MIGRATORY CITIES
Fleeing from the Cylon tyranny, the last Battlestar Galactica leads a ragtag fugitive fleet on a long quest … a shining planet known as Earth.
—Battlestar Galactica (1978)
Puerto Angeles adrift on the blue Pacific and Arkangel skating on iron runners across the frozen northern seas … —Philip Reeve, Mortal Engines (2001)
Manhattan is on the move … throughout the galaxy. The invention of the “spindizzy,” a real doozy of an antigravity device named for tricks with electron rotation, has allowed entire cities to cut themselves loose from planetary surfaces and zip through space at super-light speeds. First one, then another, then every Earth city has gathered up its bedrock and buildings and atmosphere in a force field bubble to go flying off in search of work and adventures. James Blish introduced his upwardly mobile New York in stories for Astounding Science Fiction in 1950 and combined several related stories into the book Earthman Come Home in 1955. He wrote two prequel novels and one sequel over the next few years and published them together as Cities in Flight in 1970.
New York and other migratory metropolises are Okie cities—eighteen thousand of them at the time of Earthman Come Home about fifteen hundred years into the future. Like refugees from the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, they roam the stars looking for worlds where they can trade scientific or industrial expertise for resources like petroleum, germanium, and food. Business is regulated by contracts enforced by a bureaucratic galactic police force that hassles the cities just as cops in the early twentieth century harassed itinerant laborers. Migrant cities like New York that are on the up and up think of themselves as hobos or migratory workers. Cities that have gone rogue are bindlestiffs, a synonym for tramp that Blish uses as a pejorative. New York encounters a hobo jungle where three hundred cities have huddled without work because of economic collapse, before eventually flying off to ever more distant adventures.
Half a century later, Stephen Baxter in Flood (2009) imagined a migrating city as far removed and different as could be from high-flying New York. The year is 2031, and global climate change and massive tectonic disruptions are causing water to pour into the oceans at an astounding rate. Mean sea level rise has already passed two hundred meters over the base datum for the twentieth century, on its way to an eight-hundred-meter rise by 2035. What had been an organized settlement of sea-rise refugees in the Texas panhandle only a few years earlier is now Walker City. Its tens of thousands of residents are on the move. They stretch in miles-long columns, flanked by the community’s armed guards. “This was Walker City, a city on the move. To walk was the world. To walk was life” (290).
The community wanders the still unflooded parts of the Great Plains—Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska. It stops for days or weeks to offer labor in exchange for food and supplies; because gasoline is available only to the remnants of the military, organized muscle power is invaluable. One of the characters who has ended up in the city describes it to a visitor:
We’re organized. You can see that. We’re a city on the move. We have a mayor, who we elect, although it has to be a show of hands. We have cops and medical facilities, and we barter with other communities. When we stop, we get organized, we dig latrines, we post guards. We have chaplains in every denomination, and imams and rabbis. We help each other; we bury our dead; we care for our children. And we stay out of trouble…. We work in return for lodging or food. It’s not ideal, but it’s not meant to last forever. We’re looking for a place to put down some kind of roots. Until we find that, we’re on the move. An Okie city, but a city nevertheless. (300–301)
Tell a science fiction fan that you’re writing about mobile cities, and Cities in Flight is likely to pop up first in the conversation. James Blish was one of the more popular science fiction writers of the 1950s and 1960s and well connected with the Futurians, the New York club that included Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Cyril Kornbluth, Donald Wollheim, Damon Knight, Judith Merril, and many other writers who shaped the field from the 1940s to the 1970s. Blish wrote big-picture science fiction of grand sweep over many millennia, framed by Oswald Spengler’s ideas about the rise of cultures and the decline of civilizations from The Decline of the West (1919). It’s future history of the sort that Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein were toying with in the same era.
But Blish doesn’t actually do much with the city part of his story line. Mayor John Amalfi makes his appearance standing on the top level of New York City Hall (is it the “belfry” of a building or the “bridge” of a spaceship? he wonders). Blish scatters occasional references to New York streets and landmarks, but the city as city doesn’t drive the action. Neither the scale nor variety of urban life really figures. The narrative is a series of exciting episodes at different planets and star systems where a few key characters get to show their cleverness and courage. For all that we learn about the dynamics of neighborhoods, the interplay of cultural groups, or the maintenance of urban services, we could just as well be on a traditional starship having space opera adventures with Mayor Amalfi and City Manager Mark Hazleton as captain and first mate.
Baxter’s wandering community is a more limited and more plausible projection that just meets the criteria for cityhood. Roughly the size of the Union and Confederate armies that marched back and forth across Tennessee to clash at Shiloh and Chickamauga, it is large enough to be a city. Its population is a heterogeneous hodgepodge of races and ages and backgrounds. It has government and services. It is certainly not tied to one location, but the ability of Walker City to survive for a decade in a context of cataclysmic geophysical change that has destroyed cities with millennia of history means that it substitutes persistence for permanence.
Blish and Baxter have set a challenge. Normal cities are stationary—they spread from a center and don’t move (with the occasional exception of small towns that governments relocate because of dam projects or similar public works). London is still where the Romans built Londinium nearly two thousand years ago. Names may change with politics and migration—from Byzantium to Constantinople to Istanbul for a world-class example, from New Archangel to Sitka for a U.S. case—but the cities are in the same place. Plenty of cities have disappeared into history, but they died on the ground where they were born. We have seen that one of the common tropes of science fiction is the city that could not possibly move because it already covers an entire planetary surface.
But what if a city could move? That is the premise for startling, even shocking, reversals. Unlike staid social scientists and historians, science fiction writers can imagine cities that fly, walk, crawl, roll, creep, and float. Cities can move by hard inches and slow miles, they can barrel along tracks and strike out across oceans. How could they do this, we wonder, hoping for more technologically satisfying suggestions than spindizzies. Why should they move at all? What is gained and what is lost when a city pulls up stakes?
HUNTER-GATHERERS
In 1964, British architect Ron Herron published drawings of Walking City—a huge self-contained mini-city that looked like a combination of giant building cranes, 1950s robots, and praying mantis. He envisioned urbanoids with vast extensible legs that could stalk through future New York or London like benevolent monsters. Walking cities could assemble into an ad hoc metropolis, or their residents could decide to pack up and move their entire city if their environment grew too polluted or local politics too repressive. Walking City citizens wouldn’t have to leave their apartments as the superstructure trundled across the landscape, the entire city turning into a giant caravan (or RV, for U.S. readers).
Herron was a part of Archigram, a group of young British architects who came together in the early 1960s to stage a conceptual revolt against stuffy academic modernism. They published their ideas in an ephemeral magazine beginning in 1961, staged exhibitions, and even snagged a handful of commissions. They were part of the transformation of British intellectual life as a new generation of artists and professionals pushed to supplant their elders who had been shaped by depression, war, and postwar austerity. Results ranged from the explosion of British rock music to the New Wave science fiction that would soon appear in the magazine New Worlds.
Archigram drawings are thought experiments and visual jokes in what people a few years later might consider the Monty Python mode. The Archigram watchwords were flexibility and motion, in contrast to Le Corbusier’s proposals for massive building complexes fixed in place and Paolo Soleri’s emerging drawings of vast permanently sited arcologies. Herron proposed the Walking City. Peter Cook proposed Instant City, a set of airships freighted with performance spaces and culture to enliven drab towns like a flying circus. Given their celebration of movement and what critic Michael Sorkin called their “nomadic fantasies,” we can read the Archigram vision as a direct send-up of Lúcio Costa’s and Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasília, designed to resemble a great grounded bird and already four years into construction when Herron published.1
Much more recently, Spanish architect Manuel Domínguez has published drawings for a Very Large Structure half a kilometer in span that could crawl across the landscape on huge caterpillar tracks. Lower levels would house the mechanical systems and infrastructure, and the top deck would be the living area. More like a land-based cruise ship than a city, it is another quasi-utopian thought experiment, not all that different in basic goals from the ideal cities that Renaissance thinkers sketched out in two dimensions—just more mechanically complex and mobile.2
Greg Bear’s mobile cities in Strength of Stones, published in 1988 and including stories from 1978 and 1981, read like supersized projections of Herron’s vision. On the planet God-Does-Battle, thousand-year-old sentient cities “walk” by partly disassembling themselves and then reassembling along a chosen route like a disarticulated slinky. “The city that had occupied Mesa Canaan was now marching across the plain…. It had disassembled just before dawn, walking on elephantine legs, tractor treads and wheels, with living bulkheads upright, dismantled buttresses given new instruction to crawl instead of support, floors and ceilings, transports and smaller city parts, factories and resource centers, all unrecognizable now, like a slime mold soon to gather itself in its new country. The city carried its plan deep within the living plasm of its fragmented body” (1).
More than a millennium before the story starts, the planet had boasted 153 mobile cities, each rising hundreds or thousands of feet and able to house half a million people. They were intended as homes and refuge for the galaxy’s surviving Jews, Muslims, and Christians, but something went terribly wrong. The city operating systems decided that their humans were sinners, threw out them out, and kept them out. Without a purpose, however, the cities slowly decay. Some have gone mad. Others are unable to create spare parts or repair themselves. Those that survive move sometimes aimlessly, other times deliberately to place themselves where they can gather new supplies of water and resources. As the three linked novellas proceed, covering a span of 111 years, the central theme is the potential variety of artificial intelligence: master urban AIS, mobile city fragments with rudimentary robotic capacity, avatars, simulacra, and the original city architect reconstituted from stored memories. Nevertheless, the image of vast cities that lumber over the landscape like gigantic Transformer toys in their hunt for survival is hard to shake.
Armada is another “nomadic city” on the hunt. Front and center in China Miéville’s The Scar (2002), Armada is a great composite raft constructed on the hulls of hundreds of ships that have been lashed and chained together, some voluntarily and some as prizes from war and piracy. It spreads across a square mile of sea like an unmoored Venice, linked by bridges and walkways, served by “flat-bottomed canal runners” in the watery cracks between ships.
Each vessel was a pontoon in a web of rope bridges. Boats coiled toward each other in seawalls of embedded ships, surrounding free-floating vessels. Basilio Harbor, where Armada’s navy and visitors could tie up, repair or unload, sheltered from storms. The largest ships meandered instead around the edges of the city, beyond the tugs and steamers tethered to Armada’s sides. Out in the open water were fleets of fishing boats, the city’s warships, the chariot ships and whim trawlers and others. These were Armada’s pirate navy, heading out across the world, coming in to dock with cargoes plundered from enemies or the sea. (81)
Armada is a city by all criteria. It is ancient, and it is big. The first ships began tying together a thousand years earlier. Rebuilt from the inside and topped with new superstructures that represent the aesthetics of a hundred cultures, it supports a population in the hundreds of thousands. The city is both a hunter and a gatherer—raider, trader, deep-sea miner. Armadans engage in far-flung trade with nations of the mainland and inhabited islands. But the Armada navy also hunts down salvage and stray cargo ships, bringing back loot to feed the city’s economy. “This was a pirate city, ruled by cruel mercantilism, existing in the pores of the world, snatching new citizens from their ships, a floating freetown for buying and selling stolen goods, where might made right” (82).
And the city itself moves, sometimes making a great circle around the ocean at the whim of winds and currents, sometimes at its own intent, pulled by hundreds of tugboats that latch on with thick chains. Progress under tow is painfully slow: one mile per hour by tugs and maybe twice that if wind and current assist. It may get under way to avoid foreign vessels, to contact trading partners, or to find and tap sources of petroleum. Here the ponderous city makes steam: “The steamers, the tugs, the squat industrial vessels were moving back toward the city, like iron filings toward a magnet…. When all the servant ships had attached themselves to the city, they bore off to the southwest, venting black smoke, their gears grinding, devouring huge quantities of stolen coal and anything else that might burn. With appalling slowness, Armada began to move” (397–98).
Things go awry when the city falls under fanatical leaders fixated on reaching a geophysical anomaly at the far end of the ocean, a rift or “scar” where probability works in unusual ways and possibilities for wealth and power may be multiplied. The action involves capturing a huge sea monster and tethering it to Armada with gigantic chains, so that it pulls the city like a huge draft animal. As the city draws closer to the literal edge of the ocean, inhabitants rise in revolt, and after many dire events, the city turns away: “Raucous gangs, reeling at what they did, turned the winches that tugged at the avanc’s reins. And slowly, over miles, the avanc turned its nose in dumb obedience, and the city’s massive wake began to arc, and Armada turned. It was a long, very shallow curve that took the rest of the day’s light to complete” (619).
Armada is piratical out of necessity and some choice, but the Traction Cities that roam a postapocalypse world in Philip Reeve’s “thrilling predator cities quartet” exist in a world of pure municipal Darwinism. Crashing across the landscape on treads, London and its rivals pursue, capture, and dismantle smaller cities—and each other when they can. In Mortal Engines (2001), London has to flee from the huge and deadly Panzerstadt-Bayreuth, “a conurbation formed by the coupling together of four huge Traktionstadts” (140). Smaller cities attract swarms of predators and carrion-eater cities. The city of Motoropolis, for example, runs out of fuel and finds itself stranded, to be picked apart by scavenger towns: “Tom realized that its tracks and gut were gone, and that its deck plates were being stripped out by a swarm of small towns that seethed in the shadows of its lower levels, tearing off huge rusting sections in their jaws and landing salvage parties whose blowtorches glittered and sparked in the shadows between the tiers.” In turn, “a pack of tiny predator-suburbs were harrying the scavenger towns on the northwestern side, singling out the weakest and slowest and charging after it” (81–82).
London towers two thousand feet with six tiers (roughly enough height for a 150-story skyscraper). The elite live in the open air on the top level. The lowest factory level is the city’s gut, where captured cities are dismantled. The clanking machinery of traction occupies the bottommost tier—the city runs on steam. We get no horizontal dimensions or population figures, but a small mining city that London captures has nine hundred people. The finest place on earth to Londoners, the city suffers when seen from the air: “It was bigger than he remembered, and much uglier. Strange, how when he lived there he had believed everything the Goggle-screens told him about the city’s elegant lives, its perfect beauty. Now he saw that it was ugly; no better than any other town, just bigger: a storm front of smoke and belching chimneys, a wave of darkness rolling toward the mountains with the white villas of High London surfing on its crest like some delicate ship” (267).
The books are written for the middle-school market, so the chief characters are a plucky teen boy who sees through adult deceit and a plucky teen girl from outside the cities who offers her own cynical views. Mortal Engines, the first volume, offers confrontations with bad adults, a narrow escape from a pirate city, a thrilling airship ride, and other fascinating adventures. By the second volume, Predator’s Gold (2003), Tom and Hester have made their way to a different city, London having perished in fire. Their new home is pursued by the greedy urbivore Arkangel, which claws its way across the northern ice: “eight tiers of factories and slave-barracks and soot-spewing chimneys, a sky train riding the slipstream, parasite airships sifting the exhaust plume for waste minerals, and down below, ghostly through veils of snow and powdered rock, the big wheels turning” (11). Accompanying Arkangel like escort ships around an aircraft carrier are hunter-killer suburbs like Wolverinehampton (a pun for British readers, as is the mobile suburb Tunbridge Wheels). If the hero, the heroine, and their adopted city fail to escape, their fate is visible: “The city flexed its jaws, giving the watchers on Anchorage’s stern an unforgettable glimpse of the vast furnaces and dismantling-engines that awaited them” (299).
Real cities have enormously intricate energy systems. They use electricity generated by distant dams, steam plants, and atomic reactors; they burn coal from distant mines and natural gas piped in from hundreds of miles away and perhaps even delivered in liquid form by ship; they depend on petroleum sourced in a world market but delivered to gas stations and home heating systems by tanker trucks; and a few buildings may directly tap solar radiation from ninety-three million miles away. This complexity makes a mobile city an imaginative stretch, since it would need power not only for internal needs but also to move its immense tonnage. Miéville has the advantage of wind and current for Armada, while Reeve takes refuge in the steampunk aesthetic for his post-electronic cities, with giant red-hot boilers powering gears and drive trains. It’s fun, ramping up nineteenth-century steamboat races and locomotive chases, but it also puts him firmly on the fantasy side of science fiction that doesn’t care about pesky physics formulas on the relationships between energy and work.
RIDING THE RAILS
Powering across the Mars-scape of the future, the Catherine of Tharsis is a barreling supertrain that crisscrosses the surface of the Red Planet in Ian McDonald’s Ares Express (2002). Looming like an ocean liner, it hauls hundreds of freight cars to keep the Martian economy humming. It is also a small traveling town, the permanent residence of a big interlocking clan. Clans and guilds from dozens of independent trains exchange information, compete for business, and intermarry to cement alliances.
There is something about trains that helps to marry past to future for science fiction and fantasy. Clanking, hissing, tooting, rumbling locomotives are steampunk SF standbys. Few American kids ride intercity trains, but millions know about the magic train platform and the steam locomotive that carries Harry, Ron, and Hermione to Hogwarts School. At the same time, the streamlined locomotive was one of the principal signifiers of the technologically superior future when science fiction was entering its golden age in the 1930s and 1940s, a role assumed more recently by the bullet trains that connect European and Asian cities at two hundred miles per hour, such as Japan’s Shinkansen, the Alta Velocidad Española, France’s TGV, and South Korea’s KTX.
Both the French and Korean trains may have been inspirations for the French comic Le Transperceneige, source for the Korean-made English-language film Snowpiercer (2013). After ecological disaster has frozen the Earth, a tiny remnant of humans have found shelter on a train that endlessly circles the globe. The train is divided rear to front by class divisions enforced by armed police. An unemployed lumpen proletariat living on the dole crowd the rear cars, petty officials fill the middle cars, and the indulgent elite live in exotic comfort close to the engine. The action involves a revolt of the underclass, who slowly fight their way forward until the hero confronts the mad genius who designed and runs the train. At the climax, an avalanche shatters the train and leaves only two young survivors to step out into the wintery wasteland, their fate ambiguously left to the imagination of the audience.
The train is a moving world—it contains all surviving humans—but it is questionably a city because it has no hinterland, no trade, no interactions with a larger world. Its population is unspecified but probably in the range of five hundred to two thousand, and its size apparently somewhere from thirty to fifty cars.3 The closest analogy to the train is the science fiction standby of a generation ship, a large spaceship that takes several generations from departure to destination at sublight speeds. The train moves along an endless loop, as a generation ship moves through space. As in Robert Heinlein’s classic story “Universe,” the goal of the protagonist is to explore the far reaches of the container and reach its control center. As the story progresses, the people from the rear cars learn more and more about the miniature world in which they are confined. In the end, however, gaining control does not help—there is no forgotten purpose toward which the train/ship can be redirected and no new world waiting.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s Terminator inflates the streamlined train by orders of magnitude. Terminator is an entire city that rolls around Mercury at forty-five degrees south latitude, carried on “twenty gigantic elevated tracks,” pacing the planet’s rotation and keeping just inside the shadow zone and ahead of Mercury’s searing dawn. The city, as Robinson describes it in 2312 (2012), is bigger than Venice, whose historic island districts were home to about sixty thousand people in the early twenty-first century. The city is domed, of course, for temperature control and breathable air. Its power supply is a marvel of creative engineering: “The sleeves on the underside of the city are fitted over the track with a tolerance so fine that the thermal expansion of the tracks’ austenite stainless steel is always pushing the city west, onto the narrower tracks still in the shade. A little bit of resistance to this movement creates a great deal of the city’s electricity” (28). Around and around the planet it glides, circumnavigating the barren globe in 177 days, powered by the sun and thus solving the problem of a city finding and carrying enough concentrated energy to be able to move.
Terminator made an earlier appearance in Robinson’s “Memory of Whiteness” (1986), and Geoffrey Landis echoed or paralleled it in “Proposal for a Sun-Following Moonbase” in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society in 1991. The narrative imagination and the engineering imagination combine to reach toward the technological sublime, the sense of wonder and exhilaration that comes from contemplating newly made objects that push the limits of human accomplishment, like Boulder Dam, perhaps, or the space station that we approach with a sense of awe in the film 2001. Robinson enjoys thinking up new and unusual cities like the Martian cliff-wall cities we have already encountered or the city in 2312 that rings the Saturnian satellite Iapetus, built along a continuous High Street that follows the moon’s odd equatorial ridge. Its engineers have used seashell genes to engineer calcium into scallop shapes that make the city resemble a giant coral reef. Terminator is equally awesome. Seen from outside by sunwalkers who enjoy the splendor of the Mercurial surface, the city is sublime. Sometimes it rolls through darkness, sometimes it is struck by sunlight reflected off cliffsides ahead. “During these cliffblinks, nothing has a shadow; space turns strange…. Changes in light, slight tilts in pitch, these make it seem as if the town were a ship, sailing over a black ocean with waves so large that when in their troughs, the ship drops into the night, then on the high points crests back into day” (28–29).
Inside the city, ambience and scale change. Terminatorians enjoy neighborhood cafés, parks, human-scale apartments, and similar benefits of traditional urban life. Robinson’s future cities are consistently walkable, reflecting the best of current theory about the fabric of successful urbanism. He assumes that no matter how exotic the urban shell and location on Mars or Mercury, people will prefer everyday environments that recall Paris or Brooklyn. It would be hard to think of a future city as comfortable as Odessa in Green Mars (1994), for example, where Maya Toitovna and Michel Duval work interesting jobs during the day and take evenings at tables along the seawall facing the yet-to-be filled Hellas Sea, with dark copper clouds in the purpling sky and music from the café behind them.
Advanced technology is vulnerable, especially when it is a single nonredundant system, but social inertia is a powerful counterforce. Terrorists destroy Terminator by diverting and crashing a chunk of solar system debris onto the tracks ahead of the city. Although there is time to evacuate, the city dies when it reaches the break in the tracks and stalls for the sun to catch it. Like New Orleans after Katrina or Tokyo after its earthquakes and fire bombings, Mercury has the capacity and the emotional will to rebuild. The central character Swan Er Hong is caught outside when the disaster strikes and immediately cries in anguish: “Oh, my town, my town, ohhhh…. We’ll come back! We’ll rebuild! Ohhhhh …” At the book’s end Swan is back in the rebuilding city: “It’s good to be home,” she tells another citizen. “Thank God we rebuilt.” “We had to,” a friend replies (341).
The ramshackle rail-riding city that Christopher Priest imagined in Inverted World (1974) certainly should be rebuilt, or at least renovated, but the chances are unfortunately minimal. The city, whose inhabitants call it “Earth,” is in constant motion like Terminator, but it grinds rather than glides. It travels on four tracks that are gathered up after it passes and hauled around to the front to be laid down again so the city can continue to move. Huge winches haul it along a stretch of track and then have to be repositioned when the track is relaid from behind the city to front. This numbingly repetitive process has been going on for 192 years at the rate of one-tenth mile per day. In seventy thousand days the city has moved seven thousand miles. Residents number their age in miles, not years, setting up the striking opening sentence: “I had reached the age of six hundred and fifty miles”—17.8 Earth years.
The city is on the move because it is compelled to chase a constantly retreating “optimum” that recedes at a constant pace. The city can sometimes make up ground when the going is easy, only to falter in pursuit when it reaches rough terrain and has to detour around obstacles or delay for its engineers to throw up bridges. We learn at the end that the optimum is an energy source that travels slowly across the Earth (a bit like a shifting magnetic pole). The optimum interacts with a machine in the city to supply its power, thus the necessity to keep up. The seven thousand miles started in China and end on the coast of Portugal.
To residents it is a city, and it functions like a city. The population appears to have been drawn from China, Russia, Italy, France, Germany, and England, for instructions and maps can be found in all those relevant languages. Labor is divided and differentiated into roles ranging from teacher to synthetic food factory worker. Government is by guilds of Future Surveyors (scouts and explorers), Traction, Track-Laying, Bridge Builders, Barter, Militia, and Navigators (the senior council). The roles of the Traction, Track, and Bridge specialists are obvious, but the Barter guild is the key to survival, for the city trades with its constantly changing hinterland. Barter specialists negotiate labor contracts with local villagers, who help with the track-laying process. “By and large, the city could fulfill [the needs of the settlements]. With its high degree of organization, and the technology available to it, the city had over the miles accumulated a large stockpile of foodstuffs, medicines, and chemicals, and it had also learned by experience which of these were most required. So with offers of antibiotics, seeds, fertilizer, water-purifiers—even, in some cases, offers of assistance to repair existing implements—the Barter guildsmen could lay the groundwork for their own demands” (115).
“Earth” is a satirical stand-in for the British Empire. It passes through impoverished landscapes across the span of Eurasia and uses technical superiority to impose its will on the backward natives. In particular, it leases young women as breeders, because women born of city families overwhelmingly produce male children. Female children remain in the city, but boys can return to the village with mothers. This sexual exploitation is not necessary to the basic plot, but it highlights the unequal relationship between the city and its surroundings. There is much dissatisfaction in the villages, expressed at one point by a destructive but ultimately unsuccessful attack by angry natives. Why do the locals resent us, the central character Helward Mann asks his track guild mentor: “Surely we pay for their services.” “Yes, but at our price. This is a poor region. The soil’s bad, and there’s not much food. We pass by in our city, offer them what they need … and they take it. But they get no long-term benefit, and I suppose we take more than we give” (86). The people of India and Uganda would agree.
If the city is Western imperialism, it’s in just as bad shape as all the real empires were in the postwar era. The winches are slowly wearing down, parts are failing, cables are fraying with sometimes deadly results, rails are warping out of true. It is slow moving, ungainly, its most vital parts exposed to attack. When Helward Mann first sees it from outside, as a new guild member, he is surprised how small and grubby it looks. An outsider with wider experience agrees that it doesn’t appear very city-like: “She had heard the men refer to it as a city … but to her eyes it was not much more than a large and misshapen office block. It did not look too safe, constructed mainly of timber. It had the ugliness of functionalism … this strange structure was nowhere more than seven storeys high” (276). Priest gives its dimensions as 1,500 feet long, 150 feet wide, and 200 feet high with seven levels. He never specifies a population total, but an allocation of three thousand cubic feet of space per resident would allow a population of fifteen thousand. Alternatively, the floor space on the seven levels could house five thousand people at three hundred square feet each, or maybe double that if there are mezzanines and secondary levels.
The city—“Earth”—also exists in its own perceptual bubble, with a self-satisfied insularity and distorted worldview. The optimum creates an “inverted world” by warping local space-time into a hyperbola that stretches to infinite height in front and infinite flatness behind. Things get flatter behind and taller ahead. Because of relativity effects, people age more slowly relative to the city/optimum if they travel backward from the city and age faster if they travel forward into the future. Given that people from outside the city can come and go without apparently feeling the same effects, we are left uncertain as to whether the city people suffer a mass delusion in their perceptions of the world, or whether they are truly physically influenced.
The city dwellers are ignorant of the larger world outside, where it is two hundred years after the crash caused by exhaustion of fossil fuels. Civilization is being rebuilt in places like England. The key outside character/observer Elizabeth Khan is a nurse from England who has come to Iberia to work with villagers (an example of the nongovernmental organization work that can be considered, by critics, as neo-imperial) and visits the city. At the end, however, the city grinds to a halt, stopped by the Atlantic Ocean and by a revolt among younger residents who want to stop the city and get off. “We’ve been cheating and stealing our way across this land, it’s that which has created this danger,” says one. “It’s time for it to stop” (234). And it does. The moving city comes to rest, and “Earthers” leave it to take up life according to normal Earth physics.
The city’s mobility, it turns out, has been a source of ignorance. Blinkered by their real/perceptual space warp, the city folks haven’t a clue and think they are on another planet. Encapsulated in the city and compelled, they think, to follow the optimum, residents structure their entire society around keeping the city moving. Promising young people like Helward Mann are educated and trained for the single purpose of keeping the tracks advancing and the city with them. There is never time to learn anything about the regions and people through which they pass, save for their ability to furnish food and labor. The situation is like a column of nineteenth-century explorers passing through the African jungle, intent on a distant goal and interested in their surroundings only to the degree that they can supply porters.
DISTRIBUTED CITIES
The Swarm is a fleet of at least 150 dirigibles that ceaselessly crisscross their planet in the recent action-packed novel Terminal World by Alastair Reynolds. Once they were the defense force for the vast city of Spearpoint, but they along ago declared independence and have become a complete society. Reynolds does not supply full details, but it is clear that different airships serve different functions, much like the neighborhoods or districts of a city. An oversize super-aerostat serves as the city’s “downtown” and government center. There are military airships, and presumably industrial and agricultural airships to serve the different needs of the Swarmers, who live their lives in the air. In effect, they constitute the physically disconnected pieces of a single city.
Like a real city, the Swarm governs itself (through an airship oligarchy), trades with communities outside itself, accepts immigrants who meet its standards, and has persisted over generations. Reynolds is explicit: this is an “aerial city” where the protagonist Quillon, on arrival, hears “four thousand subtly different engine notes, not one tuned to exactly the same tone as any other, but combining, merging, threading, echoing off the crater walls to form one endless, throbbing, harmonically rich chorus that was utterly, shockingly familiar. The hum of the city” (195).
The Swarm is a “distributed city,” a concept that is emerging simultaneously in urban planning theory and science fiction. The term can be derived by analogy from distributed computing, where a single task is parceled out among multiple networked but physically separate machines. A distributed city is one whose neighborhoods and districts are widely parceled out over space and form a unit by interacting over distance. It retains the spatial specialization of a normal city, but the pieces are scattered rather than adjacent. A distributed city is not simply suburban sprawl, which is a phenomenon that we can map as a single contiguous geographic entity. Geographers and planners can debate where exactly to draw boundaries around metropolitan Toronto or Phoenix, but they agree that it can be done. A distributed city is something different. It can be mapped only as a discontinuous scattering of nodes or pieces, each of which plays a distinct role as part of a larger whole.
There is really no distributed city yet to be found on our planetary surface. Mega-regions like the BosWash megalopolis of the northeastern United States or Japan’s Taiheiyō Belt (Pacific Belt) from Tokyo to Osaka and beyond might look at first glance like they fit the model—they consist of several nodes located along a corridor like beads on a string—but each component is fundamentally independent of the others. Baltimore could exist without Philadelphia, Nagoya without Kobe, Portland without Seattle. The closest we have come in North America is the relationship between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, the latter of which boomed in the later twentieth century as, in essence, a specialized recreational annex of LA separated by a hefty chunk of desert.
Another comparison is the “global cities” described by sociologist Saskia Sassen. She argues that the global economy has produced an interchangeable elite of corporate managers and financiers who inhabit the most expensive apartments and prestigious office buildings in New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Dubai and move with complete ease from one place to the next. Their “upper city” (think Metropolis here) is effectively a single place that happens to be distributed among several continents, given that the highest-level .001 percent are at home anyplace their expensive wants and tastes can be satisfied. An example in contemporary fiction is the twenty-eight-year-old protagonist in Don DeLillo’s aptly titled Cosmopolis (2003), an asset manager who spends the novel in a limousine between his Manhattan apartment and a haircutting salon while running a bet against the yen.
In urban theory circles, interest in distributed cities comes in part from concerns about urban survivability in the face of disasters like Hurricane Katrina and anticipation of the long-term crisis of climate change. In response, a few planners have begun to explore the creation of resilient cities through massive decentralization that goes many steps beyond classic suburbanization. This is not nostalgic, antiurban, back-to-the-land thinking of the sort that permeates much of American culture and some of its science fiction. It is about using the power of long-distance communication to create new urban forms.4
The government of Scotland offers an example. A report by Design Innovation Scotland recently offered up the idea of a distributed city as a new way to think about regional economic development. The report calls it an “imagined city” in which enterprises and communities across a large region (it suggests the Highlands and Islands) are linked laterally into a functioning whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Thinking in these terms, the Scottish planners see a distributed city as a way in which “apparently disparate resources—intellectual, physical, social and material—can be usefully related to one another to create motivational, distributed enterprises within a regional ecology of cultural and economic activities.” The economic development jargon from Edinburgh bureaucrats is a bit painful to read, but the idea is there.
We can understand the radical implications of distributed cities by revisiting Terminal World, where Reynolds contrasts the Swarm with Spearpoint, a vast towering city in the shape of a tapering cone that is home to thirty million people. Fifteen leagues across at its base, it narrows to one-third league across at fifty leagues above the ground and keeps rising into the vacuum. As discussed in chapter 1, Spearpoint represents the much more common science fiction type of the city as megastructure, imagined as the ultimate coalescence of high-rise Manhattan or Chicago into a single accreted superstructure. Distributed cities offer a sharp contrast, with some innovative ways to think about urban futures in science fiction as well as urban planning. They also do the science fiction work of upsetting the image and reality of cities as vast, fixed agglomerations that grow higher and wider as time passes. They embody the ability of science fiction to challenge basic economic and social assumptions.
The antecedent of the radically distributed city is a brief theoretical speculation by the early Soviet sociologist and planner Mikhail Okhitovich, who wrote in opposition to high modernist theorists of the high-rise city like Le Corbusier. Associated with the radical Soviet architects of the Constructivism movement, Okhitovich in 1929 published a short article, “The Problem of the City,” that proclaimed the idea of “disturbanism.” With modern technology, he said, the new socialist society would not have to crowd together in the centralized capitalist city. His alternative was the Red City of the Planet of Communism—perhaps envisioned for Earth or perhaps as a socialist utopia for Mars in the tradition of Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star (1908). The new city would be structured by social relations rather than territory, he argued, and the different functions of a city no longer needed to exist in one physical place. Instead, he wrote, “the whole world is at our service.” He envisioned activity waves of greater and lesser intensity that would span the planet, sometimes overlapping and reinforcing to create a network of urban nodes that together constituted urban society. Okhitovich himself ran afoul of Joseph Stalin and was executed in a gulag in 1937, plunging his ideas into official disrepute. Architectural historians in the 1980s resurrected his work along with that of other advocates of radical Soviet architecture. His ideas now make it into blogs on architecture and utopias.5
The distributed cities that are now appearing in science fiction, with their indirect debt to Okhitovich, have yet to settle into a standard pattern. In a simple example, Iain M. Banks in Surface Detail (2010) uses the term “distributed city” for a set of supersize high-rise structures scattered over a planetary surface. It is as if the suburban “edge city” nodes described by journalist Joel Garreau were uprooted from their locations outside Washington and Houston and plopped randomly across a much wider landscape. Jay Lake takes an opposite tack in imagining a distributed “Cascadiopolis” in the near-future Pacific Northwest. His story “Forests of the Night” appears in the original anthology Metatropolis. The stories from other contributors such as Tobias Buckell and editor John Scalzi take place in recognizable extrapolations of regular cities like Detroit and St. Louis, and their plots revolve around the classic tension between privilege and powerlessness in urban centers and peripheries. Lake, in contrast, imagines an alternative city that weaves its way through the forests and mountains of the Cascade Range in the Pacific Northwest. His city consists of a networked set of isolated enclaves that look individually like forest compounds but together amount to something much more. As he said in an e-mail, “It’s not like I had a map or anything. Just visualizing a distributed, zero-footprint city environment spread out through lava tubes, tree platforms and low-impact temporary surface structures.”6
The refugee fleet that comes together in the reimagined television series Battlestar Galactica (2004–9) is also a distributed city. It consists of several dozen physically distinct and sometimes quite distant units. Because series continuity was not always great, the number of ships at different times and in different episodes ranged variously around several dozen. There are big “neighborhoods” like Galactica with more than twenty-five hundred people and smaller ships with populations in the mid-hundreds. The total population of this discontinuous settlement amounts to just about fifty thousand, the size of a small city like Binghamton, New York, or Grand Junction, Colorado.
Like cities with neighborhoods and districts, the fleet’s individual ships specialize in particular activities that together make up a functioning city. There are cargo ships, mining ships (Monarch), industrial ships like the tylium refinery ship Daru Mozu, a hospital ship (Rising Star), a prison ship (Astral Queen), residential ships like Cloud Nine, a government center on Colonial One, and, of course, military ships like Galactica.
They function together, exchanging personnel and residents, sometimes shifting functions, and battling over politics. The fleet lacks the permanence of a real city, but for a few brief years it amounts to a city parceled out among vast reaches of space.
These are innovative ways to think about cities, which have always been grounded in very specific locales, but there is a precedent from 2,450 years ago, as recounted from the Greek-Persian wars. Battlestar Galactica’s William Adama had an ancestor in Themistocles, also the captain of a distributed city-fleet standing against the overwhelming might of an implacable enemy. Here is what Herodotus reported about debates among the Greek leaders after Athens had fallen to the invaders:
When Themistocles thus spoke, the Corinthian Adeimantos inveighed against him for the second time, bidding him to be silent because he had no native land, and urging Eurybiades not to put to the vote the proposal of one who was a citizen of no city; for he said that Themistocles might bring opinions before the council if he could show a city belonging to him, but otherwise not. This objection he made against him because Athens had been taken and was held by the enemy. Then Themistocles said many evil things of him and of the Corinthians both, and declared also that he himself and his countrymen had in truth a city and a land larger than that of the Corinthians, so long as they had two hundred ships fully manned.7
A distributed city highlights interrelations among the different parts of a great city—their simultaneous specialization and interaction. It also requires flexibility that is the opposite of a vast, stable arcology. A distributed city can grow by accretion and shrink by secession, like the Galactica fleet. It adds flexibility to the mobility of flying Manhattan or Terminator. Half a century ago, urban planner Melvin Webber proposed that the increasing power of communication technologies would allow “communities without propinquity.” Webber was thinking of the loosened constraints of geography within metropolitan areas, but his idea of a “non-place urban realm” is excellent shorthand for distributed cities envisioned on much vaster scales. Planners and theorists are still coming to grips with the possibilities, and imaginative writers have an open invitation to step in and help.