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Laputa

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Stephensonia

New Atlantis in The Diamond Age, or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer might make the cynical think of a functional Swiftian Laputa.

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Community entry: Laputa

Parts of the text below from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Laputa is a fictional place from the book Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift.

Laputa is a flying island or rock, that can be directed by its inhabitants in any direction. Its tyrannic ruler uses it to control the mainland by threatening with covering rebel regions with the island's shadow. The people of Laputa are fond of mathematics and technology, but fail to make practical use of their knowledge. They insert technologies and abstractions into their conversations inappropriately, such as using large sacks of objects to show each other, which they consider "purer" than words. These sacks weigh them down and bend them over with their weight (any resemblance to the Graphic User Interface is purely anticipatory rather than coincidental).

They created such marvels as a mirror that would let you converse with any historical figure, but couldn't construct well-designed clothing. This is a satire on the Royal Society of his day.

The satire of the Royal Society is made even more obvious when Gulliver descends to the mainland of Laputa's kingdom and visits its capital, Lagado, where there is a "Grand Academy of Projectors". Among the projects in course in the Academy are:

  • A project to extract sunrays from cucumbers and store them in glass bottles, to release them in winter days.
  • A project to convert human excrement into food.
  • A project to teach blind people to paint, by making them tell one color from another by the taste of the pigments.
  • A project to make silk from spider's webs.
  • A machine to generate automatically phrases and sentences which, combined together, would form books: "He then led me to the frame, about the sides, whereof all his pupils stood in ranks. It was twenty feet square, placed in the middle of the room. The superfices was composed of several bits of wood, about the bigness of a die, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender wires. These bits of wood were covered, on every square, with paper pasted on them; and on these papers were written all the words of their language, in their several moods, tenses, and declensions; but without any order. [...] The pupils, at his command, took each of them hold of an iron handle, whereof there were forty fixed round the edges of the frame; and giving them a sudden turn, the whole disposition of the words was entirely changed. He then commanded six-and-thirty of the lads, to read the several lines softly, as they appeared upon the frame; and where they found three or four words together that might make part of a sentence, they dictated to the four remaining boys, who were scribes." (This one is similar to some of the pursuits of John Wilkins and Daniel Waterhouse in Quicksilver, and also quite similar to the Wikipedia project)

At least some of these projects were inspired by an actual visit that Jonathan Swift made to the Royal Society in 1710.

The "Laputa Missile Complex" is the target of the B-52 bomber "Leper Colony" in the 1964 satire Dr. Strangelove, a reference to the highly theroetical discussions of nuclear war and deterrence that led the world to catastrophe in that film.

The 1986 anime film Laputa: The Castle in the Sky by Hayao Miyazaki features a floating city named Laputa after that of Gulliver's Travels. "La puta" means "the whore" in Spanish. Swift probably knew this, and Miyazaki probably not. The Walt Disney company did, and as the American distributor of Miyazaki's film (though still unreleased in the USA), contracted the name to "Castle in the Sky." Some Spanish editions of "Gulliver's Travels" use "Lupata" as an euphemism.