Short Story 43: Beautyland

Marc Aramini · 02 Aug 2012, 22:13 · from 2012-August.txt.gz

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From: marcaramini at yahoo.com (Marc Aramini)
Date: Thu, 2 Aug 2012 15:13:40 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) Short Story 43: Beautyland
In-Reply-To: <CAMwO0gwW5o9CyM36Awu+szZ7yrRZihNBJWYaFeH4uxyM0A-a4A at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <1343945620.47290.YahooMailClassic at web160704.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>

The story does say "there were six deer - I guess they may have been about the only wild deer left in the US", so that seems to be pretty bad and widespread de-speciation.? And ALL the plants seem to be dying from something.
?
In the short story "Remembrance to Come", the college has moved underground becaus the US has been fried, but I don't think this is the same continuity (primarily because of the capitalist basis of the economy here in Beautyland)

--- On Thu, 8/2/12, Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:

From: Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Short Story 43: Beautyland
To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Date: Thursday, August 2, 2012, 3:04 PM

On Thu, Aug 2, 2012 at 5:55 PM, Marc Aramini <marcaramini at yahoo.com> wrote:

Is it from a nuclear fallout or just bad business practices?
I read this long ago, but nuclear fallout never occurred to me. It doesn't fit in a story about ecology & money, a sudden nuclear war wouldn't be a persistent hazard over the entire country and wipe out *all* native wildlife, and the fallout that could persist over many years would both be fairly weak and wearing filters would not do much to help - certainly you wouldn't start immediately choking on the air. All of it fits better a general motif of smog and ozone and whatnot.

(At the time I read it, I wondered how attractive the animals or parcel of land could possibly be, if the rest of the country was *that* bad off.)

-- 
gwern
http://www.gwern.net

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