Where did the week go?

[wyld_dandelyon]

I turn around, and it's Friday already!

So, my NaNoWriMo story is set in an alternate Chicago where people ride horses, bicycles, or surreys, and get power from windmills.

What local color would you suggest ought to be there?

Or, if you prefer, tell me what cool devices might exist in a world with no fossil fuels or computers! 

They do have electricity (though no grid), and  plastics (or something similar) are grown from the byproducts of bacteria. 

Comments

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

If they don't have fossil fuels or an electric grid, but they do have urban life, they really need a good light source. So, perhaps they have some sort of sufficiently advanced technology that turns mechanical energy directly into visible light? Wind-up lights don't start fires, so if they've had a material for a long time that glows if you twist/pound/stir/whatever it instead of getting hot, they could well have refined it to the point of not needing fire for light.

A general distrust of liquid fuels because of the fire hazard is a lot more believable than saying they aren't possible in the world, and is just as effective in practice. A lot of things that seem fundamental in our society are the way they are just because everybody knows that's how it is, not because they need to be that way.

If there are trains, they will move stuff. Railroads got started moving the mail, not moving passengers. But you do need to figure out how expensive the trains are (since you said they exist), which in turn determines whether they only move really a small volume of really important stuff and a few rich people, or a whole lot of basic stuff and lots of people. You don't *have* to figure out how they're powered, but I think it would help to understand how the world works. I'm getting pretty far into the speculation swamp here, but you might postulate some technology that can store up the energy from a windmill to run a locomotive from New York to Chicago, but doesn't scale down from the size of a locomotive to the size of a private car.

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

Oh, this world had cities--and big ones--before electricity or gas light. So I wonder why you think they need a really good light source.