30 Winks

@sevensixfive You could take it one step further back and include E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman series.

We don’t talk often enough about the Foundation -> Dune -> Star Wars literary influence arc. Desert planets, evil empires, prophecied chosen ones and psychic powers. Plus the destruction and creation of Big Dumb Objects

@SandyofCthulhu I don't remember Jesus. Do remember Ben Franklin, though. I remember thinking what secret knowledge could you torture out of him? "Tell me, is a penny saved REALLY a penny earned!?"

A lot of people don’t realize how far Lovecraft was willing to go in his tales. In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward he makes it quite clear that the evil old sorcerer had resurrected, interrogated, and tortured Jesus of Nazareth himself.

@emollick Kind of an H.R. Giger feel to a couple of those atriums.

The best Brutalist/Brutalist-inspired architecture of the 1960s through 1980s still looks more like the future than almost anything built before or since. The atriums of the Hyatt Regency San Francisco (1973), Hyatt Regency Atlanta (1967), Atlanta Marriott Marquis (1985).

Of course, the era was abundant in political strife. Still, the wide embrace of the American Renaissance aesthetic across the political spectrum implies a shared feeling of taking part in a valuable project and a confidence in a bright future. Would be great to get that back.

While I have no doubt cynicism played some role, it seems clear that there was genuine idealism there as well. I’m thinking of Andrew Carnegie saying, “The man who dies rich dies disgraced” and giving ninety percent of his fortune to build public libraries.

Reading “The American Renaissance 1876-1917," about the architecture-centered aesthetic and intellectual movement of that era. Notes and musings follow -