Help with how social class works between underground cities and floating cities

So in some short story of mine, a undergrounder (a name for a person who lives in the numerous underground cities and towns), meets a cloudlander (people who live in the floating cities of eden and fairly dark skin). The cloudlander in question, sula we, is here to investigate a the activity of a terrorist group who wants sink the entire city. The undergrounder wants to help but due to the cloudlander seeing him as beneath them, this creates some conflict.

Seems like I said 20 million times but the thing is, the implications as well as either society ( as well as the middle ground) might not feel plausible. This is fiction after all though, just that the fridge things sometimes can break a thing apart. See, in the past, a meteorite struck earth in the year 2040. This halved the human population and the last remaining fleed underground. But what chaos it brought, also gave them a new power source, arcium. That's how these humans managed to live underground for so long but soon afterward, a few decided to venture out to the surface once again. The surface, however, proved to be mighty dangerous. the fauna and flora have since evolved to more harsh forms to adapt to the changed landscape. In order to settle here without getting killed, the come up the use of dome settlements. Eventually, these evolved to the surface cities of today. After that, sky cities were built but only the richest could enter, which created a bit of a divide in social class.

Sorry for the exposition dump. Lemme go to my main question, does it make sense for someone that hailed from a floating sky city to have issues being with an undergrounder? And also, is this span of time too short for this happen since the story take place in the year, 2520.

Ps. I'm not expecting much answers honestly. Most threads I post get a few at best.

The setting year is far out enough that pretty much anything could have happened, so it's probably fine. I would avoid using round numbers, though.

I'm not sure I can answer your main question. What kind of issues would the cloudlander have, and for that matter what would the undergrounder have? Whether their attitudes towards each other make sense or not depends more on any friction the two races might have with each other, and any personal grudges or beliefs the two might have towards each other.

"Butterfly" and "Cicada" might make good slurs. A butterfly is pretty and does little, while a cicada is loud and is lazy.

but in a subterranean human city, people have a different vocabulary compared to those on the surface

what words would come about due to this?

There's plenty of class tensions that would manifest from "rich people live in X and poor people live in Y." Just look at the Sheltered Aristocrat for things that rich people would do (or NOT do).

-Food access and food quality. The rich people in the floating cities wouldn't need to grow their food or raise livestock, and they'd probably be able to import tons of stuff that the surface people and ESPECIALLY the underground people can't get because they're poor. Even if everyone eats the same staple foods of bread/rice/corn as the bulk of their meals, an underground or surface-dwelling person will probably have to make do with a few homemade bread/rice/corn dishes while rich people probably have eight million fancy variations to eat. (But they wouldn't COOK those meals, because they're rich and they can pay people to do it.)

The classical Western example is "poor people get brown bread and rich people get white bread," but there's also vastly different kinds of rice in Asia that I didn't know EXISTED because I'm middle-class. I found out a few years ago (I'm twenty-seven) that there is a type of BLACK RICE. Well, it's black when raw and it turns purple when cooked, which actually makes it MORE special. Asian royalty ate it at feasts, so it was a rare thing even for THEM, and it still sells for a premium today.

-Living conditions. If you've got floating cities, I'm pretty sure they'd have as many fancy accommodations as they can afford. Gated communities with security cameras/guards would probably be the bare MINIMUM for an upper-class person, and plenty of rich people in current times own estates with acres of well-tended land surrounding their giant mansions, which are staffed with at least a dozen servants and a crew of guards. Apartment buildings are probably for the the middle-class tradesmen and crafters who work inside the city, and the surface/underground people would probably be crammed into the utmost basic living areas (including slums).

And even then, an "average" person in the floating city would probably be "well-off" or even "fabulously wealthy" if things like their home having an ACTUAL shower/toilet are routine when people on the surface/underground use public facilities, or heat up some water on the stove.

edited 7th Jun '17 12:58:02 PM by Sharysa

seems like i was right, i wasn't expecting that much replies.

edited 17th Jun '17 10:00:10 AM by ewolf2015

I may be unkind here, but I presume the lack of reaction may, in part, be due to others being less unkind and not wanting to mention that the idea of 'people from above living in high tech (or high magic) luxury and considering themselves literally and figurative above mere ground (or underground) people below' has been done before. A lot. Really often.

.... Ok, maybe some people might disagree about that last one.

well, i plan on making the sky cities more like towers instead, with the underground supporting them.

I think you missed my point there.

It wasn't that floating cities have been done a lot.

It was that the whole 'social divide between people living above and people who live below, who are seen as and treated as inferior by those who live above' thing has been done a lot.

Actually, the mobility of floating cities would drastically change the upper class\lower class dynamic as it would be hard to establish that essential middle class that tends to the upper class's needs when the city could just float off at any moment.

This actually accelerates the Marxist movement when someone with more money than sense thinks that they don't need the lower class at all and floats their magical palace away from the industrial centers that give it life.

Maybe the floating cities are restricted to a certain range or speed? I mean, all that land, metal, and buildings are gonna be HEAVY, so I don't see an entire city being able to just unhook an anchor or switch off the gravity-reduction power that keeps them in a certain spot. If it's not restricted to a certain radius, its movement would probably be more like a really, really fancy blimp going at 10-20 miles PER DAY, both out of sheer practicality and for the safety of the people who live on that floating city.