Take a look at these pictures and tell me that you don’t get a least a little bit of a hard SF vibe, or at least a feeling that you could play a level or two of Halo in that city, or a rebirth of Disney’s original dream of building an inhabitable amusement park.

And even though it was built in a desert halfway around the world, to me it looks like a kind of fictional American future—a mall city constructed in the middle of a desert on the cutting edge of technology and capitalism. Vegas and Wal-Mart smashed together under a repressive theocratic government.

We’d already heard a great deal about the corruption and suffering that lived behind the facade, and I’m sure we’ll hear more about in the months and years to come as the cracks widen.

Whether it lives or dies, it’s pretty clear that the dream of Dubai as a place where excess can birth mega-projects on a river of money is over now.

And the strains of Ozymandias keep ringing in my ears…

`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away”.

So perfectly apt for this city built in the desert it’s almost ridiculous…

What the author doesn’t mention is how this paradise was essentially an orwellian nightmare—a place where people could be detained for almost any infraction, up to and including supposedly legal narcotics found in their bloodstream.

It was also built on the backs of what was essentially legalized slave labor

Engineering and technology are amongst our most powerful tools, and there’s a certain amount of hubris necessary to take any project of significant size and vision.  But there’s a point at which what you can do far outstrips what you should do.

As our financial system has become more divorced from actual human work we’re seeing the danger that comes from an ability to turn our wildest dreams into reality, both good and bad. And while I’m all for urban fantasy and modern re-interpretations of classic fairy tales, it’s important to remember that our most enduring stories of fantastic creatures are mostly cautionary allegories about the dangers of what happens when our wildest dreams come true.