Poser wrote:Rex Kramer wrote:The City and The City is a pretty tremendous book. About 25% of the way through according to my kindle and the setting is probably one of the most original I've ever read. Essentially the story takes place in an eastern European city that is in exactly the same place as another city. Sections of these cities overlap but the residents of each city are not allowed to acknowledge the presence of the other. Anyone breaking this gets snagged by something called Breach. It's really quite fascinating. I'm reticent to recommend it yet without finishing it but I'd check it out if the premise interests you.
Sounds similar to a hypothesis I'd been considering (but never told anyone about...):
What if you could clone the UK; Everyone who wants to Brexit goes on the independent, no-deal island just to the West. Everyone who wants to remain stays where they are, and remains part of the EU.
I'd mainly thought of of it as an illustration of 'which would you prefer to live on?', but never considered it as the basis for fiction until now.
It's more like not cloning the UK, but the country "splitting" in two regardless, without actually splitting at all. All the leavers would live in Brexituk, all the remainers in Eurouk, and neither would interfere with the other. Two countries coexisting grosstopically together but entirely divided. You'd drive into the ROI from Eurouk's NI with no border procedures, turn around at a roundabout, then queue for 2 hours to get through the border checks into Brexituk.
Honestly the concept of The City and The City is so good. One of the themes is to shed light on how we already live somewhat like what initially appears absurd in our cities, like in how we walk past the homeless without seeing them, or avoid entirely those areas of the city we don't like or feel like we don't belong. The subjective reality of The City and The City is constructed from a human capability for cognitive dissonance and correction of an observed reality to better fit our own internal views. The concept then of the two cities existing separately but together is not a novel, alien one existing only in fiction, but a natural and obvious extension of our reality.
Basically it's perfect sci-fi.
