuristic look.

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And it's free I think.

Thanks Matakishi

Guys,

You have got to check out this "Future Square" table!

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Dan