Thursday, February 16, 2012

Ten top science fictional bars

At io9 Esther Inglis-Arkell tagged ten of the best bars in science fiction. Many of the bars are from movies and television; one bar from a novel:
Chatsubo from Neuromancer

Chatsubo does not sound like a nice place, and it's not in a nice universe. It is, however, in a very good book, and so it's pretty normal to want to explore it. Neuromancer's tale of technological intrigue is heavy with unpleasant consequences for anyone who wasn't hardened enough to deal with it or was hardened enough that they even remotely stepped out of line. Although Chatsubo is an ex-pat bar in Japan and seems more like a pretentious hipster place than a smoldering den of corruption, a place to be annoyed with the clientele rather than terrified by them, it doesn't still doesn't seem like a fun place to go. Instead, you would go to Chatsubo (or the rest of the Neuromancer universe) like you would swim with sharks or run with the bulls - just to say you had done it and not to enjoy it.
Read about the other bars on the list.

Neuromancer made PopCrunch's list of the sixteen best dystopian books of all time and Annalee Newitz's lists of ten great American dystopias and thirteen books that will change the way you look at robots.

--Marshal Zeringue