the atmosphere contains no oxygen, Venusians make the planet livable by using electrolysis to oxygenate their bubble cities. Rather than Kuttner’s implausible mile-deep citadels, these lie just below the ocean surface so their tops nearly break into the sky at low tide. The dome is two-layered, with carbon dioxide sandwiched in between to absorb shocks. Honeycomb structures between the layers minimize danger, and internal barriers can shut off different sections of the city in case of breach (the first half of the book centers on threatened sabotage). This said, however, the domes themselves are made from a handy super-duper plastic called transite, which is completely insoluble, doesn’t etch, won’t change chemically in reaction with the ocean, and never gets encrusted with slime or Venusian barnacle equivalents. Moreover, the domes are actually supported by power beams that are, explains a city official, “diamagnetic force fields in steel housings. It looks as though steel beams are supporting the dome, but that’s not so. Steel just isn’t strong enough. It’s the force fields that do it” (58).
Maureen McHugh in Half the Day Is Night (1994) made a much more serious stab at imagining underwater cities, in this case a set of cities two hundred meters under the Caribbean that constitute the nation of Caribe. The plot itself—a story of two innocent individuals who slowly realize that they have been caught up in political and corporate maneuvers and scheme to escape—does not require the undersea setting. Much of the action occurs in the boardrooms, cheap hotels, and mean streets that are the familiar settings of noir and thriller fiction. Submarines rather than ferries connect the cities, buses operate on city streets, including the Caribe equivalent of Kenyan matatu and similar vehicles of the third-world poor. The ethnicity of the French Vietnamese and Chinese American protagonists contrasts with the darker-skinned Haitians of Caribe, paralleling the plot tension of individuals from the global North caught up in problems of the global South that drives many stories of intrigue, from Graham Greene novels to the 1982 film The Year of Living Dangerously.
Nevertheless, McHugh refrains from introducing impervium or transite or diamagnetic force fields and pays particular attention to the problems of temperature and air. She never describes the domes or containment systems themselves, but the ambient cold of the deep ocean overburdens heating systems and renders the cities always chill. Only a handful of construction workers and fish jockeys work in the sea outside, taking drugs to speed their metabolism and eating vast piles of carbohydrates to survive the cold. Inside, pressure variations between upper and lower levels affect the composition and quality of the atmosphere. The rich get clean, dry air. The poor on the lower levels breathe damp, oxygen-poor air laden with odors and pollutants because recirculation systems are ill-maintained. Open fires are illegal, a stricture violated in poor districts, but richer residents still drive cars with internal combustion engines. Air is not yet metered like water and power, notes one resident, but the implication hovers that Caribe is not that far removed from New Klondike.
SUPERSIZE US
In 1974, author and editor Frederik Pohl had a brief conversation with New York mayor John Lindsay about whether the city was governable (Lindsay thought that the basic problem was not enough tax revenue). The next year Pohl published The Years of the City, five chronologically sequential novellas about the future of New York. The unifying concern is the problem of governance as the changing cast of characters deal with labor union power and racketeering, political corruption, and changing legal systems.
In the third novella, “The Blister,” Manhattan is being enclosed under one large dome up from the Battery to Canal Street and another over the middle of the island, with a smaller dome to connect them, making a sort of lopsided dumbbell shape like “two humps on a camel, the tall igloo one down around lower Manhattan, the lower connecting bridge from Canal Street to the twenties, the big elongated one covering midtown and Central Park” (177). Pohl might have been drawing on Buckminster Fuller’s 1969 proposal for a dome covering Twenty-Second Street to Sixty-Fourth Street, river to river.2 In line with New York’s tradition of work in high steel, the domes are a network of girders and cables holding plastic panels. The engineers use peripheral skyscrapers as anchors, some of which have to be sheared off to fit the slope. It will not be a Martian-style bubble tent but rather a gigantic cousin of a geodesic dome, although with hexagonal instead of triangular panels.
Pohl never explains why it is necessary or desirable for the Big Apple to become the Big Blister. He refers briefly to creating an enclosed, relatively self-sustaining system—garbage will be recycled rather than barged and dumped at sea, gas-powered cars will be replaced, there will be more recycling of materials—but in the next story the barges are still at work. The dome is periodically vented to get rid of radon, but readers otherwise do not know how air circulates. The dome does allow climate control within the range of 15–28 Celsius, perhaps the reason that a city like Tucson followed with its own smaller “thermal dome.” In the fourth and fifth sections, the existence of the dome is background (it allows for exciting but illegal hang gliding, for example).
A few years after Pohl imagined the evolution of New York, C. J. Cherryh took on the same task in “Highliner,” one of six stories about the distant future of earthbound cities collected and published as Sunfall (1981). Her New York is a superhigh, ever-growing pyramid whose “single spire aimed at the clouds, concave-curved from sprawling base to needle heights” (106). The city is constantly expanding, building and rebuilding its burdened foundations, pushing higher, adding space to intermediate levels. Smaller suburban towers cluster around it, metropolis and mountain range at the same time.
Both authors are careful to undercut the impressions of grandeur that their megastructures might evoke. Pohl’s city is socially messy, with a touch of political repression. His protagonist in “Blister” is an ordinary worker who helps to assemble the great dome. Cherryh’s city is an ultimately futile effort on a dying planet with a fading sun. Like Pohl, she centers her story on the city’s “highliners,” the skilled specialists who risk their lives to inspect and repair the exterior of the tower while dangling from flimsy ropes and harnesses. Her basic plot is routine—workers unite to resist corrupt corporations—but the name of the central character, John Tallfeather, recalls the Mohawk Indians who worked skyscraper construction in twentieth-century New York. With both stories, readers get indirect answers to the questions in Bertolt Brecht’s poem “A Worker Reads History,” which asks “Who built the seven gates of Thebes? … In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished, where did the masons go?”
Cherryh’s future New York is a mighty and monstrous artifact, but it has nothing on Isaac Asimov’s definitive supersized city. Eager readers who bought the first volume of Asimov’s Foundation for its cover art when it appeared in book form in 1951 might have expected, from the lines of rocket ships swirling toward the center of a vast galaxy, to plunge immediately into a space battle or an expedition to alien worlds. Instead they found themselves on the very strange planet Trantor … and in the world-encompassing imperial city of Trantor.
Asimov’s readers were visitors in the ultimate covered city. It’s big, with a population of forty-five billion, many of them administrators who manage the affairs of the twelve-thousand-year Galactic Reich. The city covers all seventy-five million square miles of the planet’s land surface and creeps out onto the continental shelves. Only occasional parks and the imperial palace offer touches of green to relieve Trantor’s metallic gray. Nearly everyone lives underground. Asimov introduces the city by tracing newcomer Gaal Dornick’s breakneck trip from spaceport to hotel in an air taxi that plunges into a high wall “riddled with holes that were the mouths of tunnels” and flies on through blackness “with nothing but the past-flashing of a colored signal light to relieve the gloom” (8). When he wakes the next day, he cannot tell day from night, for “all the planet seemed to live beneath metal” (9). Trantoropolis extends only a few hundred feet above the surface but reaches a mile belowground. From an infrequently used viewing tower Gaal “could see no horizon other than that of metal against sky, stretching out to almost uniform grayness … all the busy traffic of billions of men were going on, he knew, beneath the metal skin of the world” (11). In follow-on books, as the atmosphere deteriorates,
