THE PHYSIOCRATS: organic biscuits & the ruins of suburbia
Pitched somewhere between Archigram, the Matrix, The Tripods, and a bacteriophage, this entry to the Reburbia suburban design competition is … all kinds of wonderful.
Whoever Michael Huges & Damien Wake actually are, I’ll hold on to the vague hope that they live in a hollowed-out volcano, and have an army of overall-clad mooks to do their bidding.
From their description:
“These 3000 ft mobile tower-cranes toddle towards suburban communities where they proceed to drill deep footings at the center of their cores into the earth and outstretch their tripod legs over a 2000 ft radius of suburb. The crane tears out homes from their plots and shelves them in 60 floors of open floor plates. Breaking it up into five sub neighborhoods, commercial/public floors are packed full of the big box stores and strip malls that sustain residential communities …”
This got me thinking about how much I’d like to see Prince Charles take on one of these beasties!
“ELEVATED GEOTHERMAL NEIGHBORHOOD SMASH PUNY ROYAL!” *stomp*
… And then I remembered some notes for something vaguely relevant, lurking at the back of a notebook -
[Micro-pitch: THE PHYSIOCRATS]
Set in a cyberpunk (ribofunk?) Duchy of Cornwall following the near-total collapse of suburbia, this [comic? TV mini-series? novella? machinima?] puts the reader/viewer in the heart of the conflict between the moneyed members of the pluto-gerontocratic military-agricultural-biotech complex and the last remaining fragments of the disenfranchised rural refusniks in a series of final skirmishes for the very heart & soul of the British countryside!
*dramatic chord!*
- Alistair Parvin’s Agri-Noir facilities in white plastic, chlorophyll, and photovoltaic blue …
- Citizen journalists unearthing corporate espionage in the vat-grown meat industry …
- Rogue combine harvesters churning through suburbia’s greening ruins …
- Eurocrats turning a blind eye to organic biscuits made from people …
- The dodgy pharming practices at the heart of a highly contagious cross-species pandemic …
Basically, I think we’re looking at Gothic Hi-Tech (cf. Bruce Sterling) with silage & giant chickens. It’s Ghost in the Shell meets Countryfile, as a six-part mini-series.