I was somewhat bewildered when, after years of significant construction-related transit disruptions, Waterloo Region’s Ion light rail system actually began transporting people from one location to another.1 We all know that large infrastructure projects are aspirational, interminable, and expensive. Who ever heard of them being finished? Nevertheless, the completion and ongoing use of the LRT argues that sometimes the system fails and large projects actually succeed in their goals.
Science fiction, being less limited by cruel practicality, abounds with successful and ambitious infrastructure projects. Consider the following four examples.
Building on the Line by Gordon R. Dickson (1968)
Man’s glorious interstellar destiny depends on linesmen like Clancy and Plotch risking their lives to construct transmit stations on hostile alien worlds. XN-4010 is more challenging than most outpost worlds. Cold enough to freeze oxygen, XN-4010 is home to an enigmatic race of hobgoblins implacably hostile to the off-world visitors. Men working under those conditions need all the friends they can get. Too bad for Clancy that all he has is the annoying Plotch.
A hobgoblin attack strands the pair and leaves Plotch mostly dead. Dutiful Clancy sets out on the long journey back to the Terran homebase on XN-4010. It’s not at all clear which will be the greatest impediment: a) the distance he needs to cover on foot while carrying Plotch, b) the hobgoblins, or c) the cutting-edge, unreliable equipment with which all linesman are saddled.
This novelette reminds me of a Robert Sheckley story that is being played utterly straight.
Readers may wonder why, if the natives are so hostile, humans insist on building a transmit station on XN-4010. It’s one part “the humans have little control over which anchor worlds can be reached” and one part “it was 1968, and the idea that locals should have a say about how a more powerful culture should use their land was controversial when it was a subject of discussion at all.”
Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke (1979)
Vannevar Morgan’s groundbreaking bridge spanned the Strait of Gibraltar, joining Atlantic Europe to Africa for the first time since the Zanclean flood. Morgan’s next project will utterly eclipse the 14-kilometer Gibraltar bridge. He must construct a vertical suspension bridge from the Earth’s surface more than 36,000 kilometers into space itself. If he is successful, he will revolutionize space travel. If unsuccessful, he will join visionaries like Thomas Andrew, William Mulholland, and Leon Moisseiff in disgrace.
There are straightforward impediments to overcome. The structure demands materials of stupendous strength. Construction requires methods that haven’t been invented yet. Some suitable location must be found to anchor the orbital tower. This last presents Morgan with what could be his greatest challenge, a political one: The best anchor site is occupied a Buddhist temple whose master has no intention of granting access to the tower project. Eminent domain is not an option. What’s a poor visionary to do?
As you may know, this was one of two novels about orbital towers that were published back to back. Of the two, I prefer the Clarke, not least because, unlike the Sheffield, it didn’t rely on a method of delivering the anchor end of the tower to Earth that would make any safety engineer faint.
The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts
The starship Eriophora has circled the Milky Way, leaving five thousand superluminal wormhole gates in its wake. The scale of the project is prodigious, both in space and in time. It has been sixty-five million years since Eriophora launched. Whatever entities now use the faster-than-light network the starship laboriously constructs are very likely not human.
Eriophora’s human crew are infrequently needed, occasionally woken from cold-sleep to deal with problems beyond the limited (but reliable) intelligence of the ship’s AI. Chafing at their endless servitude, human minds turn to escape. But how can people who wake one week out of every thousand years outwit a relentless master with all the time in the world to methodically monitor its human servants?
Ah, good old Peter Watts, about whom I once observed “Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts.” However, this story isn’t as bleak as many other Watts stories.
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers (2014)
New members in the Galactic Commons, humans aren’t yet a valued member species. Humans’ most spectacular accomplishment to date is nearly killing their own homeworld. The jury is still out as to whether accepting humans into the Commons was a mistake or not. Humans are therefore ideal expendables, suitable for the Commons’ dangerous, low status jobs.
The good ship Wayfarer expands galactic infrastructure by punching wormholes from one galactic region to another. The galaxy is filled with hazards. The diverse crew has to somehow overcome their intrinsic differences and work as a team. Failure means not merely insolvency but possible death as well.
The Galactics are remarkably judgmental about humans, given some of the planet-altering shenanigans some member species have engaged in. It seems that while the various member species may be very different from each other in form and culture, many of them share a capacity for hypocrisy.
***
As has been noted before, epic infrastructure projects are a common subject for science fiction authors.2 These four are a very small sample. If by chance I overlooked one of your favorites, please mention them in comments below.
In the words of fanfiction author Musty181, four-time Hugo finalist, prolific book reviewer, and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll “looks like a default mii with glasses.” His work has appeared in Interzone, Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis) and the 2021, 2022, and 2023 Aurora Award finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by web person Adrienne L. Travis). His Patreon can be found here.
[1]Ion’s debut was succeeded almost immediately by a collision caused by an oblivious driver. This turned out to be a harbinger for the future. Waterloo Region automobile drivers turn out to be surprisingly bad at noticing moving trains.
[2]Grand infrastructure projects also supply good plot material for mundane authors. Zane Grey published a book, “Boulder Dam,” about the construction of the dam.
It’s a minor background detail so I couldn’t work it in but in Pamela Sargent’s Cloned Lives, there’s a throwaway comment about a massive transportation infrastructure project, high speed trains replacing planes. No cost overruns, no interminable delays, just a policy decision and implementation. SF is wild.
Let me be the first to register the outraged objection to the absense of that Harry Harrison book which I probably read when I was 12.
And on looking it up, it appears that it was not known everywhere in the world as A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!.
Well bah humbug to that.
I’m here for all the shade about Ontario trains. May you still be writing reviews when they finish the high-frequency rail.
Ontario has been talking ambitious train projects since before the Archduke and his wife took that ill-fated drive.
The earliest such story must surely be Edward Everett Hale’s 1869 “The Brick Moon”. Summary: in order to make celestial navigation easier, it is decided to launch an artificial moon into orbit so that simply taking its altitude will give you your longitude (note: this is insane and would not work) by flipping it into space from the rim of a pair of giant waterwheels (this is also insane and would not work) and accidentally launch a load of Sandemanians inside it as well (this is insane and would not work) where they live happily in orbit (this is… yeah)
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Atlantic_Monthly/Volume_24/Number_144/The_Brick_Moon
“We all know that large infrastructure projects are aspirational, interminable, and expensive.”
Exhibit A: Boston’s infamous Big Dig.
What about alien infrastructure projects that are initiated with minimal environmental impact studies, like the hyperspace bypass in Hitchhiker’s Guide, or the ringworld in Usurper of the Sun?
Peter (@2): A major disappointment in my sf reading was finding Mr. Harrison’s Tunnel Through the Deeps, only to realize that its proper title was A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! How could the US publisher mess up the title so, so badly??
It may simply reflect editor Nick Mamatas’ tastes but the Haikasoru books I read (of which Usurper was one) that touched on whether aliens would care if their projects wiped us out generally came down on the ha ha of course not side. From All You Need is Kill (AKA Starship Troopers, the Groundhog Day Cut)
There is Stephen Baxter’s “Ring” – “The Great Attractor”, created by the “Xeelee” – the “Baryonic Lords” – using a measurable fraction of the mass of the entire universe.
At first, it is suspected of being a weapon. However, further investigation reveals it to be something far more worrying….
Wormholes and Trains.Peter F Hamilton
I love the epilogue to Fountains of Paradise. Clarke did a better job than most of presenting a far future.
I’m surprised no one has made a streaming series out of it. Much more adaptable that Foundation
I had to go back and count the stories to make sure James hadn’t slipped in his usual fifth story to see if we were awake.
No, Jove nodded and I inadvertently included one I’d mentioned recently.
Los Angeles drivers also had problems noticing moving trains. The idea that crossing barriers coming down wasn’t just an interesting slalom course was also a difficult concept. They eventually figured it out.
Samuel R. Delany’s “We, in Some Strange Power’s Employ, Move on a Vigorous Line” has infrastructure aspects to it. It’s about a massive plan to provide electric power to the remotest corners of the world. His “Driftglass” is tangentially about laying deep-sea cables, too.
Not every LRT crossing has gates. There’s a pedestrian crossing at King and Victoria that has what likely going to be the fatal coincidence that the time it takes a person to disembark and walk to the crossing is the same interval required for the train to start moving again and reach the same crossing. LRT trains have good horns and better brakes.
@DemetriosX: That’s “Rigorous Line”, not “Vigorous”.
A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! reminds me of this wonderful short story by Maciej Ceglowski: The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel.
The first thing that came to my mind was Brian Stableford’s The Face of Heaven and sequels. Ever make a mess of a project and decide that there’s nothing for it but to cover it all over and start something new? In this trilogy, the principle is applied to the entire surface of the Earth – cleaning up decades of ecological disaster is too much trouble, so the people of Earth just put a sort of roof over it all and live on top of that.
Impressive, but it’s little more than a loft conversion compared to the structure in Colin Kapp’s “Cageworld” series. The name derives from the situation of the Earth in this series: spinning around like a caged ball bearing inside a Dyson sphere… one of several concentric Dyson spheres which have engulfed, or replaced, every planet in the Solar System. Obviously, by the time this project gets out as far as Neptune, the spheres are getting quite large – possibly unfeasibly large. This is all the doing of the nigh-omnipotent Zeus computer, which sits inside the Mercury sphere and carries on this rather ambitious plan. Zeus is a computer with a mission, to make sure the human species continues to expand, and has enough living space to do that, no matter what. There are numerous problems with this setup, but apparently none that can’t be solved by the regulation small crew of misfits in a spaceship. Works every time.
How about “A Subway Named Mobius” by Armin Joseph Deutsch?
The first one I thought of is from Blish’s “Cities in Flight” – a bridge made of Ice IV on the surface of Jupiter: a real bridge to nowhere, appearing to be built as a monument to its creator’s ambition (but with a secret purpose)
Really?
Nobody’s mentioned “The Roads Must Roll?”
@0: Waterloo Region automobile drivers turn out to be surprisingly bad at noticing moving trains. I don’t see anything surprising about this; an evening drive from Niagara Falls to Torcon 3 (not actually through Waterloo, but close) was one of the most frightening experiences I’ve had. I don’t think they noticed moving anything.
Tom Swift and His Repelatron Skyway is low on plausibility but high on ambition.
@22: I think the object is stories about building big things, not about big built things. Heinlein talks about labor troubles, and has someone from overseas looking at how the rolling roads work (with an eye to copying?), but IIRC doesn’t tell us anything about the building process.
@0, also: I generally don’t defend Dickson, but I’ll note that “An Honorable Death” has a somewhat different view of interacting with indigenes. OTOH, you won’t catch me defending (e.g.) None But Man.
@Moderator: is it just me, or does the system not support italicizing links? The above Tom Swift displays with italics in the edit window but not in the preview or displayed comment. I thought this had worked for me before….
I would be remiss were I to pass up a chance to mention Graydon Saunders’ _Commonweal_ series (on Kobo), which, despite being an epically high-powered-magic FANTASY series, has running subplots about serious amounts of canal and other infrastructure, as well as getting into “defending the Commonweal from every feudal epic sorcerer kingdom outside it (in the Bad Old Days it is a reaction to) is needed to let it get itself into the future at ALL, so the armed forces, the Line, are necessary infrastructure for the state”.
–Dave, …it’s not your everyday four-color extruded epic, is what I’m sayin’ here.
Isn’t the engineer in Transatlantic Tunnel a descendant of that famous traitor, G. Washington?
On a less hopeful note, Robert Harris’s novel Fatherland, in which Germany wins WWII and is celebrating the Führer’s 75th birthday, describes many of Albert Speer’s colossal architectural additions to Berlin, such as a Reichstag building with a dome so large it has its own weather in the upper portions.
EDIT: Further research reveals that this would have been the Volkshalle, not the Reichstag.
chip137@23: Yes, the handling of italics and links is thoroughly borked. Has been for ages
Predating Harrison, there’s the 1935 film “The Tunnel”/”Transatlantic Tunnel”. It’s based on _Der Tunnel_ by Bernhard Kellerman, which I haven’t read, but I have to think that screenwriter Kurt Siodmak (“The Wolf Man”) made some significant changes in emphasis.
The SF trappings of the movie are handled in a nicely low-key way, without putting tailfins on everything or having characters declaim to each other how neat it is to have television. (It’s a lot less expository in that way than, say, “Things to Come”, which I love, but which is definitely of the old “let’s enumerate the wonders of our present day to each other” school.) The time period of the movie is unspecified, but the engineer hero, Richard “Mac” McAllen, had previously built the Channel Tunnel in 1940 and the Bahamas-Miami Tunnel (no date given), and he looks 40ish (the actor was 42 when it was released) so the time frame probably runs around the 1950s and 60s.
There’s some interpersonal and family drama surrounding the chief engineer, but a lot of the tension and action is based in the construction, which is portrayed as plausibly dirty and dangerous– basically contemporary hard rock work further enabled by “Allenite steel” and the “radium drill”.
Money repeatedly becomes an issue (no great surprise given the colossal investment and the long time horizon for a return).The human cost of major construction projects is turned up to 11, with a reporter asking Mac early on if it’s true the effort is killing a man a minute.
(Mac doesn’t answer, but I have to guess “no”– that’d be half a million a year. Assuming half are coming from the UK and half from the US– they’re tunneling from both sides, of course– the Brits would be losing about three Great Wars worth of casualties to get the tunnel built.)
It’s repeatedly claimed that building the tunnel will (somehow) lead to world peace. (Mac explains his own sacrifices by reference to that lofty goal. But in the universally accepted sequence “1) Build Tunnel Across Atlantic; 2) ?????; 3) World Peace!”, that second step is pretty vague.) It does explicitly contribute, over the course of the story, to a formal “English-Speaking Union”, the details of which aren’t given. (There’s still a President and Congress of the US and a Prime Minister and Parliament in charge of the British Empire, but both legislatures have giant telescreens showing the other in real time, at least when major issues like the Atlantic Tunnel are under discussion.
Interestingly, even when the tunnel is in jeopardy, its stock price is collapsing, and the work of over a decade may have to be abandoned permanently– unattended, the tunnel will flood in three months– at no point is the possibility of public funding broached.)
Other tech details are scattered and the script doesn’t draw attention to them, which I think makes them more effective in establishing verisimilitude: In the first scene, a character uses a motorized wheelchair. (Wikipedia says they were developed in WWII.) Televisions/Videophones are ubiquitous, and of varying design, from the wall model to the desk unit to the folding console to the evidently wireless one in the transatlantic aircraft. (One rich man has two built into his office wall and a third on his desk that reads off stock prices of interest to him.)
There’s some interpersonal and family drama surrounding the hero, his neglected wife, the best friend who’s carrying a torch for her, and the hero’s son. Also a plotline involving a stereotypical 30s “merchant of death” arms dealer who disappears without explanation after one of his schemes has been foiled. (In the original German novel, he’s reportedly a more explicit antisemitic stereotype.) But mostly the story is driven by the myriad challenges of a huge civil engineering project.
Jack Williamson and James E. Gunn’s 1955 novel Star Bridge is set against a background of a humongous infrastructure project, the network of “Tubes” which enable FTL travel between worlds, the secret of which is controlled by a monopoly which as a result effectively rules human space.
@26 – There is a remnant of those colossal architectural plans for Berlin, the Schwerbelastungskörper (“heavy load-exerting body”), which was intended to test the load bearing capacity of Berlin’s marshy soil in preparation for the building of a massive triumphal arch (similar to but designed to dwarf the Arc de Triomphe in Paris). As it turned out, the triumphal arch could not have been built without considerable stabilization of the ground. It was left in place after the war, since it couldn’t be safely demolished, a monument to Nazi hubris.
There’s Christopher Anvil’s “The Royal Road”, in which the spacefaring human civilisation isn’t allowed to interfere overtly with less-developed worlds — but there’s surely no harm in making a helpful suggestion about how one such world might improve its road network…
27 sounds fascinating – thank you!
A major disappointment in my sf reading was finding Mr. Harrison’s Tunnel Through the Deeps, only to realize that its proper title was A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!
That is a real misstep by the publisher! Even if Americans don’t routinely say “hurrah” a) it’s set in Britain and its colonies, and b) surely A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurray! would have been a better title?
Now trying to think of suitable other titles for foreign markets.
A Transatlantic Tunnel, Ya Bloody Beaut!
A Transatlantic Tunnel, Is It?
A Transatlantic Tunnel, Eh?
Sure And Isn’t It A Transatlantic Tunnel? Well Now That’s Just Grand
Un Tunnel Transatlantique, Sacre Bleu!
Ein Transatlantischer Tunnel, Gott In Himmel!
Caramba! Un Tunel Transatlantico!
Transatlanttinen tunel. Olen hiemen inoissani.
@30 ajay: OK, that last one is very funny, particularly with the lead-up.
We had an interesting discussion recently on an international fan forum about “Sacre bleu!”; a French commenter pointed out that this expression hasn’t been commonly used in France in, oh, about 80 or 90 years. I wonder how long it will continue to signify Frenchness to us Anglophones? One still frequently sees it in headlines in England when something bad-not-tragic happens in France.
I am not sure how widely used “Gott in Himmel” and “Caramba” are either, to be honest.
I think Rudyard Kipling’s The Bridge Builders would count. Building a giant bridge over the Ganges is interrupted by the gods.
The French no longer say “Sacre bleu“?
Nom d’un nom!
Andrew Offutt’s Rails Across the Galaxy described what happened when a branch line of a galaxy-wide railway project came to the Solar System.
And in Clifford Sinak’s “Construction Shack”, the Solar System was discovered to be a major construction program with Pluto as the workers’ base of operations.
@8 & @30 Not to worry. The Harrison book was rereleased in the US under its proper title (by some obscure publisher whose name I can’t quite put my finger on) in 1981, which is the edition I first encountered.
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?240545
33: another great recommendation – thank you! And it has, weirdly, quite a Pratchett tone to it – the various gods arguing with each other about modern technology, and Krishna predicting that as Indians lose faith the gods will dwindle and become insignificant Small Gods.
There aren’t many fantasy (rather than SF) stories about building epic infrastructure. There should be more.
KJ Parker’s Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City may come close?
Ted Chiang’s “Tower of Babel”, of course. Stephen Baxter’s Northland trilogy are not really fantasy… alternate history?
China Mieville’s Iron Council, the railroad that builds as it goes.
Not sure if this project is big enough to be counted but thought the building of this imaginary space station was cool when I was a kid.
Space Platform by Murray Leinster. First published January 1, 1953
My first thought was Kij Johnson’s novella, The Man Who Bridged the Mist, for fantasy stories about infrastructure. The mist is a spooky substance that flows downhill, can support boats (like water), but is corrosive to most substances, and has fish (and far stranger and larger things) that live in it.
#6. The Big Dig may have gone way over budget and taken much longer than planned, but it was completed and allows me to get from my home in Cambridge to Logan Airport (without traffic) in about 15 minutes. That is certainly worth $6 billion! (Not to mention replacement of the infamous Southeast Expressway, the knitting together of downtown and the North End and the creation of the Greenway.)
39 that was going to be the 5th example but I mentioned it in another piece.
The Vogons building a hyperspace bypass is an obvious example, although perhaps their work was aimed at something other than improving the transport infrastructure. Building a planet as a computer might also count.
Terraforming a planet is about as major infrastructure as one can get and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars are full of the infrastructure needed to take an inhospitable rock-ball and turn it into a working biosphere.
I thoroughly enjoyed all three books because the political bickerings around the infrastructure development are so human-scale even whilst space-elevators are being spun out of carbon nanotubes and entire impact craters are tented. The politics of the ethics of major infrastructure builds even mirror the protests we see now against major road and pipeline development. Humanity may have got to another planet, but our disagreements about protecting the environment of the earth (or Mars in this case) remains the same.
I like the huge piping system in Pratchett’s MAKING MONEY. *See* ‘liquidity’.
Couple of books no one’s mentioned yet.
Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, where a whole linked ring of orbital habitats are constructed when Earh’s surface becomes uninhabitable.
And Iain M Banks’s Consider Phlebas in which the background is not construction but the impending demolition of Vacatch Orbital. Actually there’s lots of big infrastructure in the Culture novels but mostly it’s just there.
I like the huge piping system in Pratchett’s MAKING MONEY. *See* ‘liquidity’.
Apologies if you knew this already, but this actually exists – the Philips Hydraulic Computer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC
Help me out here, Tor folks. Many years ago I read a book about the construction of three space elevator towers; it was well written and the engineering and materials science was believable. All was well until ecoterrorists released carbon eating nanobots into the upper levels of the almost complete tower based in Peru, causing it’s collapse, immense collateral damage, and the ruin of the primary financier. I cannot remember the title or author, and I’ve dug through my active and storage library to no avail- I’d like to read this again, but am lost. Anybody?
Surely the 300,000,000 mile suspension bridge that is the Ringworld is worthy of note as a honkin’ big infrastructure project?
@47
How many years ago? Was it Ben Bova’s Mercury maybe?
@43 Terraforming a planet is about as major infrastructure as one can get
For a Stage I civilization, perhaps. Stage II gets you Dyson Spheres and the like. Stage III does the same thing to galaxies.
I’m with @43. I read Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 and to me terraforming a planet seems like an incredibly immense project but with significant return. Is the return on a Dyson Sphere worth the enormity of the cost in labor and materials? There’s been a lot of talk of ludicrously long bridges, tunnels, and rail systems. I think we’ve surpassed that with air travel.
“There’s been a lot of talk of ludicrously long bridges, tunnels, and rail systems. I think we’ve surpassed that with air travel. “
Air travel is incredibly expensive and environmentally destructive compared to any other transport mode (especially for freight!) which is why people keep building very long bridges, railways etc, and I hope they keep doing so.
@51 – The costs of building a Dyson sphere have recently been examined – https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/03/building-a-dyson-sphere-whats-the-payback-time-of-disassembling-a-planet/
James @01, we don’t need SF for “No cost overruns, no interminable delays, just a policy decision and implementation.” My sweetie got her BA in Shanghai, during a period when that city began to build not one, but eight subway lines – not stations, lines.
The project began in 2003 and, when she returned for a visit around 2012, it was done, and had been for a year or two, according to Wikipedia, 15 years ahead of schedule. (The article doesn’t mention whether it was on, over, or under budget: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Metro.)
@2 @8 @30 – this New England Yankee remembers reading “A TransAtlantic Tunnel Hurrah” as a youth by that very memorable name – and not much more about the story. Do I also vaguely recall coal-burning aeroplanes?
“it was 1968, and the idea that locals should have a say about how a more powerful culture should use their land was controversial when it was a subject of discussion at all.”
You can give a lot of people veto powers, or you can have large infrastructure projects. But not both. Giving the locals power to block things is why nothing gets built any more. So any book in which such a project gets built, is a book in which the locals can be easily overridden.
56: or a book in which there aren’t any locals in the way.
Or just a book in which the locals support the project because it’s well planned and necessary for the public good. You don’t have to be a genocidal dictatorship to build large infrastructure projects nowadays. The Channel Tunnel exists, after all. The LHC exists. Incheon Airport exists.
The Channel Tunnel was built under the channel, where indeed there are no actual people. Incheon Airport was built in South Korea, where they don’t make it easy for any one of thousands of people to block something. It doesn’t matter how worthy your project is: the more people there are who can block it, the more likely it is to be blocked. Increase the number of potential blockers far enough, and any project is getting blocked.
For example, if you give a hundred Americans each the right to veto a Holocaust memorial, on average you can expect eleven of them to think the Jews caused the Holocaust. So its quite likely that one of them will exercise the veto. Now imagine you were giving the veto to a hundred people whose houses had to be demolished to make way for the memorial. Even more likely one of them will exercise the veto.
Or take the Waterloo Region’s Ion light rail system. Suppose it inconvenienced a thousand people. Give each of them the right to block it, and all it takes is one person who puts his own certain inconvenience above the benefits to everybody else. Bear in mind that a group of a thousand people will probably include a few dozen sociopaths. You’d better hope they are all very public-spirited sociopaths.
Of course, you might have a majority vote of the potential blockers, but that means the locals in one area can be outvoted by the locals in others, and we are back to the first locals having something imposed on them from elsewhere.
It’s not a major focus of the books, but LotR is full of epic infrastructure. There’s anything the Dwarves built in places they inhabited for a long time, such as the immensity of Khazad-dûm, which starts by tunneling through a major mountain range, A lot of what the Numenorean exiles built in the Second Age and early Third Age: the statues of the Argonath, and in describing Orthanc, its material is described as well nigh indestructible and it’s implied the techniques for building it (and presumably the other such structures of similar age) have been lost.
@59: It may be questioned whether Tolkien’s described Dwarf projects count as straightforwardly successful. Erebor and Moria are both out of business, as far as dwarves (sic) are concerned, and for rather similar reasons, by the time when Bilbo Baggins wishes Gandalf a good morning. But I suppose that both were profitable enough to be remembered favourably, and for dwarves to want to restart operations there. With mixed results.
Oh, fantasy has plenty of epic infrastructure – we just don’t normally get stories about the building of it.
And this may partly be because so much of fantasy draws on mediaeval Europe, and there just wasn’t much in the way of epic infrastructure being built back then. The leftover Roman stuff was the product of a far more sophisticated and powerful civilisation, and they couldn’t have hoped to match it. My favourite example of this is Gibbon pointing out that you could argue that modern Spain (ie modern when he was writing in the late 18th century) was arguably less advanced than Roman Spain, at least going by the mileage of decent roads, bridges etc.
This wasn’t just a European thing – when the first Europeans saw the ruins of Great Zimbabwe and asked the locals who built them, the locals said they had no idea but it definitely wasn’t them, because it was way beyond their capabilities, and it was probably the devil.
(The ruins had been abandoned for less than a century at that point – amazing that the locals could have forgotten so quickly.)
@61 For reasons which are unclear to me Baen published a tie-in novel for Mayfair Games’ Iron Dragon board game: Mountains & Madness by Rose Estes. The novel, like the game, is about the building of a railroad system in a fantasy world of elves, dwarves. etc. Unfortunately it’s not very good.
@52 See also “The Alteration” by Kingley Amis, in which in the alternate-history 1976 of a world dominated by the Roman Catholic Church there is a railroad bridge across the English Channel. Because Church doctrine has essentially banned the use of electricity, air-travel is by steam-powered dirigibles, which are slow and expensive, and therefore uncommon.
@61 – You could argue that mediaeval cathedrals were large infrastructure projects, although they didn’t answer the needs that we think of infrastructure projects fulfilling today. At least they showed that societies in that time could muster the resources and skills to build large complex structures. I suppose that you could say that the Norman castle-building initiative in England after the Conquest did too, although the castles served nobody’s interests but the Normans’.
Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor had, as an incidental part of the plot, the approval and building of a novel suspension bridge across a major river. That society wasn’t at mediaeval levels of technical expertise,though – they had airships and were at an early stage of industrialization. Still fantasy, however.