Post #4387727

Quasit's Daily Book Recommendations: "Oath of Fealty" (1981) by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle Age Range: 17 to adult Genre: Science Fiction Here's a book that's a bit different: it's about an arcology. Are you familiar with arcologies? If not, I'm guessing you're not an architect. An archology is essentially a whole city contained in a single huge building. It includes residential apartments, shops, parks, swimming pools...anything a person could want. In theory you could live your whole life in one and never need to leave. A lot of architects have taken interest in the concept over the years, and there are a few partially-built or complete archologies in existence. "Oath of Fealty" takes place in the near-to-mid future. After a massive fire in Los Angeles, a major corporation arranged to build an archology on the land: Todos Santos. It's a huge building, four square miles with a population of nearly 250,000 residents. But Todos Santos has enemies. Politicians, environmental terrorists, and hostile citizens of Los Angeles. The management are experts, and some of them have a special advantage: neural links to the archology computer. It's not AI, but it's like having the internet constantly on tap just by thinking about it. [The tables were long and narrow, with a pair of moving beltways down the center. Dirty dishes came from their right, and a continuous stream of food and beverages and clean utensils poured from some cornucopia to the left. "Take a place," Art Bonner said. "You can choose your own company, or wait for someone to choose you." "No reservations?" Reedy asked. "No. It's a random proposition." Bonner led them to an empty stretch at a long table. "Scheduling's going to catch hell for this if it doesn't fill up." He paused for a moment to stare at nothing. That's the value of that implant, Rand thought. He's just made a note, with all the details, and tomorrow MILLIE will remind him to think about schedules.] It's a thick book and a long story, but it's not a tedious read. It feels like a cross between science fiction and a thick mainstream epic or disaster novel. Which isn't surprising, because Niven and Pournelle wrote a few such books. I'll note that the villains are a bit dated; crazed environmental activists who hate progress and technology, but are proven utterly wrong. Niven and Pournelle are a pair of old right-wingers, and it shows. But they're not TOO obnoxious about it. As with yesterday's novel, the politics don't get in the way of the story. If the concept of archologies interests you, Mack Reynolds also wrote some novels about them. I'll be recommending some of those novels in the future. The book's still in print, and it's available in ebook format from the usual suspects as well (please don't use Amazon). You'd have a good chance of finding used copies in used book shops. And it's available to borrow freely from the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/oathoffealty0000larr You can find a complete spreadsheet of all the books I've recommended here to date (along with links to each post) here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSzubtaPojvprNwZCeR6N4xzCpZzMeb4xrrEHPtk6Bvx3RGj1Bxdg2KWY0CcjHjxUfMTGTF1eYpyoFn/pubhtml Happy reading! 🤓📖 #Books #Bookstodon #ScienceFiction #BookRecs #BookRecommendations #DailyBookRecs #QuasitBookRecs