with some secondary crossover characters. Babylon 5 aired 115 episodes from 1994 to 1998. Both shows regularly make lists of the best examples of science fiction TV.
Analogies from the history of the American West help to point out why one of the space stations is a city and the other is not. A good match for Deep Space Nine is Fort Vancouver, the Hudson’s Bay Company headquarters on the Columbia River from 1825 to 1846. It was a trading node with multiple peoples—Scots, French Canadians, Métis, Iroquois, Crees, Hawaiians—but only a few hundred in total. Boss John McLoughlin could take in the single stockaded fort with a glance.
If Fort Vancouver was a tenuous extension of empire, San Francisco during the gold rush and after was another Babylon 5—big, brawling, barely able to hold on to middle-class respectability. It had its Zocalo along Market Street and Union Square, its Downbelow vice district in the Barbary Coast. San Francisco’s population skyrocketed from a handful in 1847 to 57,000 by 1870 and 149,000 by 1880. It was a city of immigrants from Australia, South America, China, Europe, and the eastern United States—not so exotic a mix as at Babylon 5, but as disparate as you were likely to get in the nineteenth century.
Babylon 5 is a vast machine by definition. It is an enormously complex assemblage whose parts all have to work together, from power sources to airlocks, from ventilation systems to docking bays. But then, every city is a physical machine designed to sustain its residents. Into my house in Portland come water, natural gas, electricity, cable TV signals, Internet data to let me check on San Francisco’s early population, bags of groceries, books, and a bunch of other stuff. Out goes water down drains and toilets; heat through my dryer vent and open windows (in summer) and poorly sealed cracks (in winter); solid unneeded objects to recycling containers and trash can; books back to my local library branch; and phone messages back to the world through nearby (and unpopular) cell towers. Multiply my house eight hundred thousand times for my midsize metro area, add millions of square feet of retail and office space, schools, fire stations, and museums, and then add some more—the roads, bridges, rail lines, conduits, pipes, wires, cables, drains, sewers, elevators, and broadcasting towers that hold it all together. Any city is a huge interlinked object, a three-dimensional artifact that reaches above and below the level ground. It is both a vast abstract sculpture and a machine for living.
Cities full of aircars and slidewalks are close cousins of mundane cities with current pieces of technology extrapolated to support story lines. Superhigh cities of soaring towers extrapolate technologies like elevators and steel frame construction that have been available for 130 years. With space station cities, and domed habitats on airless worlds, and cities that float in air or water, and cities that pave over entire planets, something different is involved. Now the entire city with its overwhelming physical mass and form is the new technology that changes the ways that people can live. In short, the reimagined city itself is the new techno feat.
This chapter explores a particular type of city-machine whose fundamental imperative is to maintain and protect breathable atmosphere. A space station is, among other things, a sealed container of air maintained at pressure, humidity, and chemical composition appropriate for human beings. The science fiction future is filled, as well, with buried cities and domed cities that maintain usable air on moons and planets where a natural atmosphere is absent or deadly. “Dome breach!” is one of the most common and useful crises in the science fiction repertoire—after all, humans can live weeks without food and days without water, but only minutes without air.
Techno cities revolve around the promise of new products and technologies that will change everyday life. Bubble cities rely on the potential of engineering for their very existence, assuming the possibility of scaling up construction technologies by orders of magnitude; but they also raise the specter of fragility. First settlements in tunnels and domes are as vulnerable as isolated Massachusetts towns in King Philip’s War or as tenuous as a mining town in avalanche country. Overgrown supercities depend on so many interacting systems that a single breakdown can trigger multiple failures and disaster.
BUBBLES IN THE SKY
“Pa had sent me out to get an extra pail of air.” In 1951, Fritz Leiber opened the classic short story “A Pail of Air” with an irresistible hook that inverts the bucolic image of Jack and Jill. Leiber imagines Earth adrift from the sun and so cold that the atmosphere has frozen out into a layered snow of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and oxygen. A solitary family huddles in an empty city inside a nest built from rugs and blankets, thawing buckets of frozen air to survive. The planet, in effect, has become a great space station with the conservation of breathable air as the purpose of rudimentary engineering. The fact that the family turns out not to be sole survivors doesn’t undercut the impact of imagining air itself as a commodity that requires elaborate care.
Leiber’s story directs our attention away from pipes and wires to the most fundamental technological imperative of spaceships and space stations—the value of breathable air. In a throwaway line, Linda Nagata in “Nahiku West” (2012) touches on the essence of orbiting cities as machines for breathing. She posits a space station city that orbits the sun just inside the orbit of Venus and notes that “most of the celestial cities restrict the height and weight of residents to minimize the consumption of volatiles” (544). The prime engineering directive for cities in empty space, on airless moons, and on planets with unbreathable atmosphere is to encapsulate living space in a way that absolutely delimits in-here from out-there. No terrestrial walled city—not Rome or Constantinople, Toledo or Tallinn—has been as completely separated from its surroundings as Babylon 5 or Nahiku West.
Pell Station in C. J. Cherryh’s Hugo-winning novel Downbelow Station (1981) is a city comparable to Babylon 5. It is big, tightly packed, most definitely bounded, full of diverse races, social classes, and districts, and several generations old. Like other gigantic space stations, it is literally machine as city. It is also the major crossroads of the space lanes. It is the first station outward from Earth where major interstellar trading routes converge. Forty merchant ships are docked when the story opens. With access to in-system mines and to agriculture and mining on the planet that it orbits, Pell is also the key source of supply for a rogue fleet of warships that ostensibly are part of Earth forces but which operate as pirates. Here is Admiral Mazian speaking to his fleet captains: “Look at the map, old friends, look at it again. Here … here is a world. Pell. And does a power survive without it. What is Earth … but that? You have your choice here: follow what may be Company’s orders, or we hold here, gather resources, take action” (242).
Pell is city-size. Cherryh does not specify its population, but two other stations recently destroyed in the ongoing Union-Company war had twenty-five thousand to thirty thousand each. When Pell has to absorb six thousand refugees, it needs to relocate only a small portion of its population. When the refugees come in, there are one thousand units available in guest housing and two thousand more available by emergency conversion of space. Another five hundred units will be available in 180 days through further space conversion. At three persons per unit, Pell could likely absorb more than ten thousand newcomers with social disruption but no serious stress on its basic systems; indeed, it absorbs nine thousand more refugees during the few weeks of the story. At that same time, Mazian’s fleet is requiring new IDS for all the refugees. So far, says a fleet official, “we’ve identified and carded 14,947 individuals as of this morning” (423). The process will take two more weeks, implying that fifteen thousand is a minority. Seventy years later the population of Pell Station and its dependent planet has grown to roughly half a million, according to a follow-on novel, Regenesis, so we can assume a city-station population of one hundred thousand or more at the time of Downbelow Station.
As the population implies, Pell is physically extensive and complex enough that few residents know all its sections and corridors. They need street signs and color-coded corridors. Captain Signy Mallory, the fleet officer who has taken temporary control, orders all the signage removed. Station official Damon Konstantin complains,
“The station is too confusing—even
