Mr. Konstantin, we don’t mark corridors for intruders.”
“We have children on this station. Without the colors.”
“They can learn,” she said. “And the signs all come off.” (255–57)
Pell station has the multiple economic functions of a city. All its sectors have retailing: There are “a score of bars and entertainment concessions along green dock and the niner access which had once thrived in the traffic of merchanters … a line of sleepovers and vid theaters and lounges and restaurants and one anomalous chapel completing the row” (433). When levels 5–9 on orange and yellow sectors are displaced, the result is “dockside shops, homes, four thousand people crowded elsewhere” (30). Two distinct working classes maintain Pell City. One of the characters gets assigned work on a salvage line, along with other human workers, taking apart worn equipment by hand and sorting parts for reuse. A social notch below, filling the role of the noncitizen proletariat, are nonhuman hisa from “downbelow” on Pell planet. They live in the maintenance tunnels and do the essential scut work that keeps the station alive.
Pell has persisted for at least two centuries with increasing independence. Seven generations of the Konstantin family have served—dominated—Pell administration as something like hereditary bureaucrats: “The Konstantins had built Pell; were scientists and miners, builders and holders” (50), and they are a powerful voice in the elected governing council. The station is theoretically subject to the control of the Company from distant Earth but effectively operates independently, a status that is confirmed at the end of the wartime crisis that drives the narrative. Pell had been evolving its own way, neither Union nor Company, with its own political values that its leaders try desperately to preserve. At the end of the book, Pell has ridden out a crisis that has nearly cracked it open to space when “a whole dock breached, air rushing out the umbilicals, pressure dropped … troopers who had been on the deck, dead and drifting…. The dock was void” (401–2). As the stationcity avoids being ripped apart like earlier victims of the war, the newly formed Merchanters Alliance claims Pell as neutral territory, effectively making it an independent city state, and people begin to talk about “citizens of Pell.”1
WILL WORK FOR AIR
New Klondike, as its name implies, is a boom town on the Martian prospecting frontier. The treasure this time is alien fossils, not gold, but New Klondike shares many of the traits of instant towns on the North American or Australian mining frontier. Featured in Robert Sawyer’s Red Planet Blues (2013), New Klondike is jerry-built and already shabby: “The fused-regolith streets were cracked, buildings—and not just the ones in the old shantytown—were in disrepair, and the seedy bars and brothels were full of thugs and con artists, the destitute and the dejected” (9). Because the location is Mars rather than the Yukon, however, there is one major difference: it lies under a transparent dome that is four miles across and twenty meters high at its center. Public utilities include “air-processing facilities” as well as water and sewage treatment plants. And air is the most precious of the utilities. The private investigator who narrates the story offers a tongue-in-cheek take on noir fiction: “On the way to the place, I passed several panhandlers, one of whom had a sign that said, ‘Will work for air.’ The cops didn’t kick those who were in arrears in their life-support tax payments out of the dome—Slapcoff Industries still had a reputation to maintain on Earth—but if you rented or had a mortgage, you’d be evicted onto the street” (32).
As New Klondike suggests, space station cities have planet-based cousins. Science fiction could scarcely survive without its hundreds or thousands of air-protecting cities built under domes, under transparent tents, buried under the surface of moons and planets. The most basic job of these cities as physical constructions is to encapsulate breathable air at breathable pressure. Residents must always be on guard for breaks and blowouts that vent the usable air, void the pressure, or perhaps let in the poisonous atmosphere that has been swirling outside. These are cities protected from the vertical dimension—from meteors, from poisonous gases, or from vacuum that stretches upward to infinity.
Air is the one unregulated and unmetered input into our ordinary urban ecology. It is just there. It is not piped and monitored like water, nor packaged and vended like food and fuel. It is just there as we go about our lives—sometimes dry and sometimes rainy, sometimes smoggy, sometimes crisp and clear after a weather front has swept through. It can do violence when stirred into tornadoes and hurricanes, but usually we notice only its attributes—it’s too hot, too cold, too wet. To imagine air requiring technological intervention is a disquieting novum. Science fiction readers may be so accustomed to domed and buried cities that they scarcely notice, but the idea is actually startling, just as Fritz Leiber points out with the very title of his story.
Consider the dual role of air in the film Total Recall (1990). Mars is a mining colony controlled by a corporation directed by the creepy Vilos Colhaagen, who squeezes his workers by charging for the very air they breathe. When Douglas Quaid, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, arrives on the planet, workers are being driven to revolt as the price of air keeps rising: “More Freedom! More Air!” At the same time, the half-buried, half-domed city is terribly fragile. Quaid’s arrival on Mars triggers a shoot-up in the arrivals hall that shatters a window and creates a blowout that sweeps people outside—very exciting and very dangerous, although we wonder who would design such a brittle dome, not to mention being stupid enough to arm guards with projectile weapons.
Writers have converged on consensus architecture for the stages of settlement on airless worlds. Allen Steele in Lunar Descent (1991) describes the moon early in the colonization process. Moon miners live in a single company town constructed from a bunch of “low, square and rectangular monocreete buildings clustered together under bulldozed soil, interconnected by subterranean tunnels and above ground crosswalks” (53). The mess hall / meeting hall has a couple of deeply recessed windows onto the drab moonscape, but the workers live inside under a layer of regolith or outside in pressure suits. Larry Niven set his SF detective novel The Patchwork Girl (1980) on the moon at a later stage of development, but the city is still buried under “rock and moondust piled high atop it for meteor protection” (15). The top level has windows, however, enabling an assassin to attempt murder by targeting a victim in his room with a powerful laser aimed from outside, setting up a reverse locked-room mystery. As lunar settlement continues to mature, we may find the characters living on the surface under a dome, as in the opening of Anniversary Day (2001), a recent entry in Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “Retrieval Artist” series about a science fiction detective in Armstrong City: “Bartholomew Nyquist parked his aircar in one of the hoverlots at the end of the neighborhood. The Dome was dark this morning, even though someone should have started the Dome Daylight program. Maybe they had, deciding that Armstrong was in for a ‘cloudy’ day—terminology he never entirely understood, given that the Moon had no clouds and most people who lived here had been born on the Moon and had never seen a cloud in their entire lives” (15).
The consensus sequence is similar for Mars. South Colony in Robert Heinlein’s classic Red Planet (1949) has a population of a few hundred pioneers, living in double-layered plastic domes connected by tunnels. Arthur C. Clarke’s first published novel, The Sands of Mars (1951), is set sometime in the 1990s in Port Lowell, the largest city on Mars, with two thousand people. Lowellites live inside six nearly invisible plastic domes (the largest half a kilometer across) held up by internal air pressure and intertied by tunnels. Under the domes are “uniform metal houses and a few public buildings” giving the appearance “more of a military camp than a city.” Oxygen is extracted from the oxidized red Martian soil. Residents practice blow-out drills with the goal of getting to cover inside a sealable building within ten seconds.
Heinlein’s and Clarke’s colonists are in the first decade of settlement, but Greg Bear’s Moving Mars (1993) is set on a substantially developed planet in the year 2171. Residents still live underground, but with large domes over the central spaces. Off to the edges of the university, for example, is
