KEEP OUT, YOU IDIOTS!
THE DESERTED CITY
Danforth refused to tell me what final horror made him scream out so insanely…. We had snatches of shouted conversation above the wind’s piping and the engine’s buzzing as we reached the safe side of the range and swooped slowly down toward the camp, but that had mostly to do with the pledges of secrecy we had made as we prepared to leave the nightmare city.—H. P. Lovecraft, “At the Mountains of Madness” (1936)
“Such an abandoned metropolis must hold many secrets. We must be wary here.”—Larry Niven, Ringworld (1971)
Doors hang open and swing in the wind. Vehicles, familiar or alien, rust in the streets. Towers in the city center speak of past glories—there may even be abandoned museums—but nobody is around. Stranded travelers or explorers comb through the ruins, looking for loot to help them survive or clues to the nature of a lost civilization. Don’t linger! the reader wants to shout. Don’t imagine that you can safely spend the night on an upper floor of a “downtown” tower. Mutated rat-things are lurking among the ruins, or devolved ape-things, or automated robotic protectors, or automated traps and snares set millennia ago. The next pages will be very exciting.
They certainly are exciting in Justin Cronin’s best-selling vampire apocalypse novel The Passage (2009). Secret government science experiments gone horribly wrong loosed a vampire-making virus on the world. Nine out of ten North Americans died, while one out of ten turned into madly driven, flesh-devouring, infectious “virals” that gobble up “everything with hemoglobin in its veins and a heat signature between 36 and 38 degrees, i.e., 99.96 percent of the mammalian kingdom” (305). Only handfuls of people survived in paramilitary units and in fortified compounds from which it is safe to venture only during the day and well armed. Now, in the year 92 A.V., scouts from a compound in the San Jacinto Mountains of Southern California tap the abandoned city of Banning for useful supplies.
Peter could discern, through a haze of airborne dust, the long, low shape of the Empire Valley Outlet Mall. Peter had been there plenty of times before, on scavenging parties; the place had gotten pretty picked over through the years, but it was so vast you could still find useful stuff. The Gap had been cleared out, and J. Crew too, as had the Williams-Sonoma and the REI and most of the stores on the south end near the atrium, but there was a big Sears with windows that offered some protection and a JC Penney with good exterior access so you could get out fast, both still containing usable things, like shoes and tools and cooking pans. (289)
Yes, shoes and cooking pans, and also books from the public library on the north end of town near the mall. The symbolic search for knowledge in the deserted city is the mistake. A book-loving caretaker of an isolated power station associated with the compound has made one too many trips to the library, which has been reinhabited by virals. Infected himself, he has assaulted his coworkers. Three scouts and one power station survivor return to check out the library and inadvertently call forth the vampires who have been sheltering in its basement. Their numbers are too great, their movements too fast. They capture/infect/kill one of the four, drive the others in wild flight to safety.
Not too long after, the survivors of the Banning library encounter set off with four others on a trek to Telluride, Colorado, to find the secret government laboratory that spawned the infection. On their way, they reach the “vision of towering ruins” (519) that is Las Vegas. They are looking for fuel for their Humvees, but twilight lowers as they try to navigate streets choked with rubble and abandoned military vehicles. The buildings are monumental, with strange names like Luxor and Mandalay Bay. Some are “burned, empty cages of steel girders, others half collapsed” (522), but one is still intact. With night arriving and the airport out of reach, they take refuge on the fifteenth floor of what turns out to be the “Milagro Hotel and Casino.” They are just settling in for a watchful night, peering out over the ruined city, when the window shatters and a viral swoops in to snatch one of the party. It’s a trap: “All those blocked streets, they led us right here” (530). They try to make it out of the building. There are virals everywhere, blocking the exits, chasing them through the hotel toward a narrow, oh-so-narrow escape.
DISASTERVILLE
Abandoned cities have been science fiction staples for a century. On journeys of discovery or flight, our heroes come upon an empty city whose people and civilization have vanished like those of Banning and Las Vegas. For Cronin’s protagonists and for other explorers and refugees, deserted cities hold out the lures of pre-disaster supplies, possible shelter, and lost knowledge. The vacant shell can be an American city after atomic warfare or strange places on alien worlds. Empty cities instantly supply the sense of estrangement that is central to the science fiction experience. In the hands of Anglo-American writers, they also draw on a thick heritage of antiurban writing and rhetoric. If we think that cities are bad for us, it’s not a bad idea that they die, and it’s not unexpected that they are as troublesome in death as in life.
A generation before The Passage, Stephen King had already nominated Las Vegas as the city of death in his blockbuster catastrophe novel The Stand (1978). After mutated influenza escapes a bio-research lab and wipes out the overwhelming majority of North Americans, survivors slowly sift across the continent, pulled like iron filings to two magnetic poles—Las Vegas and Boulder. Survivors who are attracted by worldly power converge on Las Vegas, that seemingly most artificial of cities. Repopulated Vegas becomes the center for a new empire in the far western states (there is a shadow of Mordor in the geography, with Las Vegas situated within the rings of mountain ranges that create the Great Basin of Nevada and adjacent states). The bad guys, led by the supernaturally evil Randall Flagg, create a place of rigorously enforced rules and order guided by objective thought. To come near the city is either to accept demonic fascism or die. Flagg is “the last magician of rational thought, gathering the tools of technology” (919), tools that eventually destroy the city through the providential detonation of a nuclear warhead.
Boulder is the bucolic alternative to the perversity of Las Vegas. Here come those who are immune to the call of power but not to the attractions of community. They find a relatively blank slate because most residents seem to have tidied up and left town before the plague hit. There are a few dozen newcomers at first in what they call the Free Zone, then a few hundred by the time their first Colorado winter closes in the town, then something like eleven thousand by the following April. They buckle down to the nitty-gritty of reconstituting civil society. Residents come together for town meetings at the Chautauqua Auditorium—a real place located where the town gives way to mountain parks and one that harks back to earlier American traditions of community. They restore symbols of solidarity by reaffirming the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They create a steering committee and hold town meetings. They organize work groups to scavenge for supplies in Denver and repair the power plant. At the end of the novel, the Zoners of Boulder are free to set their own course–which involves hiving off new settlements before the town grows dangerously into a city again.
Boulder stands on the “good” side of a small-town/city divide in Anglo-American culture that sees far more virtue in the countryside and village than in the metropolis. In the indictments of critics from Thomas Jefferson to W. T. Stead in If Christ Came to Chicago (1894) and Lincoln Steffens in The Shame of the Cities (1904), cities are bad for individual bodies and for the body politic. As reservoirs of disease they destroy individuals, and as cesspools of temptation and degradation they pollute souls. The lurid “prostitute’s confession,” supposedly penned on her deathbed by one who had once been an innocent maid from the country, was one of the nineteenth century’s popular and titillating genres. No one escapes the snares of the city, for the extremes of wealth corrupt the morals of the rich at the same time they grind down the poor, whose dependency on a fickle market undermines the very basis of democracy. Jefferson sounded all the alarms when he wrote Benjamin Rush on September 23, 1800, that “I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man.” He was finding the bright side of a yellow fever epidemic that had killed thousands of Philadelphians.
Stephen King’s Boulder is literally a town of ghosts when the refugees and trekkers arrive, a place where houses and shops stand empty and machinery waits for someone to flip the on switch. In the world of western American ruins, it is a cousin to Rocky Mountain ghost towns whose nostalgic dereliction is easily domesticated into backcountry attractions. There may possibly be ghosts behind the creaking doors of abandoned mills and cabins, but that eerie noise is likely the wind, or the skittering of a scavenging raccoon, and it’s an easy jaunt back to the ski resort condo after a day of exploring.
Howardsville, Colorado, or Highland City, Montana, or Shaniko, Oregon—low-key tourist destinations all—stand in contrast to the apocalyptic scenery of the real ghost cities of nuclear technology. In the former Soviet Union and now in Japan are nuclear catastrophe zones where the shells of old cities remain to be slowly reclaimed by struggling vegetation. Okuma on the coast of Honshu is a hollow reminder of the Tōhoku earthquake and Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown. The Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine turned Pripyat from a modern model city for nuclear facility workers into an empty shell where soldiers stripped furnishings from apartments and buried them along with precious automobiles in the equivalent of mass graves—creating what is now a marginal site for schadenfreude tourism.
The city destroyed by atomic warfare—rather than atomic power and weapons production—is a commonplaces of science fiction, taking its place alongside cities destroyed by preatomic armies, earthquakes, tidal waves, fires, rising sea levels, meteors, volcanoes, asteroids, and comets. Mike Davis in The Ecology of Fear and Max Page in The City’s End have inventoried the multiple ways in which novelists and filmmakers have ruined Los Angeles and New York.1 Imagined bombardments by German battleships or by Soviet bombers are simple variations on a theme. So are earthquakes triggered by overbuilding in “The Tilting Island” (1909) and the feral creatures stirred by environmental degradation and urban renewal in the 1981 film Wolfen. The same tropes and images also recur over the decades—silent streets wandered by the last survivor, the shattered remains of the Statue of Liberty, the last couple contemplating the Adam-and-Eve option, skyscrapers toppling to earth or drowned by a rising sea. Eric Drooker’s cover of the New Yorker for May 23, 2011, depicts the New York Public Library lions festooned with vegetation in a green shade like a temple lost in the Amazonian jungle.
What is telling is not only the glee with which we imagine the destruction of these symbolic cities, but also the possibility of refuge. If survivors can reconstitute a semblance of normal life, they will do it in the countryside and small town. In Pat Frank’s 1959 best-seller Alas, Babylon, atomic war destroys Miami, Tampa, and Jacksonville, but civilization survives in the small town of Fort Repose. This is a Florida of four million people rather than today’s eighteen million, with Walt Disney World yet unbuilt, leaving elbow room to regain some of the survival skills of nineteenth-century farmers. Because they are still close to the land—fishermen, recreational hunters, and farmers—the people of Fort Repose do a pretty good job of imitating their great-grandparents. With strong leadership from former military officers, they organize a barter economy and fight off a relatively tame set of highwaymen who are actually crooks from Las Vegas stranded in Florida. Civil society frays around the edges, but holds. Fort Reposers are sorry about the deaths of tens of millions, often bitterly sorry, but they are also pleased that they have themselves remained true to rural America. They realize that the nation should never have become so centralized and dependent on cities and the economic efficiencies that they offer, and that the postwar world may actually be a healthier place.
The catastrophe story’s exodus sets the scene. Depictions of abandoned cities follow in tales set decades or millennia later about the temptation and dangers of tentative and problematic returns. They are an especially useful feature for adventure trek stories, supplying episodes to mix with environmental challenges, inadequate supplies, and hostile natives. Making their way across a strange planet or a postapocalyptic Earth, adventurers have already suffered dangerous weather, daunting landscapes, failing equipment, and dwindling food. Now they come upon a deserted city that offers the enticements of refuge and shelter … the attractions of goods and supplies … the lure of forgotten knowledge.
Larry Niven’s Ringworld novels offer good examples. Exploring the amazing world-construct in Ringworld (1970), Louis Wu and companions encounter two distinct cities. In the sequel The Ringworld Engineers (1980), Wu encounters two more. Interspersed with other challenges, these deserted cities are part of the variety pack of quick-turning action scenes that have given the series its enduring popularity (along with the really cool starting premise of a Dyson Ring, of course).
In the first book, humans Wu and Teela Brown and nonhumans Speaker-To-Animals and Nessus come across a ruined city. Designed to hover high in the air, it has fallen from the sky when the Ringworld power supply failed in a catastrophe long past. People still live around its margins, going out to work fields in the day, sheltering in the ruins at night. They turn out to be dangerous because Wu does not match up with their expectations of how he, as presumably one of the Engineers who built Ringworld, should behave. The travelers have to fight their way out. The temptation to explore the empty city in search of information is compelling—the city gives them a map of their section of the vast world—but it’s also dangerous.
In The Ringworld Engineers, Wu encounters another abandoned city. It had been built tall, with towers and floating buildings. Now it lies in ruins, another casualty of the literal fall of the cities. One building remains relatively intact. Inside are a group of Machine People who have been traveling to trade (they are so named because they maintain alcohol-powered machinery). Laying siege are vampires who exude a pheromone that makes sexual desire override all self-control. The vamps get close enough to entice and entrap all but one of the Machine People. Wu can’t help exploring the city, only to find himself caught and crazed as well. The one Machine People survivor manages to save him, and they set off on new chapters of adventures. The abandoned city was a trap, despite being an interesting and intriguing place to explore (135–42).
Abandoned cities can be dangerous even when they are empty of terrestrial and extraterrestrial vampires. Automated defenses still operate centuries after the city has emptied. Laser cannon shoot exploring planes out of the sky. Sensor systems call up armed robots. Andre Norton’s explorers in Star Rangers (1953) are a group of galactic patrol members crashed on a strange planet. They find an empty city to explore but come face to face with robotic guards.
He could see the patroller now. It was at the far end of the block. The flashing lights on the buildings played across its metal body. But the sergeant was almost sure that it was unlike the ones known to galactic cities. The rounded dome of the head casing, the spider-like slenderness of the limbs, the almost graceful smoothness of its progress, were akin more to the architecture of this place.
Its pace was steady and unhurried. It paused before each doorway and shot a spy beam from its head into the entrance. Manifestly it was going about its appointed task of checking the security of each portal….
Was it relaying back to some dust-covered headquarters an alarm?
But its arms were moving—
“Kartr!”
Night sight or no night sight, Kartr had not needed that shout from Rolth to warn him. He had already seen what the patroller held ready. He hurled himself backward, falling flat on the floor of the hall, letting momentum carry him in a slide some distance along it. Behind him was a burst of eye-searing flame, filling the whole entrance with an inferno. Only his trained muscles and sixth sense of preservation had saved him from cooking in the midst of that! …
“Are you hurt? Did he get you?” …
“The bag of bolts? I scragged him all right—a blast hole right through his head casing and he went down. He didn’t reach you?”
“No. And at least he’s told us something about the civilization they had here.” The sergeant surveyed the blaze behind him with critical distaste. “Blow a hole in a city block to get someone. Wonder what they would have thought of a stun gun.” (285)
Perhaps because automated defenses are such an easy complication to drop into the action, Larry Niven decided to have fun thinking up a variation to stymie his Ringworld explorers. As they explore an empty city, Louis Wu and Speaker-To-Animals are dismayed to find their fly-cycles taken over by remote control and flown into a cavernous building where they are trapped, suspended in space and dangling upside down. They have unknowingly violated some ancient traffic laws and activated a traffic control system that flies them directly to a detention facility, presumably intended when the city was active to be where they would pay off a fine for reckless driving. Now they are abandoned to eternal captivity in “an airborne Sargasso Sea” with the bones of earlier captives littering its distant floor … until they are released by a half-crazed survivor of a ramship crew who herself has been stranded on Ringworld for decades too long.
Even more dangerous than robotic defenses is the reinhabited city, the deserted city reinfested or repopulated with the wrong kinds of things or people. Whether it was built by humans or by some other race, whether it has been emptied by nuclear, viral, zombie, or vampire apocalypse or by the simple passage of time, any nice people who might have survived the disaster and decay have stayed away. Only nasty people and things have come back to haunt the ruins and threaten the traveler/explorer.
Knowledge is what draws Fors into an abandoned city in Andre Norton’s Star Man’s Son: 2250 A.D. (1952). Scattered tribes inhabit North America three centuries after nuclear holocaust. There are proud, horse mounted, nomadic plains people, dark-skinned farmers moving up from the south, and the Star Men whose mission is to explore abandoned places and add to knowledge. The latter are the descendants of technicians and scientists who had been preparing a voyage to the stars. Now they seek out scraps of information: “Many times around the evening fires had the men of the Eyrie [the Star Men] discussed the plains below and the strange world which had felt the force of the Great Blow-up and been turned into an alien, poisonous trap for any human not knowing its ways. Why, in the past twenty years even the Star Men had mapped only four cities, and one them was ‘blue’ and so forbidden” (6–7).
Fors is the son of a Star Man and a plains woman. Born a mutant, with white hair and night sight, he is frozen out of any chance to become a Star Man himself. He therefore takes off on an adventure of exploration. In due course he finds a city: “This was one of the cities, the great cities of huge sky-reaching towers! … His city—all his … an untouched storehouse waiting to be looted for the benefit of the Eyrie…. Libraries—those were what one was to look for—and shops, especially those which had stores of hardware or paper…. Hospital supplies were best of all” (38). The city seems largely intact, perhaps the victim of disease after the nuclear war. It holds ruined buildings and a museum that has not yet been ransacked. But lurking in the shadows and cellars are subhuman and cruel Beast Things that drive Fors from the city. In one explanation, they are offspring of city dwellers and invading soldiers caught in radiation, creating children so mutated as no longer to be human. In another, they are the result of failed experiments to combine human and rat genetic material. “Whichever theory was true, the Beast Things, though they aroused revulsion and instinctive hatred among the humans, were also victims of the Old Ones’ tragic mistake, as shattered in their lives as the cities had been” (132).
George Allan England’s serialized postapocalyptic novel Darkness and Dawn from 1912–14, a full half century before Norton’s book, uses the Rip Van Winkle plot to introduce a deserted city. After thousands of years, an engineer and a stenographer awaken high in the Metropolitan Life Tower (the world’s tallest building from 1909 to 1913). They find themselves the only humans left in New York. Like other visitors to the future city, they explore its shops and streets as they struggle to survive and fall tastefully in love. Allan is strong and capable, Beatrice strong but happy with standard gender roles. The publisher sold the story as “Romance, Mystery, Adventure,” although critic Nick Yablon in Untimely Ruins explores England’s socialist background and reads the story as an explicitly anticapitalist revolutionary allegory that uses the postapocalyptic setting as a way to make readers think about alternatives. More to our point, the deserted city is reinfested by mutated ape-men who cross over from New Jersey, forcing Allan and Beatrice first to fight for their lives and then to flee to the isolated countryside far from the enticing but dangerous city.2
Allan and Beatrice are the literary ancestors of Robert Neville in Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend (1954) and its several film adaptations as The Last Man on Earth (1964) with Vincent Price, The Omega Man (1971) with Charlton Heston, and back to I Am Legend (2007) with Will Smith. The setting shifts from Los Angeles to New York for the most recent film, but the basic premise stays the same. A plague has killed nearly all human beings, turned some variously into vampires, albino mutants, or infected virus-monsters, depending on the version, and left behind scientist Robert Neville to live a barricaded life in the depopulated city. He searches for a cure, encounters the undead, and comes up with a solution that holds out hope for humankind, but only at the cost of his own life. The setting gets eerier with the successive versions: Matheson’s hero has to contend with vampire hordes from the get-go, but Will Smith spends substantial screen time with only his dog for companionship in the empty streets before encountering the infected. Whatever the details, surviving/saved humans end the story by escaping the dangerous city, just as George Allan England imagined generations earlier.
The infestation can be much less gruesome than mutated Beast Things, devolved ape creatures, and viral mutants. Even when physically normal, humans who have reinhabited cities are likely to be impure of heart. The power-hungry denizens of Stephen King’s Las Vegas have plenty of cousins who are susceptible to recatching the urban disease of domination and empire building and doing the wrong things all over again. Kim Stanley Robinson in The Wild Shore (1984) extrapolates a future in which the neutron bombing of the United States has left a scattering of farming and fishing villages along the Southern California coast, connected to near neighbors by occasional trading fairs. Trouble comes up the coast from San Diego, where a petty dictator has consolidated power in the ruins of Mission Valley. His agents offer a tempting deal—connection to a larger political unit by a railroad that is slowly pushing northward in return for a modicum of taxes. When the villagers of San Onofre travel south to see for themselves, they find a society that is already corrupted by power and embarked on the seductive path of industrialization. There are not yet dark, satanic mills on the San Diego mesas, but the villagers can see them coming and want nothing to do with the emerging empire.
LOST CITIES
In Ringworld and The Stand, The Wild Shore, and The Passage, and in many other exploration stories, the abandoned city is one episode in a longer narrative arc of a survival journey or a bildungsroman. In the closely related lost city / lost world genre, however, the deserted city is the whole point. The somewhat truncated “century of lost cities” in European/American exploration stretched from the 1840s to the 1920s. At the start of that era, American diplomat John Lloyd Stephens stumbled across the Mayan cities of Copán, Chichen Itza, and Palenque, and British adventurer A. H. Layard directed early excavations at the site of Nineveh. Archaeologists and travelers continued to bring abandoned cities to the European attention through the excavation of genuinely lost sites like Knossos and Mohenjo-Daro and the description of cities like Angkor, Great Zimbabwe, and Machu Picchu that were known locally but still had to be “discovered,” meaning added to the mental maps of Europeans and North Americans.
With all that discovering going on, and with Europeans energetically carving out colonial empires in Africa and southern Asia, underwriting and dominating the development of Latin America, and attempting the same in China, writers of adventure fiction met the growing challenge of expanding geographical knowledge by inventing places. Adventures of European expansion began to feature unknowable or impossible locales to supplement real Pacific islands, frozen tundras, and wild outbacks. Travel romancers around the turn of the twentieth century invented undiscovered islands in the wild ocean, hidden Antarctic valleys conveniently heated by volcanism, cave cities, secret Himalayan sanctuaries, and unexplored plateaus in Amazonia, and then peopled them with atavistic animals or unexpected colonies of surviving Phoenicians, Vikings, Israelites, and Crusaders.
Science fiction added a twist to what were basically alternative histories. In the standard lost-city narrative, white Europeans or Americans discover a lost society of other white people, or perhaps honorary white people such as Israelites who can be assimilated within the ruling race, or perhaps a nonwhite people who happen to have a white boss like She Who Must Be Obeyed. In contrast, there are no people of any skin color in the City of the Old Ones that an American scientific expedition discovers hidden behind a towering mountain range in the interior of Antarctica in H. P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness.” Lovecraft wrote the novella in 1931 and finally sold it to Astounding Stories in 1936. The details of the expedition are plausible. Richard Byrd had famously overflown the South Pole in a Ford Trimotor plane in 1929, so Lovecraft gave his scientists airplanes to carry them inland from the Antarctic coast over unknown territory. There are lots of details about logistics and base camps and geological poking and prodding. Indeed, the story moves at the pace of a glacier as particulars are added for verisimilitude and hints are dropped that something very bad is in the offing for these adventuresome Americans. The narrator is one of the few survivors, returned with a warning for the world.
What is the warning? There is a fantastic deserted city in the heart of Antarctic, and you don’t want to go there! It is incredible, a place cobbled together from remembered fragments of archaeological digs—a bit of Knossos, a bit of Mesa Verde, a bit of the stone cities of the Incas. Lovecraft offers plenty of perhaps unneeded detail.
Here, on a hellishly ancient table-land fully twenty thousand feet high, and in a climate deadly to habitation since a prehuman age not less than five hundred thousand years ago, there stretched nearly to the vision’s limit a tangle of orderly stone which only the desperation of mental self-defense could possibly attribute to any but conscious and artificial cause….
… This Cyclopean maze of squared, curved, and angled blocks had features which cut off all comfortable refuge…. Only the incredible, unhuman massiveness of these vast stone towers and ramparts had saved the frightful things from utter annihilation in the hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of years it had brooded there amidst the blasts of a bleak upland….
For boundless miles in every direction the thing stretched off with very little thinning; indeed, as our eyes followed it to the right and left along the base of the low, gradual foothills which separated it from the actual mountain rim, we decided that we could see no thinning at all except for an interruption at the left of the pass through which we had come…. The foothills were more sparsely sprinkled with grotesque stone structures, linking the terrible city to the already familiar cubes and ramparts which evidently formed its mountain outposts. These latter, as well as the queer cave mouths, were as thick on the inner as on the outer sides of the mountains.
The nameless stone labyrinth consisted, for the most part, of walls from ten to one hundred and fifty feet in ice-clear height, and of a thickness varying from five to ten feet. It was composed mostly of prodigious blocks of dark primordial slate, schist, and sandstone—blocks in many cases as large as 4 × 6 × 8 feet—though in several places it seemed to be carved out of a solid, uneven bed rock of pre-Cambrian slate. The buildings were far from equal in size, there being innumerable honeycomb arrangements of enormous extent as well as smaller separate structures. The general shape of these things tended to be conical, pyramidal, or terraced; though there were many perfect cylinders, perfect cubes, clusters of cubes, and other rectangular forms, and a peculiar sprinkling of angled edifices whose five-pointed ground plan roughly suggested modern fortifications. (42–44)
The attraction is knowledge. This is a scientific expedition, and the narrator muses that “ingrained scientific habit may have helped; for above all my bewilderment and sense of menace, there burned a dominant curiosity to fathom more of this age-old secret—to know what sort of beings had built and lived in this incalculably gigantic place.” But the quest for knowledge is dangerous, and some cities are better left unexplored. The first people to come near the city discover remarkably well-preserved alien creatures, which they try to dissect. When the narrator arrives the next day—he and his companions fly over the high range and land in the city itself—everyone is dead. There are writings and pictographs on the walls that tell a story of an elder race that preceded humans by millions of years. The empty halls echo with strange noises and reek with fetid odors. Drawn by insatiable curiosity, the explorers delve deeper into the city through downward-leading tunnels and passageways and tunnels and subterranean halls and still more tunnels. Portents become more portentous, until the explorers find themselves fleeing for their lives from a ravening creature that rises from deeper down. It’s a shoggoth, one of the servant creatures that had rebelled against the Elder Race and helped to bring their city to ruin. It’s an amalgam of giant garden slug, Arrakian sandworm, tunnel boring machine, and lamprey eel … and definitely bad news.
“At the Mountains of Madness” lies at the extreme for deserted city stories with its over-the-top horror and utterly fantastic premise. It straddles the margin between science fiction and fantasy, but it also contains key elements of the type. The explorers are off on their own. The abandoned city is physically fascinating, and it offers the promise of knowledge—knowledge that turns out not to be worth the cost.
In one comparative framework, stories like “At the Mountains of Madness” belong in the same category with slasher/horror films. Sitting in the theater, we want to shout at that attractive girl on the screen: “Don’t go there! Don’t go down those dark basement stairs! Keep out of that neglected attic! Don’t take the back-alley shortcut—stick to the well-lit main streets! And for heaven’s sake, don’t spend the night in that deserted cabin in the woods!” Sitting in our chair, late at night in a pool of light from a single lamp, we mutter the same thing, wondering why Lovecraft’s protagonists, and their many pulp literature cousins, plunge into the deserted city without adequate reconnaissance and then keep going, farther and farther, deeper and deeper.
There is a difference, however. The doomed teenager is motivated by idle curiosity and perhaps by a dare. For most science fiction explorers, the empty city entices with the promise of the practical. They poke around because they are curious, but curious with a purpose. The deserted city may have stores of food or medicine, or maps of the new planet, or clues to the cataclysm that drove away its inhabitants. These are left-brain attractants, in keeping with the rational problem-solving ethos central to the science fiction genre. For writers as different as Cal Tech graduate Larry Niven and New England curiosity H. P. Lovecraft, cities are containers of readable objective history, weird or curious as it may be.
LIFE AMONG THE RUINS
Pat Murphy cleverly turns the deserted-city story inside out and upside down in The City, Not Long After (1989). She posits a late twentieth-century plague that has killed the vast majority of Americans. Survival rates were marginally higher in small towns and rural areas, where an agricultural economy is slowly recovering, but San Francisco is an abandoned city. Now, sixteen years (the title’s “not long after”) after the great die-off, roughly a hundred San Franciscans are scattered in random hotel suites, houses, and shops, rattling around in the spaces where more than seven hundred thousand people once lived. There is rudimentary trade between the city and Marin County farmers, but someone who ventures in without preparation will find empty streets, abandoned and scavenged automobiles with the remains of their occupants, slowly crumbling buildings, burgeoning vegetation, and streams that have surfaced from their culverts and pipes to reclaim their natural paths between the hills.
It looks like we may be in the traditional territory of I Am Legend, but no, those hundred city-dwellers are right-brain people, a mix of eccentrics and artists who use the city itself as an inspiration for poetry and music and a canvas for installation art and performance art. A neo-Mayan collective has repainted the Trans-America tower. Mirrors and glass have turned several blocks into a shimmering Garden of Light. One San Franciscan is a tattoo artist. Another collects human skulls, polishes them with floor wax, and arrays them with carefully picked artifacts taken from the skull’s original surroundings: “A pair of wire-rimmed bifocals, an empty whiskey decanter, a naked plastic doll with curly blond hair and baby-blue glass eyes, a hash pipe, a Bible, a lace glove” (63). Others construct giant wind chimes or weld life-size human figures whose hinged jaws chatter in the breeze. A man who has decided he is a machine rather than human makes other solar-powered devices to roam the city, like mechanical spiders, rats, and dogs. Danny-boy, who has grown up knowing only the city of art, persuades dozens of his fellows to paint the Golden Gate Bridge blue for the sheer pleasure of watching its transformation. The city’s “mutants,” in short, are defined not by vampirism but by compulsions to create.
Danger lies not inside the city but outside, where a former army officer is re-creating a territorial state in the Central Valley. With political pressure and a small army, he has cobbled together Sacramento, Modesto, Fresno, Stockton, Chico, and smaller towns into an authoritarian polity that suppresses dissent in the name of order and patriotism. San Francisco is both an attraction and a thorn in his side. It offers resources, and it also challenges the concept of strength through unity. Murphy draws General “Fourstar” Miles as a cross between Elmer Gantry and General Jack D. Ripper: “There are those who would forget our heritage, cast aside our traditions…. A selfish few hoard the resources of the city of San Francisco, scorning our offers of friendship and alliance…. They revel in anarchy, squandering the treasures of the past, delighting in unnatural acts that are an abomination in the eyes of man and God” (33–34). He is a shadow of Randall Flagg, without magical powers but speaking the same language.
The plot is simple. Jax is a half-wild young woman from the Valley. When her mother dies after abuse by the soldiers, she flees to San Francisco to warn of the coming invasion. She meets Danny-boy and they slowly fall in love—not surprising, given that they are the only teenagers in the city. The San Franciscans slowly realize the invasion threat is real and decide to resist by nonviolent guerrilla actions. In effect, they stage performance art that steadily demoralizes the invaders, who number only 150 because post-disaster California is still thinly populated. Dannyboy saves Jax by killing General Miles and dies in turn, the leaderless soldiers are happy to decamp from the weird city, and San Francisco returns to its own version of normal.
Writing in the 1980s, Murphy was recognizing and defending San Francisco’s reputation for difference. In the background is the Haight-Asbury scene of the mid-1960s, political turmoil at San Francisco State University in 1968, the emergence of the Castro as a gay neighborhood, the assassination of Harvey Milk in 1978, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s. In this context, in which many other Americans viewed San Francisco as the antithesis of order, the book makes an obvious political argument that San Francisco’s difference is liberating rather than dangerous—hence the rant by General Miles. However, it also makes a larger statement about cities as the centers of creativity. From her early years, Jax treasures a snow-globe paperweight that contains a miniaturized downtown San Francisco—a direct statement that San Francisco and other cities are vast artifacts and works of art. When the globe accidentally shatters, Jax realizes that she must take her own part in the ongoing creation process along with all the active artists and eccentrics.
Pat Murphy’s reversals on the abandoned-city plot directly undercut the common science fiction preference for country over city, for frontiers over the presumed stasis and stability of urban centers, for individual adventurers over individuals embedded in the social networks of the metropolis. As the war approaches, Danny-boy tells Jax what a city is good for: “We’re good at showing people a view of the world that they’ve never seen before. We’re good at making people uneasy. We’re good at convincing people to see things differently” (179). What the outsiders discover in Murphy’s abandoned city is not old lore but new ideas, not vampires or shoggoths but new creations, not danger and death but refuge from war.