NOTES TO INTRODUCTION
1. V. Gordon Childe, “The Urban Revolution,” Town Planning Review 21 (April 1950): 3–17; Michael E. Smith, “Sprawl, Squatters, and Sustainable Cities: Can Archaeological Data Shed Light on Modern Urban Issues?,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 20, no. 2 (2010): 229–53.
2. Samuel R. Delany, “A Future Narrative of Cities,” ParaDoxa 2, no. 1 (1996): 27–28.
3. Gary K. Wolfe, The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1979).
4. Lewis Mumford, The Story of Utopias, originally published in 1922, remains a literate introduction. Ruth Eaton, Ideal Cities: Utopianism and (Un)Built Environment (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002), highlights the associated visual imagination. Also see Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979), and Françoise Choay, The Modern City: Planning in the Nineteenth Century (New York: George Braziller, 1969).
5. Frank Lloyd Wright, The Disappearing City (New York: W. F. Payson, 1932); Le Corbusier, The City of To-morrow and Its Planning (New York: Payson & Clarke, 1929); Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982).
6. Bruce Sterling, “The Virtual City,” ParaDoxa 2, no. 1 (1996): 46–47; Robert Rydell, World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Also see Rob Latham and Jeff Hicks, “Urban Dystopias,” in The Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature, ed. Kevin R. McNamara (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 166–67.
7. Paolo Soleri, Arcology: The City in the Image of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969). The book is big enough to cover an entire coffee table. At about the same time, engineers George Danzig and Thomas Saaty offered a presumably serious model for a similar superstructure in Compact City (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1973).
8. Carlo Aiello, Evolo Skyscrapers (Los Angeles: Evolo, 2012) and Evolo Skyscrapers 2 (Los Angeles: Evolo, 2014).
9. Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden, “Rat Cities and Beehive Worlds: Density and Design in the Modern World,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 53 (October 2011): 727–28.
10. Melvin Webber, “Order in Diversity: Community without Propinquity,” in Cities and Space, ed. Lowden Wingo Jr. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963), 23–56; Barry Wellman, Networks in the Global Village (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999); Rainie Harrison and Barry Wellman, Networks: The New Social Operating System (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).
11. Andrew Lees, Cities Perceived: Urban Society in European and American Thought, 1870–1940 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
12. Morton White and Lucia White, The Intellectual versus the City: From Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962).
13. In Notes on the State of Virginia (1784), Jefferson wrote: “The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigour. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.”
14. Claude Fischer, To Dwell among Friends: Personal Networks in Town and Country (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
15. Edward Glaeser, The Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (New York: Penguin, 2012), 74.
16. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Peter Hall, Cities in Civilization: Culture, Innovation, and Urban Order (New York: Pantheon, 1998); Peter Hall, “Creative Cities and Economic Development,” Urban Studies 27 (April 2000): 639–49.
17. R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path (New York: St. Martin’s, 1981).
18. John B. Calhoun, “Population Density and Social Pathology,” Scientific American, February 1962, 139–48. Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden discuss the impact of Calhoun’s ideas on architectural theory in “Rat Cities and Beehive Worlds.”
19. Nicola Griffith, “Layered Cities,” ParaDoxa 2, no. 1 (1996): 36.
20. Carl Abbott, Frontiers Past and Future: Science Fiction and the American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006). For an example, I have argued that SF writers have consistently utilized and depicted Colorado as a place of refuge and survival because of the way that the state in the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth century epitomized the mountain West in the national imagination. Carl Abbott, “Rocky Mountain Refuge: Constructing Colorado in Science Fiction,” Science Fiction Studies 39 (July 2012): 221–42.
21. Brian Attebery and Veronica Hollinger, eds., Parabolas of Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013), vii.
22. Grounded in specific American experience, these two middle chapters on suburban and urban crisis trace a historical trajectory as writers in different decades respond to the changing world around them. The other chapters are structured synchronically as variations on a theme.
23. This distinction is similar to Henri Lefebvre’s differentiation between the “representation of space” or “conceived space” and space as both everyday experience and imaginative experience (“representational space” or “lived space”). The former refers to space as conceptualized and ordered from the top down by scientists, planners, technocrats, and bureaucrats, the latter to the individual experiences that respond to, reimagine, and remake ordered spaces. At roughly the same time these theorists were writing, journalist Jonathan Raban in Soft City: A Documentary Exploration of Urban Life (London: Harvill, 1974) made the similar point that large cities are places whose openness and plasticity give individuals the freedom to shape their own lives.
24. Anthony Duckworth-Smith sums this point up nicely in Future Histories: Post-Urban Design (Perth: Australian Urban Design Research Center, 2015): “The city, its form and substance are backdrops: what matters are the setting for the experiences and actions of those trying to reshape or redefine their lives” in the often strange places of the future.
25. The structure of each chapter roughly follows the same trajectory, starting with straightforward examples of the urban type and ending with work that reflects with greater nuance on character and community. Chapter 1 opens with the perky topic of personal aircars and ends with J. G. Ballard’s vision of a high-rise condo tower as the ultimately horrifying technological feat. Chapter 4, “Utopia with Walls: The Carceral City,” starts with young adult fiction and concludes with Harlan Ellison’s classic “A Boy and His Dog” and Molly Gloss’s subtle The Dazzle of Day. Chapter 7 on deserted cities opens with horror/thrillers by Justin Cronin and Stephen King but ends with Pat Murphy’s upbeat reversal of the deserted-city trope in The City, Not Long After.
26. An imposing body of scholarship in both science fiction studies and history explores the genealogy and theory of dystopia in speculative fiction. Starting places are Latham and Hicks, “Urban Dystopias,” for a clear introduction; Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000), for a key entry in SF scholarship; and Frederick Jaher, Doubters and Dissenters: Cataclysmic Thought in America, 1885–1914 (London: Free Press, 1964), for a pioneering work of intellectual history.
27. John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy (1848), book 3, chap. 17.
CHAPTER 1. TECHNO CITY; OR, DUDE, WHERE’S MY AIRCAR?
1. The magazine genre goes back to the nineteenth century and flourished from the 1930s to the 1960s. In the career of Hugo Gernsback, the border between popular science and science fiction blurred, as he published both genres in his pulp Science and Invention.
2. Examples of real-life efforts to create these sorts of devices are in Daniel H. Wilson and Richard Horne, Where’s My Jetpack? A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future That Never Arrived (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007).
3. My use of “techno city” bears a family resemblance to Robert Fishman’s use of “technoburb” and “techno-city” in Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1987). His technoburbs are outlying metropolitan communities that offer the full range of housing types, employment, commercial facilities, and public facilities as found in traditional central cities; techno cities are the multi-nodal metropolitan regions, such as Los Angeles, that contain multiple technoburbs.
4. Alison Sky and Michelle Stone, Unbuilt America: Forgotten Architecture in the United States from Thomas Jefferson to the Space Age (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976).
5. Robert Fishman, “Detroit, Linear City,” in Mapping Detroit: Land, Community, and Shaping of a City, ed. June Manning Thomas and Henco Bekkering (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015), 77–78.
6. Christopher Rand, Los Angeles: The Ultimate City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967); “Self-Sufficient Structures Carry a Metropolis across New Jersey,” drawing included in Warren Young, “What’s to Come,” Life, December 24, 1965, 143–67; Sky and Stone, Unbuilt America, 113–15, 190–91.
7. Tyler Cowan, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better (New York: Dutton, 2011); Peter Thiel, “The End of the Future,” National Review, October 3, 2011; Neal Stephenson, “Innovation Starvation,” Wired, October 27, 2011, http://www.wired.com/2011/10/stephenson-innovation-starvation/all/.
8. Ferriss’s drawings of the actual Rockefeller Center look very much like his imaginary city, save that the edges of the buildings are drawn more precisely. See his architectural renderings in the Columbia University Archives: http://library.columbia.edu/locations/avery/da/collections/ferriss.htm.
9. Hugh Ferriss, The Metropolis of Tomorrow (New York: Washburn, 1929); Joseph Corn and Brian Horrigan, Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Past Visions of America’s Future (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 15, 42–43. Bertolt Brecht shared Lang’s excited impression of towering New York in “The Late Lamented Fame of the Giant City of New York,” written after the stock market crash and before Brecht had actually visited.
10. Witold Rybczynski, “Dubai Debt,” Slate, January 13, 2010, http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/architecture/2010/01/dubai_debt.html.
11. Baran Ornarli, “Forty-Five Incredible Futuristic Scifi 3D City Illustrations,” Inferno Development, June 19, 2010, http://www.infernodevelopment.com/45-incredible-futuristic-scifi-3d-city-illustrations, and Cameron Chapman, “100 Imaginative Cities of the Future Artworks,” Hongkiat, http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/cities-of-future-artworks/.
12. King’s was “one of many similar extrapolations of the skyscraper city, imagined and drawn even before the Woolworth Building or Empire State Building,” such as William Robinson Leigh’s “Visionary City,” drawn in 1908 for magazine publication. Corn and Horrigan, Yesterday’s Tomorrows, 34.
13. The setting is continued in City of Hope and Despair (2011), and City of Light and Shadow (2011).
14. Rob Latham, “The Urban Question in New Wave SF,” in Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction, ed. Mark Bould and China Miéville (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), 178–95.
15. Gary Westfahl, William Gibson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 37; Latham, “Urban Question,” 178–79.
CHAPTER 2. MACHINES FOR BREATHING
1. Asteroid cities are a variation on the space station city, constructed in the hollowed center of an asteroid whose rock provides the same protection from radiation and encapsulation of atmosphere as space-station steel. The hollow asteroid is often imagined as a nonurban landscape of farms and villages that line the interior surface of a cylinder, as in Dark Lightning (2014), John Varley’s homage to Robert Heinlein’s The Rolling Stones (1952). In M. J. Locke, Up against It (2011), however, an urban habitat for two hundred thousand is improbably suspended and spun up for gravity inside the cavernous core of the asteroid 25 Phocaea.
2. Sky and Stone, Unbuilt America, 99.
3. Trantor has an interesting literary history. The Foundation trilogy is one of the classic reads of science fiction. Chronologically linked stories that had originally appeared in Astounding from 1942 to 1950 contained brief mention of Trantor as imperial capital and then as a city in rubble after the fall of the empire. Asimov pulled these stories together as Foundation (1951), Foundation and Empire (1952), and Second Foundation (1953). He wrote “The Psychohistorians” in 1951 specifically as the first section of Foundation to introduce his epic of galactic history and, incidentally, the city-planet. When Asimov returned to the Foundation universe in the 1980s with prequels and sequels, Trantor reappeared with more details and occasional inconsistencies.
4. Catherine L. Ross, ed., Megaregions: Planning for Global Competitiveness (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2009).
5. Constantinos Doxiadis, “Ecumenopolis: Tomorrow’s City,” 1968, http://www.doxiadis.org/.
6. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (1918–23; New York: Random House Modern Library, 1965), 246–47.
CHAPTER 3. MIGRATORY CITIES
1. Simon Stadler, Archigram: Architecture without Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); Peter Cook, Archigram (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999); Sorkin quoted in Design Museum, http://design.designmuseum.org/design/archigram/.
2. Rory Stott, “A Walking City for the 21st Century,” November 3, 2013, http://www.archdaily.com/443701/a-walking-city-for-the-21st-century/ArchDaily.
3. Le Transperceniege specifies 1,001 cars, which would make a rather ungainly train eighteen kilometers long, which is six times the longest bulk freight train and more than ten times the longest passenger train as of 2014.
4. Because the term is still in the process of settling firmly into urban planning, there are some alternative applications for “distributed city” that emphasize devolution from large-scale metropolitan systems to small-scale and localized planning. Australian environmentalist and “green urbanist” Peter Newman argues for a model of distributed cities in which energy systems, utilities, and transportation have been decentralized to avoid disastrous system-wide crashes—an idea that Kim Stanley Robinson embodied in Pacific Edge nearly a quarter century ago. Michael Blowfield and Leo Johnson in Turnaround Challenge: Business and the City of the Future (2013) use “distributed city” to emphasize the importance of scattered, small-scale innovation nodes that can network from places as different as Nairobi and Austin. It is an appealing idea in its own right, but Cory Doctorow stole their thunder with his depiction of the New Work in Makers (2009).
5. Fosco Lucarelli, “Mikhail Okhitovich and the Disurbanism,” July 14, 2012, http://socks-studio.com/2012/07/14/mikhail-okhitovich-and-the-disurbanism/.
6. Jay Lake, personal e-mail, November 15, 2013. Distributed cities have a parallel in Rem Koolhaus’s description of junk cities as places constituted from bits and chunks of the modern landscape accreted into a chaotic whole. Rem Koolhaus, “Junkspace,” October 100 (Spring 2000): 175–90.
7. Herodotus, History, book 8: 61.
CHAPTER 4. UTOPIA WITH WALLS: THE CARCERAL CITY
1. A whole subgenre of the-future-is-already-here communications thrillers is premised on the ability of heroes and villains to manipulate information flows to pursue or frustrate political and economic power grabs. When science fiction writers like William Gibson in Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country (2007), and Zero History (2010), Walter John Williams in This Is Not a Game (2009) and Deep State (2011), and Cory Doctorow in Little Brother (2008) take on stories of electronic spying, commercial espionage, and political mobilization via the Internet, it is not clear whether they are writing contemporary fiction, “speculative fiction of the very recent past” (in Gibson’s words), or science fiction set in a very near future. In any case, the cities are the cities we know: Istanbul, Jakarta, London, Moscow, Los Angeles. They are cool, exciting settings for action-packed stories, but they are the same places that we could visit ourselves, and fiction has a hard time staying ahead of real hackers, whether employees of the Chinese military or members of a hacking collective like Anonymous.
2. Forster refers to his underground city as a hive or honeycomb, and cities with similar settings, such as in Isaac Asimov’s Caves of Steel, discussed later in this chapter, are sometimes grouped as “hive stories.” See Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden, “Rat Cities and Beehive Worlds: Density and Design in the Modern City,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 53 (October 2001): 722–23; Eric S. Rabkin, “The Unconscious City,” in Hard Science Fiction, ed. George E. Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 31.
3. The Collected Tales of E. M. Forster (New York: Knopf, 1947), vii.
4. Some critics do read Lys as superior to Diaspar—pastoral communism contrasted to revitalized technocracy (Tom Moylan, “Ideological Contradiction in Clarke’s The City and the Stars,” Science Fiction Studies 12 (July 1977): 150–17). Others have pointed out how closely Diaspar resembles the New Jerusalem described in Revelation 21–22, down to twelve exit tunnels for the twelve gates (Thomas P. Dunn and Richard D. Erlich, “Environmental Concerns in Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars,” in Aspects of Fantasy: Selected Essays from the Second International Conference on the Fantastic in Literature and Film, ed. William Coyle (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1986), 204–5.
5. C. J. Cherryh’s story “The Only Death in the City,” which leads off Sunfall (1981), directly mirrors the setup of The City and the Stars. Future Paris has been sealed inside high walls for so many centuries that inhabitants have forgotten the outside. Residents effectively live forever, being repeatedly reincarnated with their memories intact. Disturbance comes when someone is actually born a new soul with no memories or knowledge of the millennia-old customs that allow society to function. This time, however, stasis muffles change and self-incarceration is unbroken.
6. Wolfe, Known and the Unknown, 88, 89, 93.
7. The follow-on television program did follow Logan and Jessica after their flight, but only by turning into a simple series of future adventures outside the city.
8. Harlan Ellison, “A Boy and His Dog,” in The Essential Ellison, ed. Terry Dowling (Omaha: Nemo Press, 1987), 923.
9. Ibid., 928.
10. Joanna Russ, “‘A Boy and His Dog’: The Final Solution,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 1 (Autumn 1975): 153–62.
11. The historical Millerites were a religious movement in upstate New York who expected the Second Coming for October 1844, but it is also an apt term for the Dusty Miller’s people. Although they are not waiting for the millennium, they are very much engaged in finding a new heaven and new earth.
12. Drew Mendelson’s Pilgrimage (1981) is an amalgam of the spunky kids, moving city, and carceral city tropes. A vast, self-contained city of twenty-five million people inhabiting 113 levels reaching two miles into the sky has been creeping across the landscape of Earth for thirty thousand years as the guild of Structors continually dismantle the rearmost sections and reconstruct new sections in front. The original inhabitants were folks who were afraid to head for the stars, building the city as a refuge that they have become unable to leave because of inbred agoraphobia. Three teenagers, chafing at the need to choose permanent careers and worried that the city seems to be sliding into chaos, set forth on a truth-seeking trek through the vast city. They have adventures along the way, including a time on an automated boat crossing a lake that has accumulated under the city—for some reason without their clothes, hence allowing some tits and ass on the paperback cover. The book is essentially a rewrite of The City and the Stars in a glacially moving city.
13. Jo Walton, “Quakers in Space: Molly Gloss’s The Dazzle of Day,” Tor.com, http://www.tor.com/blogs/2009/12/quakers-in-space-molly-glosss-lemgthe-dazzle-of-daylemg/.
CHAPTER 5. CRABGRASS CHAOS
1. Scott Donaldson, The Suburban Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), ranged over both academic and popular writing. Becky Nicolaides focuses on key intellectuals such as Lewis Mumford in “How Hell Moved from the City to the Suburbs: Urban Scholars and Changing Perceptions of Authentic Community,” in The New Suburban History, ed. Kevin Kruse and Thomas Sugrue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
2. Peter Blake, God’s Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America’s Landscape (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), 106–7.
3. Charles Abrams, The Language of Cities (New York: Avon, 1971), 60.
4. Boyle’s novel is discussed in Carl Abbott, “Real Estate and Race: Imagining the Second Circuit of Capital in Sunbelt Cities,” in Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Space, Place, and Region, ed. Michelle Nickerson and Darren Dochuk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 265–89.
5. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Verso, 1990), 110, 111.
6. Edward Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder, Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1999); Evan McKenzie, Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996).
7. Rebekah Sheldon frames the novel’s setting within the rise of neoliberal capitalism; see Sheldon, “After America,” in The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction, ed. Eric Carl Link and Gerry Canavan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 206–18.
8. Rob Kitchin and James Kneale, “Science Fiction or Future Fact? Exploring Imaginative Geographies of the New Millennium,” Progress in Human Geography 25 (March 2001): 27.
9. Alex Schafran traces the new representation of suburban dystopia in the media and academia and the resulting “discursive mishmash” in “Discourse and Dystopia, American Style,” City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action 17, no. 2 (2013): 130–48.
10. Timothy Egan, “Slumburbia,” February 10, 2010, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/slumburbia/.
11. George Galster, Driving Detroit: The Quest for Respect in the Motor City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Margaret Dewar and Robert Linn, “Remaking Brightmoor,” in Mapping Detroit: Land, Community, and Shaping of a City, ed. June Manning Thomas and Henco Bekkering (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015), 143–65.
CHAPTER 6. SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE! VARIETIES OF URBAN CRISIS
1. Latham and Hicks, “Urban Dystopias,” 168–71 (quote 168). Joan Dean has noted the dominance of overpopulation worries in science fiction films of the 1970s. Joan F. Dean, “Between 2001 and Star Wars,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 7, no. 1 (1978): 16–17.
2. Jack London, People of the Abyss (1903), author’s preface, www.sonoma.edu/writings/peopleoftheabyss.
3. Adna F. Weber, “Suburban Annexations,” North American Review 166 (May 1898).
4. The actual number is now estimated at between six thousand and ten thousand.
5. Josiah Strong, Our Country: Its Present Crisis and Its Possible Future (1885; Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), 172–73.
6. Ibid., 176–77, 186.
7. Robert Fogelson, America’s Armories: Architecture, Society, and Public Order (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
8. Martin Ridge, Ignatius Donnelly: Portrait of a Politician (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); Frederick Jaher, Doubters and Dissenters: Cataclysmic Thought in America, 1885–1914 (London: Free Press, 1964).
9. Google Ngrams suggest that the term “gridlock” dates to 1962, the same year as “Billennium,” although use did not take off until the 1980s.
10. “That Population Explosion,” magazine cover by Boris Chaliapin, Time, January 11, 1960, http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19600111,00.html.
11. Miles A. Powell, “Pestered with Inhabitants: Aldo Leopold, William Vogt, and More Trouble with Wilderness,” Pacific Historical Review 84 (May 2015): 195–226.
12. Vivian Sobchack, “Cities on the Edge of Time: The Urban Science-Fiction Film,” in Alien Zone II: The Spaces of Science-Fiction Cinema, ed. Annette Kuhn (New York: Verso, 1999), 133.
13. Donella Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (New York: Universe Books, 1972).
14. Smith’s story was later included in the multiauthor collection Future Boston, whose underlying premise is that a geological anomaly causes Boston and its immediate environs to sink and let in the ocean, while the rest of the United States is unaffected.
15. Watery cities are one of Robinson’s favorite images. In addition to these examples, The Wild Shore (1984) includes a visit to San Diego’s Mission Valley, where the towers of late twentieth-century hotels rise from impounded water like moated fortresses.
16. The windup girl of the title is a genetically engineered “new person,” brought from Japan as a businessman’s aid, then abandoned in Bangkok to a life of prostitution and sex shows. Under the extremes of degradation, she snaps her obedience conditioning to kill her tormenters. She is a fascinating character and a most sympathetic murderer who plays an inadvertent catalytic role in the plot and manages to survive the end of the city.
17. In Shipbreaker (2010) he also transposes the third world industry of ship disassembly to a future North America.
CHAPTER 7. KEEP OUT, YOU IDIOTS! THE DESERTED CITY
1. Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998); Max Page, The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).
2. Nick Yablon, Untimely Ruins: An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819–1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
CHAPTER 8. MARKET AND MOSAIC
1. Peter Langer, “Sociology-Four Images of Organized Diversity,” in Cities of the Mind: Images and Themes of the City in Social Science, ed. Lloyd Rodwin and Rob Hollister (New York: Plenum, 1984), 100–101.
2. Brian Stableford, “Cities,” in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ed. John Clute and Peter Nichols (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993); Vivian Sobchack, “Cities on the Edge of Time: The Urban Science Fiction Film,” East-West Film Journal 3 (December 1988): 4–19; John Gold, “Under Darkened Skies: The City in Science Fiction Films,” Geography 86 (October 2001): 337–45.
3. Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community (New York: Paragon, 1989).
4. Samuel R. Delany, “On Triton and Other Matters: An Interview with Samuel R. Delany,” Science Fiction Studies 17 (November 1990): 307.
5. Ron Randall, Trekker, No. 1 (Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Comics, 1987), 8.
6. Science fiction readers are also familiar with more benign bars that provide the setting for a long series of tall tales and mind-puzzle stories: Arthur C. Clarke’s White Hart Pub, Larry Niven’s Draco Tavern, and Spider Robinson’s Callahan’s Place.
7. Andrew Milner, “Darker Cities: Urban Dystopia and Science Fiction Cinema,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 7 (September 2004): 259–79.
8. Ibid., 268.
9. Norman Klein, “Building Blade Runner,” Social Text, no. 28 (1991): 148; Robert Silverberg, “The Way the Future Looks: THX 1138 and Blade Runner,” in Omni’s Screen Flights/Screen Fantasies: The Future according to the Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Danny Peary (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984), 187; “Directing Alien and Blade Runner: An Interview with Ridley Scott by Danny Peary,” in Peary, Omni’s Screen Flights / Screen Fantasies, 189.
10. Interpretations of the Blade Runner city run both negative and positive. David Desser emphasizes the “mélange of swarming humanity” in which inequalities of race and class are inscribed in a dangerous cityscape, but Vivian Sobchack writes that it is “a city experienced less as base and degraded than as dense, complex, and heterogeneous” and endlessly stimulating. David Desser, “Race, Space and Class: The Politics of Cityscape in Science Fiction Films,” in Alien Zone II: The Spaces of Science-Fiction Cinema, ed. Annette Kuhn (New York: Verso, 1999), 93; Sobchack, “Cities on the Edge of Time,” 136.
11. Stephen Rowley, “False LA: Blade Runner and the Nightmare City,” in The “Blade Runner” Experience: The Legacy of a Science Fiction Classic, ed. Will Brooker (New York: Wallflower Press, 2005), 210; Klein, “Building Blade Runner.”
12. Robert Neuwirth, Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World (New York: Routledge, 2004); Brodwyn Fisher, Bryan McCann, and Javier Auyero, eds., Cities from Scratch: Poverty and Informality in Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
13. Robert E. Park, “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment,” American Journal of Sociology 20 (March 1915): 577–612.
14. Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1890), 25.
15. Claude Fischer, To Dwell among Friends: Personal Networks in Town and Country (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
16. The text references Turkish and Kurdish immigrants to the cities and references real nations in a way that would put the cities somewhere around Transylvania, but since the cities have a port, they may be nearer to Moldova. Or is the location to be interpreted as a seacoast in Bohemia to emphasize the element of fantasy?
17. Scott Bollens, On Narrow Ground: Urban Policy and Conflict in Jerusalem and Belfast (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000).
18. Leonie Sandercock, Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities in the 21st Century (New York: Continuum, 2003), 1.
19. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Knopf, 1977), and Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
20. Joan Gordon, “Hybridity, Heterotopia, and Mateship in China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station,” Science Fiction Studies 30 (November 2003): 467. Also see Mark C. Childs, “Learning from New Millennium Science Fiction Cities,” Journal of Urbanism 8 (March 2014): 97–109.
21. Christopher Palmer, “Saving the City in China Miéville’s Bas-Lag Novels,” Extrapolation 50, no. 2 (2009): 224–38.
22. Joan Gordon and China Miéville, “Reveling in Genre: An Interview with China Miéville,” Science Fiction Studies 30 (November 2003): 364.
23. Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). My student Marianne Ryder has used the concept to understand the emergence of the Puget Sound region as a center for sophisticated glass sculpture, an art world that embraces artists, educational programs, exchanges of expertise across continents, specialized workplaces, patrons, galleries, and museums that legitimize the art outside its place of production. See Marianne Ryder, “Forming a New Art in the Pacific Northwest: Studio Glass in the Puget Sound Region, 1970–2003” (PhD diss., Portland State University, 2013).
24. Edward Glaeser, The Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (New York: Penguin, 2011), 247.
25. Ibid., 1.
26. The novels expand on a setting that Gibson introduced in the short story “Skinner’s Room,” written as part of a 1990 museum exhibition on Visionary San Francisco.
27. Michael Beehler, “Architecture and the Virtual West in William Gibson’s San Francisco,” in Postwestern Cultures: Literature, Theory, Space, ed. Susan Kollin (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 88.
28. Gary Westfahl, William Gibson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 121; James Thrall, “Love, Loss, and Utopian Community on William Gibson’s Bridge,” Foundation 91 (Summer 2004): 97–115.
29. For a quick suggestion along these lines see Neil Campbell, The Cultures of the American New West (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000), 160–61.
30. Graham Murphy, “Post/Humanity and the Interstitial: A Glorification of Possibility in Gibson’s Bridge Sequence,” Science Fiction Studies 30, no. 1 (March 2003): 74; Beehler, “Architecture and the Virtual West,” 82–86.
31. Samuel R. Delany, “On Triton and Other Matters: An Interview with Samuel R. Delany,” Science Fiction Studies 17 (November 1990): 303–4.
32. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (London: Granta Books, 1992), 394. Italics in original.
AFTERWORD: CITIES THAT WILL WORK
1. George Tucker, The Progress of the United States in Population and in Wealth in Fifty Years (New York: n.p., 1843), 127.
2. Kevin Lynch, Wasting Away: An Exploration of Waste; What It Is, How It Happens, Why We Fear It, How to Do It Well (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1992), 109.
3. Hull is Griffith’s home city, re-created after her move to the United States. The locale is identified in Andrew M. Butler, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at the British Boom,” Science Fiction Studies 30 (November 2003): 381.
4. Nicola Griffith, “Layered Cities,” ParaDoxa 2, no. 1 (1996): 37.
5. Ibid., 40.
6. Michelle Reid, “Crossing the Boundaries of the ‘Burn’: Canadian Multiculturalism and Caribbean Hybridity in Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring,” Extrapolation 46, no. 3 (2005): 297–314; Sharon DeGraw, “Brown Girl in the Ring as Urban Policy,” in Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase: Contemporary North American Dystopian Literature, ed. Brett Josef Grubisic, Gisele M. Baxter, and Tara Lee (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014), 193–215.
7. Robert Markley, “‘How to Go Forward’: Catastrophe and Comedy in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital Trilogy,” Configurations 20, nos. 1–2 (Winter–Spring 2012): 7–27.
8. Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (New York: Viking, 2009).
9. Kathleen Ann Goonan, “Cities of the Future?,” ParaDoxa 2, no. 1 (1996): 31.