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12-2013

Science Fiction Cities Science Fiction Cities

Carl Abbott Portland State University, d3ca@pdx.edu

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Citation Details Citation Details Abbott, Carl, (2013). Science Fiction Cities. Deletion: The Open Access Online Forum in Science Fiction, Episode 2.

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Science fiction cities - Deletion

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Science fiction citiesEpisode 2: The Second

Deletion / December 9, 2013

Carl Abbott, School of Urban Studies and Planning, Portland State University,USA |

Nothing says trouble like a city smashed to smithereens on screen. Meteors andearthquakes, tsunamis and glaciers, earthly monsters and alien invaders – moviegoersmight think that the only thing science fiction does with cities is demolish them with bigbudget special effects. Giant waves crash over New York in Deluge (1933), an asteroidpulverizes it in Deep Impact (1998), and ice crushes it in The Day After Tomorrow(2004). Everyone knows that the star of Godzilla: King of Monsters (1956) has it in forTokyo. Los Angeles takes hits in Earthquake (1974) and Independence Day (1996) –whose flying saucer bad guys also take out New York, Washington, and Paris, itselfsoon re-obliterated in Armageddon (1998). Not to be outdone, screenwriters for 2012(2009) devised a planetary cataclysm to eradicate Los Angeles, Washington, Rome,and every other city lower than Tibet.

Look again and the picture is far more interesting. Citiescertainly perish on the science fiction screen and page,but they also grow, thrive, and decline in complex andintriguing ways. Hit the science fiction section at yourlocal library or used bookstore for the pure pleasure ofbrowsing the covers. Among the exotic planetscapes,cosmic vistas, and battling starships are cities seenfrom above and below, from near and afar. Cities soarin the distant view of foregrounded heroes and shelterbeneath transparent domes like gigantic snow globes.Tiny humans and all manner of other creatures clogcrowded street corners and thread their way among theintricate towers, tunnels, sky bridges, wiring, andplumbing of the coming metropolis. Artists bathe theirvisions with the patina of fantasy or the shimmer of

high-tech.

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We – the majority of humankind – already inhabit an urban world and share an urbanfuture. Cities are home to a majority of our planet’s population, and they’re gaining agreater edge over the countryside with each passing year. The world crossed the 50-50threshold between city life and rural life in 2008 according to the United NationsDepartment of Economic and Social Affairs. China passed the same milestone at theend of 2011 with an official count of 691 million city dwellers. By the end of the century,the worldwide ratio is likely to be 3 to 1 or even 4 to 1 – or 75-80 percent urban – thebalance already reached in Western Europe and North America and exceeded inAustralia.

Since our mundane future will be so decidedly urban, it is no surprise that the sciencefiction imagination has generated cities by the bucketful. Cities are background andsetting for stories on and off future earth, often assumed as a natural part of comingsociety. They are sometimes an active part of the plot, places whose characteristics areessential to a story’s contests and conflicts. Sometimes they become actors in theirown right, intervening and shaping as well as framing the action. The future, the nativehomeland of science fiction, will be an urban future for all foreseeable generations. It’slike a syllogism:

Science fiction is about the future.

The human future will be urban.

Therefore: Science fiction should be about urban futures.

What’s a city, by the way? With lots of small variations, historians and archeologistsagree that cities are big, densely developed, and full of difference – different typespeople, jobs, neighborhoods, and economic activities. They are also points of exchangethat influence people outside their boundaries, as anthropologist Michael Smithemphasizes. People come to cities to trade goods, services, ideas, and their own labor.More than anything else, a city is a device for making connections, so large spacestations like Babylon 5 and Pell Station in C. J. Cherryh’s Downbelow Station are cities.Most of all, cities are systems for creating innovation and change, because the bestway for any of us to come up with a new idea is to bring us in contact with strangersand their strange opinions.

There is some resistance to an urbanorientation in science fiction. Critic GaryWolfe argues that cities are basicallyantithetical to the science fictionimagination. Cities, he suggests,represent confinement, limitations onpossibility, the known rather than theunknown. They are stasis rather thanchange, contrary to the science fictionspirit of adventure and discovery (and certainly city-as-limitation has been a regulartheme since Arthur Clarke’s The City and the Stars). This position goes beyond asimple negative evaluation of city life (cities as jungles, cities as sources of eco-catastrophe) to a larger position that, in effect, cities are useful only to serve thespaceports that allow authors to launch their stories into unfamiliar territory.

I argue the contrary – that cities can also be front and center as vividly imagined worldswhose characteristics play active roles that help to structure the arc of the story, forcingand constraining the choices that the characters make. For earthly cities, for example,the Los Angeles of Octavia Butler in Parable of the Sower and the Bangkok of PaoloBaciagalupi in The Wind-Up Girl fill the bill. Their state of physical and social decay isan essential drive force for their developing plots. New Crobuzon is as much a force inChina Miéville’s novels as London was for Charles Dickens. Cities are sentient actors inGreg Bear’s Strength of Stones and John Shirley’s City Come A-Walkin.

As we think about SF cities, consider additional syllogisms that suggest two of the basic

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and inclusive ways that SF approaches cities. One strand derives from thetechnological/design imagination and its ability to think up cities whose form andfunction depend on and express new technical possibilities. The second approach isthe desire to explore the future of social and cultural systems that find their mostdeveloped and conflicted forms in cities. Together the physical and social imaginationscreate two big clusters of city types.

Science fiction is about the implications of new technologies.

Cities are the most complex of technological artifacts.

Therefore, science fiction is [often] about the physical and technologicalpossibilities of city-making.

Science fiction tries to explore the future of human society.

Cities are the central organizing system for human society.

Therefore, science fiction is [often] about complex life in future cities.

The first strand reaches back to early efforts to imagine the shape of ideal cities, bothfantastical schemes like Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun (1602) andbureaucratic prescriptions like the Laws on the Indies that the Spanish crownpromulgated as a guide to laying out colonial cities. The impulse continued in theproposals of early industrial era reformers like Robert Owen and Charles Fourier, whowere engrossed with schemes for social betterment through rethinking the physicalstructure of settlements. These were the ‘utopian socialists’ whom Friedrich Engelspointedly criticized for ignoring the primacy of the social and economic relations thatdetermined spatial patterns.

More directly, much science fiction stretches and extends the ideas of twentieth centurydesign utopians. Ambitious and self-confident architects and planners like LeCorbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Constantinos Doxiades, and Paolo Soleri would neverhave thought of themselves as offering science fictions. Nevertheless, their versions ofideal cities – to be realized in the future – tilt toward the fantastic. Many SF writers, fromRobert Silverberg to J. G. Ballard, have adapted and explored the implications ofCorbusier’s ‘radiant city’ and Paolo Soleri’s visionary self-contained megabuildings thathe termed arcologies.

In the second strand, SF draws on urban studies and social science. Nineteenthcentury fears of cities as cauldrons of social disorder and political chaos fueled theurban dystopias that appear again and again in imagined futures of the late nineteenthand early twentieth centuries. The loosely grouped set of cyperpunk writers from the1980s and 1990s reflected critical urban theory around cities as communicationsystems and the effects of economic globalization. Samuel R. Delany hasacknowledged that the Unlicensed Sector in Trouble on Triton: An AmbiguousHeterotopia (1976) is ‘a Jane Jacobs kind of thing’ while drawing the subtitle from thework of Michel Foucault.

I’m a historian and urban studies specialist who has been exploring science fictionscholarship for the past decade. After finishing one book on frontier narratives in U.S.science fiction, I’m now engaged on a mirror image project about the different types ofcity that keep reappearing in speculative fiction – deserted cities, feral suburbs, city asmachine, city as bazaar. We keep telling variations on a number of received narratives(or parabolas, to apply Brian Attebery’s term) like the ‘escape to freedom from theconfining city’ story or the ‘ultimate highrise’ story. If anyone would like to share theirfavorite SF city or city type, I’d be glad to hear from you.

Works Cited

Attebery, Brian, and Veronica Hollinger. Parabolas of Science Fiction. Middletown, CT:

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Wesleyan University Press, 2013.

Delany, Samuel. ‘On Triton and Other Matters: An Interview with Samuel R. Delany.’Science Fiction Studies 17.3 (1990), accessed athttp://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/delany52interview.htm

Engels, Friedrich. Socialism, Utopian and Scientific. Chicago: C. H. Kerr and Co., 1900.

Smith, Michael. ‘What is a City? Definitions of the Urban.’ 2011.http://wideurbanworld.blogspot.com/2011/02/what-is-city-definitions-of-urban.html

Wolfe, Gary. The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction. Kent,Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1979.

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Bio: Carl Abbott has taught history, urban studies and planning at Portland StateUniversity (Oregon) in five decades (not fifty years!). In addition to several books abouthistory and planning in North American cities, he is the author of Frontiers Past andFuture: Science Fiction and the American West as well as several articles on sciencefiction in urban history and planning journals and in Science Fiction Studies.

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December 9, 2013 in Episode 2. Tags: Cities, Design, Film, Literature, Narrative, Utopias

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