Orange County, California, critiques defense contractors as the economic drive wheel, and explores individual efforts to connect into communities through workplace, school, church, and social clique. The picture is not pretty, for the book is Robinson’s version of California well along the wrong path of rampant capitalism, but the elements of connection are there.
Like Robinson, ecologists, economists, geographers, and sociologists all want to understand the costs and benefits of urban connectivity: Do cities run on poverty and immiseration as their necessary social and economic fuel, an assertion that goes back to Karl Marx? Do capitalist cities generate spatially structured inequality by their very nature, as geographer David Harvey argues, or do they provide the tools with which individuals build the capacities to improve their lives? How do the new contacts and interactions that they enable compare with the social worlds in alternative settings such as small towns and villages? Is community-without-propinquity—the development of interpersonal connections based on common interests rather than residential proximity—as rich as localized neighborhood communities?10
Anglo-American culture—the dominant seedbed of science fiction—assumes the negative about urban life more often and more easily than does continental culture.11 It is easy to trace American antiurban thinking through intellectual traditions and popular culture.12 When Thomas Jefferson compared cities to cancers and sores on the body politic, he set a tone that has resonated in American politics for two centuries (“Ford to City: Drop Dead” read the New York Daily News headline of October 29, 1975, after President Gerald Ford nixed a federal bailout for the bankrupt city).13 Nineteenth-century fears of cities as cauldrons of social disorder and political chaos fueled the urban dystopias that appeared again and again in imagined futures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even in the twenty-first century, a majority of Americans hold to the ideal of small-town living over big-city life that is supposedly less satisfying, less authentic, less healthy, more dangerous, and more alienating.
The comprehensive findings of social science, however, are not so clear. City people in the United States have roughly the same density of social networks as small-town folks, just skewed away from kin and toward groups of common interest.14 Even the slums and shantytowns of Latin America and South Asia are places of opportunity for the rural poor, with better health care, education, and job opportunities. In developing countries, city dwellers generally are more likely than their rural counterparts to say they are happy.15 Cities are cultural incubators, technological innovators, and the places where reformers introduce and test progressive institutions. The city as creative milieu is a network of industries and universities, artists and entrepreneurs. It is easy to poke fun at Richard Florida’s trendy idea of an urban creative class, but economists and urban planners can agree that certain metropolitan settings have a special ability to generate change.16
Science fiction, of course, always draws on the knowledge base available to its creators. Writers of hard SF take scientific advances from the pages of Science, Nature, New Scientist, or Scientific American and build stories on those foundations. Robert Heinlein argued decades ago that writers of science fiction are free to imagine the uncertain and unknown, but not to ignore the body of accepted knowledge. Writers who want to base stories on the effects of black holes or on genetic engineering need specific understanding of the relevant physics or biology. The producers of the SF epic film Interstellar (2014) won kudos from the science fiction community for consulting with astrophysicist Kip Thorne and utilizing wormholes “appropriately,” whereas Star Trek warp drives don’t merit the same respect. H. G. Wells was free in 1898 to populate Mars with spiderlike beings, given contemporary astronomy. If writers working in 2016 want to set some action on Pluto, however, they will have to pay attention to the findings from the New Horizons flyby in July 2015.
There is a difference, however, in the relationship of the natural sciences to hard SF when we move to the urban realm, where there are few firm answers to powerful questions. Someone writing cities into social science fiction has fewer reliable sources and fewer constraints than someone building a plausible planet according to the laws of physics. Novelists and scriptwriters who highlight cities are unlikely to consult Cal Tech professors, or even urban studies professors, but they do draw on the ideas and projects of designers, social scientists, and social utopians.
The design professions on their visionary edge are a free-for-all world of sometimes sober, sometimes audacious, and sometimes silly ideas that are an inviting grab bag for writers and artists. The stacked trailer towers in Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (2011) exaggerate the modular apartments of Le Corbusier’s unité d’habitation in Marseilles. Geodesic domes are ubiquitous over future cities, imaginative projections of Buckminster Fuller’s 1970s proposal for Old Man River City, a bundt-cake megastructure under a geodesic umbrella to replace troubled East St. Louis.17 Wright, Soleri, Fuller, and other ambitious and self-conscious planners and architects like Constantinos Doxiadis did not think of themselves as offering science fictions. Nevertheless, their versions of ideal cities—to be realized in the future—tilt toward the fantastic and provide jump-off points for writers as radically different as J. G. Ballard and Larry Niven.
The social sciences are even more uncertain ground. Dozens of stories have depended on John B. Calhoun’s studies of overcrowded rats, but the application to people is much more tenuous than we popularly believe.18 Social sciences are often ambiguous, uncertain, and roiled by competing political agendas and ideologies—just consider the five-hundred-year debate about the causes of poverty that started under the Tudors and shows no signs of resolution in the U.S. Congress or British Parliament. Writers can pick and choose between Jane Jacobs’s celebration of Greenwich Village and Lewis Mumford’s preference for Hudson River exurbia. They can attribute caste systems in a future city to capitalism, racism/speciesism, or genetic differences and find supporting experts and arguments. They can draw on Walter Benjamin’s celebration of the variegated surface of big cities or Louis Wirth’s analysis of the alienating effects of urban life, and neither is a wrong choice.
Nor do most writers feel much need to be explicit about their choices, for residents of an urbanizing world have internalized many assumptions about the nature of cities. As Nicola Griffith put it, “fiction generally embodies that which a culture knows to be true.”19 In a previous book, I argued that American science fiction has incorporated the common historical narratives of the American West. In some cases the frontier references are front and center, as in future homesteading stories about “the little house on the big planet,” but in many others they are part of the background understanding that writers and readers share.20 In this book I am making a parallel argument. We think we know that high-rise living is alienating, so neither Robert Silverberg nor J. G. Ballard has to justify dystopian assumptions. We know that multiethnic cities are both stimulating and intimidating, so China Miéville can easily project the same values on a multispecies city. In the chapters that follow, I will be looking at the explicit borrowing of ideas about cities and city life, but also at implicit parallels and broader assumptions that are the basis for imagined places. Novelists and screenwriters are creative artists, but they are also symbionts with the social sciences, with history, and with the design professions, drawing on their ideas and simultaneously enriching their conversations.
I write about cities as a historian and urban planner and about science fiction as both a reader and a critic, and think that it is not only fun but informative to explore the different types of SF cities. For this book I have identified eight generic science fiction cities that appear and reappear in different settings as variants on common themes and concerns. What I call types bear a close resemblance to what critic Brian Attebery has recently called science fiction “parabolas.” Unlike some genre fiction like romances and westerns, where formulas nearly require certain plot elements and certain endings, science fiction is open-ended. Writers may start from a common premise or situation—galactic empires, generation starships—but science fiction readers relish the variations that can be developed from the same starting point as writers respond to each other’s version. These departures never take us
