Here begins a happy day in 2381. The morning sun is high enough to touch the uppermost fifty stories of Urban Monad 116. Soon the building's entire eastern face will glitter like the bosom of the sea at daybreak. Charles Mattern's window, activated by the dawn's early photons, deopaques.
The World Inside ~ by Robert Silverberg, 1971, science fiction, 184 pages
2381. Man had attained Utopia. War, starvation, crime, and birth control had been eliminated. Life was totally fulfilled and sustained within mammoth skyscrapers hundred of stories high. It was blessed to have children. Contemplation of controlling families was heretical. And there were methods of treatment for heresy, the most radical being death.
I have just started this book, but so far it's been interesting. Did you notice that word "deopaques"? It isn't actually a word I can find in the dictionary, so let's figure out what it means:
o·paque / ōˈpāk / adjective = not able to be seen through; not transparent. Example: "The windows were opaque with steam."
So that means if the windows somehow "deopaques," we can now see through it. In the future, apparently, sunlight "deopaques" windows. I've only read a single chapter, so none of this is explained yet. Maybe later in the book. Or maybe it's going to be beyond my understanding.
Also interesting is the fact that "man" had attained Utopia, according to the blurb on the dust jacket. That's before the women's movement, so I wonder if the women in the book consider it a utopia or not.
Gilion at Rose City Reader hosts
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