"Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World: Part 3, A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubbdubdrib, Luggnagg, and Japan."
Laputa a floating island that contains the royal court, hovering over the vassal lands below.
The entire principality impoverished by abstract science -- mathematics is the only topic of learning, astronomy the only subject of court discourse, and music the only art form. Those in the floating city detached from the reality below; those below live in rags, victims of a public policy focused on future projections -- the scientists are called "projectors" -- rather than present.
Laputans live with their heads tilted so that one eye is always looking at the stars. They are so lost in their own thoughts that servants are equipped with small baldders with which they gently hit their masters' eyes, ears, and mouths in order to remind them to look at, listen, and respond to their interlocutors.
Gulliver's tailor in Laputa measures him, inaccurately, with a sextant. Not surprisingly, then, ill-fitting clothes are common in Laputa.
Dining in Laputa: "shoulder of mutton cut into an equilateral triangle, a piece of beef into a rhomboid, and a pudding into a cycloid ... the servents cut our bread into cones, cylinders, parallelograms, and several other mathematical figures."
Among the experiments at the Academy of Science in the city below the floating island are projects to extract sun-beams from cucumbers; to return human excrement to its original food matter; to build houses from the roof downward to the foundation; and to prevent the growth of wool on young lambs in order to create a race of naked sheep.
The Academy also houses a primitive computer -- a twenty foot wooden frame with bits of wood strung along wires on which are written all the words of their language. By pulling all the wires simultaneously, the words are shuffled into a new order, with the sentences thus created scrutinized for meaning. In time, of course, all possible sentences and meanings would of necessity occur along the wires of the frame. The scientist ("projector") proposes to hasten his work by constructing fifty such frames (a network!)across the kingdom.
Gulliver finds equally dubious ideas under consideration at the Academy of Political Science, including proposals that princes choose ministers based on merit, make policy decisions based on the public good, "and many other wild impossible chimeras that never entered before into the heart of man to conceive."
Another Laputan political scientist proposes that the heads of political opponents be surgically opened and hemispheres of their brains swapped so that each legislator holds both perspectives.
Leaving Laputan possessions, Gulliver visits Glubbdubdrib, a land of the dead where he interviews great personages of the past and discovers the falsity of official histories and the prevalence of corruption, vice, cowardice, ingratitude, and dishonesty among the powerful and noble.
He next ventures to Luggnagg, where a small number of individuals each generation are born into immortality -- a miserable condition, Gulliver discovers, as those "struldbrug" experience life as a continuing process of decrepitude; an eternity of enfeeblement.
He returns via Japan which, interestingly, is in commerce with both the mythic lands of Gulliver's most recent voyages and with Europe.
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