Imagining Urban Futures. Carl Abbott
IMAGINING URBAN FUTURES
IMAGINING URBAN FUTURES
CITIES IN SCIENCE FICTION AND WHAT WE MIGHT LEARN FROM THEM
CARL ABBOTT
WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS
Wesleyan University Press
Middletown CT 06459
© 2016 Carl Abbott
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Designed by April Leidig
Typeset in Whitman by Copperline Book Services
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8195-7671-2
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-8195-7672-9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.
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Cover photo: Shutterstock. Image ID: 367966991. © Antiv.
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I like cities large and small—a good thing, since I’ve been studying and writing about their history for over forty years—while recognizing the challenges that urbanization and urban life can present. In a previous book called Frontiers Past and Future: Science Fiction and the American West, I explored the ways in which American science fiction has adapted the different narratives that we have used to understand the English-speaking conquest and settlement of North America. This book is the complement and companion piece, an exploration of ways in which science fiction utilizes the stories that we tell about the mature societies and cultures that cities embody.
I have received feedback from the Chicago Urban History Seminar held at the Chicago Historical Society. The Alternate Realities reading group at Portland State University, organized by Annabelle Dolidon and including Tony Wolk and Grace Dillon, has helped me think about different ways to approach speculative fiction. I also received welcome comments and advice from science fiction scholars Carol McGuirk and Rob Latham, historian Robert Fishman, and an outside reader for the Wesleyan University Press. A portion of the introduction appeared in the online journal Deletions and a portion of chapter 3 in the online magazine Clarkesworld.
IMAGINING URBAN FUTURES
Winner of an Academy Award for special effects, the 1951 film When Worlds Collide is one of the most striking early examples of the disaster movie in which an external force lays low the cities of the Earth, in this case leaving only a handful of earthlings to escape in a highly streamlined rocket ship. Courtesy Paramount Pictures / Photofest © Paramount Pictures.
INTRODUCTION
Nothing says trouble like a city smashed to smithereens on screen. Meteors and earthquakes, tsunamis and glaciers, earthly monsters and alien invaders—moviegoers might think that the only thing science fiction does with cities is demolish them with big-budget special effects. Giant waves crash over New York in Deluge (1933) and When Worlds Collide (1951), an asteroid pulverizes it in Deep Impact (1998), and ice crushes it in The Day after Tomorrow (2004). Everyone knows that the star of Godzilla: King of Monsters (1956) has it in for Tokyo. Los Angeles takes hits in Earthquake (1974) and Independence Day (1996), whose flying saucer bad guys also take out New York, Washington, and Paris, itself soon reobliterated in Armageddon (1998). Not to be outdone, screenwriters for 2012 (2009) devised a planetary cataclysm to eradicate Los Angeles, Washington, Rome, and every other city lower than Tibet.
Look again and the picture is far more interesting. Cities certainly perish on the science fiction screen and page, but they also grow, thrive, and decline in complex and intriguing ways. Hit the science fiction section at your local library or used bookstore for the pure pleasure of browsing the covers. Among the exotic planetscapes, cosmic vistas, and battling starships are cities seen from above and below, from near and afar. Cities soar in the distant view of foregrounded heroes and shelter beneath transparent domes like gigantic snow globes. Tiny humans and all manner of other creatures clog street corners and thread their way among the intricate towers, tunnels, sky bridges, wiring, and plumbing of the coming metropolis. Artists bathe their visions with the patina of fantasy or the shimmer of high tech.
We—the majority of humankind—already live in an urban world and share an urban future. Cities are home to a majority of our planet’s population, and they are gaining a greater edge over the countryside with each passing year. Sometime in the first decade of the present century, so far as demographers can calculate, more than half of humankind became city people. I wouldn’t bet on the exact date, but the world crossed the fifty–fifty threshold between city life and rural life in 2008, according to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. China passed the same milestone at the end of 2011, with an official count of 691 million city dwellers. By the end of the century, the worldwide