Imagining Urban Futures. Carl Abbott
or even four to one, the balance already reached in Western Europe and North America.
Since our mundane future will be so decidedly urban, it is no surprise that the science fiction imagination has generated cities by the bucketful. Cities are background and setting for stories on and off future Earth, often assumed as a natural part of coming society. They are sometimes an active part of the plot, places whose characteristics are essential to a story’s contests and conflicts. At times they become actors in their own right, intervening and shaping as well as framing the action. The future, the native land of science fiction, will be an urban future for all foreseeable generations. It’s like a syllogism:
Science fiction is about the future.
The human future will be urban.
Therefore, science fiction should be about urban futures.
Voyage outward from Earth. Settlers on the moon will likely live in underground cities—at least that’s what Larry Niven and Allen Steele propose. Martian pioneers will start off in domed cities and then transition to surface cities as terraforming takes effect—at least as Kim Stanley Robinson has projected that planet’s future. On Venus cities will float in the thick atmosphere, says Pamela Sargent. Intrepid extraterrestrial homesteaders may hope to make new lives under new skies and stars, but they will need cities and towns to supply their tools and market their crops—at least that is how Robert Heinlein envisioned the future on Ganymede. And sometimes creative imaginations have run wild to fashion implausible superfantastic cities that are built into miles-deep canyon sides, that pierce the stratosphere like huge stalagmites, that raft together on the deep sea, that span huge chasms on vast platforms, that englobe entire planets, and that even disassemble and reassemble themselves to creep across the landscape.
Waive your berth on the next interstellar departure and you may still find yourself in the future of a present-day city. We can experience the effects of climate change on Boston and Washington and economic stagnation on Los Angeles and Detroit. We can navigate an imagined megacity—super-high-rise Chicago or cybernetic Tokyo or hypertrophied Shanghai. We can choose among dozens of different Londons and New Yorks and explore the rise of the Global South in future Bangkoks, Saigons, and Istanbuls where a few social or technological tweaks can lead to fascinatingly different cities.
What is a city, by the way? With lots of small variations, historians and archaeologists agree that cities are big, long lasting, densely developed, and full of difference—different types of people, jobs, neighborhoods, and economic activities.1 They are also points of exchange that influence people outside their boundaries. People come to cities to trade goods, services, ideas, and their own labor. More than anything else, a city is a device for making connections. It is a system for creating innovation and change, because the best way for any of us to come up with a new idea is to bring us in contact with strangers and their strange opinions. This is what Samuel R. Delany has in mind when he writes that “cities are fun precisely because they encourage encounters across class lines” and other social strata of race and sexuality. Putting it more concretely, says Delany, “There must be places where Capulets can regularly meet Montagues and fall in love.”2
Deeper in time behind the last two centuries of exploding industrial urbanization are six thousand years when humans independently invented cities at least six times in what are now Egypt, Iraq, China, India-Pakistan, Mexico-Guatemala, and Peru. In fits and starts, as kingdoms and empires flourished and fell, urban society spread gradually into different corners of the world—to Londinium and Angkor and Timbuktu and Cahokia and Cuzco. Some cities have been so useful as to be invented and then reinvented multiple times, as with the Romes of Hadrian, the Medici popes, Mussolini, and Federico Fellini. Cities are a natural part of human society past and present … so it is not surprising that they are part of our near and far futures.
So, sure, science fiction is about rocket ships and weird aliens and strange new worlds. It is about technologies possible and impossible—genetic engineering, cloning, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology … and warp drives and time travel. Cities do not often appear as a category on these common lists of science fiction subject matter, but they are ubiquitous nevertheless. Some future cities function as effortlessly as glitchless software. Others are dystopian disaster zones.
Science fiction cities sometimes work as familiarizing frames, serving up useful expectations for readers and viewers. Indeed, SF often employs cities as backgrounds and settings that function in much the same way that cities do today (just as Star Fleet functions in the Star Trek universe as a familiar naval bureaucracy). Peter Hamilton’s city of Memu Bay in his space thriller Fallen Dragon (2001) would be totally familiar to a resident of Zurich or Milwaukee. C. J. Cherryh’s city of Reseune in Cyteen (1988) and Regenesis (2009) is the research center for an empire based on cloning, with all the new social dynamics that implies, but the place itself is not all that different from an American or Indian science-park district found in Palo Alto or Bangalore. The planetary capital to which it reports has hotels and public buildings, streets and back alleys, airport and commercial waterfront—it could just as well be Seattle or Chicago.
Melissa Scott in Burning Bright (1993) similarly serves up a city that is far more familiar than strange. The plot intertwines interstellar political and commercial intrigue with the adventures of a space pilot who takes shore leave in the city of Burning Bright to practice her skills as the designer of computer-based role-playing games. The city itself sounds like fun, but it is one where Scott’s readers could easily find their way around. It has elite neighborhoods and poorer neighborhoods, upscale shopping streets, warehouse districts, down-market bars, and a colorful waterfront. Residents get about on foot, with water buses on a canal system, and with helicabs. Just like home, the main streets are brightly illuminated but the side streets dimly lit with “pool[s] of light that marked each intersection to the brief edge of almost-dark where the first light ended and the next did not quite reach” (112). We’re far, far away from Earth, but not far at all from the noir ambiance of 1940s Los Angeles.
There is some resistance to an urban approach to science fiction. Antiurbanism is an easy reflex for anyone raised within Anglo-American culture, with its long-standing reverence for Arcadian scenes and rural society. Clifford Simak’s City (1952) presents a society that happily evolves beyond the need for urban places. Ursula Le Guin’s The Eye of the Heron (1978) presents a recently settled planet divided between a rural society that values hard work, peace, and gender equality and a city that is a nascent Nineveh—masculine, rigid, corrupt, exploitative, and cruel. Only by escaping the city and joining with the People of Peace can Luz Marina Falco realize her personhood. Or here, from City of Ruins (2011), are words that Kristine Kathryn Rusch puts into the mouth of Boss, the kickass woman who is the continuing protagonist in a series of novels about space exploration, time travel, and galactic politics:
I travel to Vaycehn reluctantly. I don’t like cities. I never have. Cities are as opposite from the things I love as anything can get.
First, they exist planetside, and I try never to go planetside.
Second, they are filled with people, and I prefer to spend most of my time alone.
Third, cities have little to explore, and what small amount of unknown territory there is has something built on top of it or beside it.
The history of a city is known, and there is no danger. (7)
Rusch seems to be channeling critic Gary K. Wolfe, who has argued that cities are basically antithetical to the science fiction imagination. Cities, he suggests, represent confinement, limitations on possibility, the known rather than the unknown. They are stasis rather than change, contrary to the science fiction spirit of adventure and discovery.3 This position goes beyond a simple negative evaluation of city life (cities as jungles, cities as sources of eco-catastrophe) to a larger position that, in effect, cities are useful only to serve the spaceports that allow authors to launch their stories into unfamiliar territory. It is another version of space as frontier, with cities standing in for the jump-off points for the Oregon Trail. In The Martian Chronicles (1950), Ray Bradbury began his story “The Settlement” with emigrant families waiting to embark for Mars from Independence, Missouri.