The Empress of Ice Cream (1996)

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6 points·dadt··5 comments

> If fire is the Promethean gift that first made us civilized, ice is a bewildering opposite; it has been tamed only by civilizations so advanced into decadence that they can warp the seasons.

Okay, so here's what you do. You need some place where you have fresh lakes and cold winters, like upstate New York. During the winter, you go to the lake and saw out chunks of ice. You put them in a building where you pack them in sawdust for storage. You put them on a boat and sell your ice around the world, as far away as Australia. Or you put them on a train — that's only the really advanced civilization part, really.

And now you've "warped the seasons". Talk about over-the-top.

Hey. Hey, remember _Back to the Future III_ where they're in the Old West and some people laugh at Marty for wanting ice water and Doc's got a refrigeration apparatus? All nonsense. They've got a railroad right there, they'd definitely get ice shipped in on that train.

Wanting to drink ice water on a poor town in the old west still seems laughable, even if technically possible.

The things you are describing /are/ a relatively advanced civilization. The ability to transport them is the advanced bit. In isolation people had had access to ice, but society didn't.

We were pretty advanced 150 years ago, relatively speaking

Indeed. You can read about how people in the 19th century were amazed at the rate of technical advancement -- railroads, steamships, gaslights, which had displaced horses, sailing ships, and oillamps/candles which had been the standards for generations. Much like today, there was a degree of "future shock" where people thought things were changing too much too fast.

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