Fantastic Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror

By Michael Fuchs

Contributions by Carl Abbott, Jacob Babb, Marleen S. Barr, Michael Fuchs, John Glover, Stephen Joyce, Sarah Lahm, James McAdams, Cynthia J. Miller, Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Chris Pak, María Isabel Pérez Ramos, Stefan Rabitsch, J. Jesse Ramírez, A. Bowdoin Van Riper, Andrew Wasserman, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, and Robert Yeates

Metropolis, Gotham City, Mega-City One, Panem’s Capitol, the Sprawl, Caprica City—American (and Americanized) urban environments have always been a part of the fantastic imagination. Fantastic Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror focuses on the American city as a fantastic geography constrained neither by media nor rigid genre boundaries. Fantastic Cities builds on a mix of theoretical and methodological tools that are drawn from criticism of the fantastic, media studies, cultural studies, American studies, and urban studies.

Contributors explore cultural media across many platforms such as Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, the Arkham Asylum video games, the 1935 movie serial The Phantom Empire, Kim Stanley Robinson’s fiction, Colson Whitehead’s novel Zone One, the vampire films Only Lovers Left Alive and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel The Water Knife, some of Kenny Scharf’s videos, and Samuel Delany’s classic Dhalgren. Together, the contributions in Fantastic Cities demonstrate that the fantastic is able to “real-ize” that which is normally confined to the abstract, metaphorical, and/or subjective. Consequently, both utopian aspirations for and dystopian anxieties about the American city become literalized in the fantastic city.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Feb 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9781496836649

Book preview

FANTASTIC CITIES

FANTASTIC CITIES

American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror

Edited by STEFAN RABITSCH, MICHAEL FUCHS, and STEFAN L. BRANDT

University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi.

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of University Presses.

Copyright © 2022 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2022

∞

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021042891

Hardback ISBN 978-1-4968-3662-5

Epub single ISBN 978-1-4968-3663-2

Epub institutional ISBN 978-1-4968-3665-6

PDF single ISBN 978-1-4968-3666-3

PDF institutional ISBN 1-4968-3667-0

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

To all fellow precariously employed scholars:

Solidarity forever!

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Stefan Rabitsch and Michael Fuchs

Section I: Imagining Fantastic Cities

Imagining Gotham: Hard Knowledge in a Soft City

Stephen Joyce

Whither Mankind? The Fantastic Meets the Frontier in The Phantom Empire

Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper

Cities and Communities: The Urban Vision of Kim Stanley Robinson

Carl Abbott

Section II: Picturing the End of the Urban World

The Banality of the Apocalypse: Colson Whitehead’s Necropolis and Mirthless Parody

Jacob Babb

Cities of the Dead: Urban Vampires in Only Lovers Left Alive and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

Confronting Race and Racism in the Post-Apocalyptic American City

Robert Yeates

The Water Apocalypse: Utopian Desert Venice Cities and Arcologies in Southwestern Dystopian Fiction

María Isabel Pérez-Ramos

It’s Not Good Here Anymore: Nuclear Survival and New York City’s Space in Kenny Scharf’s Videos

Andrew Wasserman

Section III: Freedom and Restrictions in the Fantastic City

Sylvester Stallone and Urban Order in the 1980s and 1990s: Gendering the City in Demolition Man and Judge Dredd

Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns

We Speak Another Language Here: Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren and the City of Folly

James McAdams

Imagining Digital Cities: Freedom and (Non-)Human Agency in Representations of Virtual Realities

Michael Fuchs and Sarah Lahm

Sleep Dealer; or, Tijuana, Ciudad del Futuro

J. Jesse Ramírez

Section IV: The City and Its Environment(s)

Terraforming and the City

Chris Pak

Olympia, Wilderness, and Consumption in Laird Barron’s Old Leech Cycle

John Glover

Ecological Plant-Based Urban Planning Makes Eleanor Cameron’s The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet Real

Marleen S. Barr

Bibliography

Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

This collection has been a long time in the making, a fact that owes little, indeed nothing, to the fantastic contributions that constitute it. Any of the delays that befell this project are entirely on us, as we committed to this venture as relatively fresh postdocs who did not yet know what academia would have (or not have) in store for us. On the positive side, there is the open and sincere collaboration with scholars who are passionate about their work, genuinely gratifying interactions with students in and outside the classroom, and the simple fun that emerges from working with and on popular culture. On the negative side, there has been a lack of security and perspective as well as the institutionalized vulnerability that we have had to contend with.

This project started back in 2014 at the forty-first annual meeting of the Austrian Association for American Studies in Graz, Austria. Titled Space Oddities: Urbanity, American Identity, and Cultural Exchange, the conference provided a venue where we met for the first time. In view of the conference’s topic, it wasn’t surprising that the conference featured several presentations which discussed the fantastic in one way or another—New York horror movies, Thomas Pynchon’s novel Against the Day (2006), virtual spaces and futuristic cities, post-apocalyptic urban spaces, urban eschatologies, imagining the ecumenopolis in Star Wars, and understanding Gotham. The variety of papers on the fantastic led to exchanges between us about starting a spinoff project to the official conference volume (published in 2018) which would focus on fantastic cities. As a matter of fact, a handful of participants in the Space Oddities conference have made it into this book. Two chapters—parts of the introduction and Stephen Joyce’s chapter on Gotham—are even based on papers given in Graz back in the fall of 2014.

Of course, this volume would not have been possible without our contributors—and the big bats (as one of the proposal’s reviewers put it) who signed up for it and made selling it to an American university press easier than we had anticipated. Ineffable thanks to all the contributors who persevered, thanks to those who filled in for authors who stepped down for one reason or another, and particular thanks to those of you who wrote chapters on relatively short notice in response to the peer reports and requests for additional chapters. Speaking of feedback: we are grateful to Isiah Lavender III (who has since revealed himself) for his feedback on our original proposal, which pointed out some weaknesses and areas that needed additional coverage. And, of course, we are also very thankful to the reviewers of the full manuscript, whose feedback, in particular, helped us improve the introduction. Finally, we appreciate Stefan Brandt’s unconditional support of this book, as he provided two then-junior scholars with a restraint-free environment to pursue this project.

According to the conventions of acknowledgments in academic books, you would expect a list of grants and awards that made the publication of this volume possible. While Steve was awarded a Fulbright Visiting Scholar Grant to conduct research for his second monograph at the Center for the Study of the American West at West Texas A&M University during the latter stages of this project, and while he cherishes the opportunity that was thus offered to him as well as the many personal encounters he had during his stay in Texas, the Fulbright Grant had nothing to do with the project at hand. Indeed, you will not see us thanking any institutions here. The two of us worked on this project (and several others) on part-time, fixed-term contracts. Yes, our teaching load was low, but so was our pay. The University of Graz even rejected our bid for a minor publication grant (in order to reduce the volume’s price), explaining that said grant would not be essential to the publication of the volume. Had we opted for a German printer (and, yes, we use that term on purpose) that requires a publication subvention instead of an American university press, we would have most likely received financial support. Neither of us is employed at the University of Graz any longer, by the way.

After breaking protocol for a paragraph, there are still a few more people who made the publication of this book possible—and the entire journey rather stress-free. A huge thank you to our editors at the University Press of Mississippi, Vijay Shah and Lisa McMurtray, who not only put up with repeated delays, but also stayed committed to the project throughout—even through the COVID-19 pandemic, which first hit Europe and then the United States a couple of weeks after we submitted our final manuscript. Thanks for the fantastic cover (pun intended), with its cyberpunk-ish vibe, goes to the press’s book designer, Jennifer Mixon. We’d also like to thank our production and design manager, Todd Lape, and copyeditor, Peter Tonguette. And, of course, everyone else at the University Press of Mississippi who was involved in the project but who we might not have been in contact with.

As indicated above, the final product that you, dear reader, hold in your hands—or look at on your screen—is the outcome of a project that spanned several years. Despite myriad obstacles, we tried to do right to our contributors and produce a worthwhile contribution to both American studies and sff scholarship. We hope that our labor will bear fruit in the way you will make use of this volume.

FANTASTIC CITIES

Introduction

Stefan Rabitsch and Michael Fuchs

It is easy to imagine the American city: impressive skylines dotted by skyscrapers built of concrete, glass, and steel, interspersed with iconic landmarks, readily come to mind. An imagined flyover reveals the deep canyons streets carve into the phallic geography of American architectural ingenuity, engineering prowess, and economic power. While neatly arranged in the seeming convenience and conformity of the grid, the city is bisected by arterial expressways. At the bottom of the urban canyons, a multitude of people go to and fro work and play, feeding off and contributing to a supposedly healthy consumerist metabolism.

However, these images usually apply only to the downtown areas of American metropolises, especially to the throbbing centers of corporate and political power. The vertical density of downtown quickly gives way to the equally dense horizontal plane of outlying neighborhoods and boroughs. Each of them lays claim to one or more distinguishing characteristics and moods associated with ethnic, gender, artistic, and economic communities who are constantly besieged by the forces of gentrification and (re)development. Moving out even further beyond a cordon of beltways and a connecting web of freeways, we find hubs of industrial activity and shopping malls. Ultimately, we reach the homogeneity of the suburban sprawl where those who can afford it live the all-American life brought to them courtesy of Levittown and McMansionism. Despite a city’s design and presumed order, when viewed from an orbital vantage point, American cities display—perhaps paradoxically—the organic qualities of cell clusters, which reinforce the notion of cities as living, breathing, and thus more complex organisms, which may even die. The title of Jane Jacobs’s iconic The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) makes this idea explicit, while N. K. Jemisin’s The City We Became (2020) echoes this notion: Great cities are like any other living things, being born and maturing and wearying and dying in their turn.¹

The relative ease with which we can conjure up these decidedly visual images speaks to the pervasiveness and ubiquity of the American city (or, more precisely, representations of the American city) in the media. Simple and clean, even when they deliver scenes of urban destruction, the series of images evoked above illustrates a set of dualisms which define American cities—both real and imagined. Indeed, the American city is characterized by a number of overlapping dualities, including, but not limited to, high vs. low, center vs. periphery, uptown vs. downtown, open vs. closed, feminine vs. masculine, White vs. ethnic, rich vs. poor, straight vs. queer, past vs. future, and dark vs. light.

A scene in the first episode of Netflix’s cyberpunk series Altered Carbon (2018–20) demonstrates the visual currency of these characteristic dualisms (illustration I.1). The show is set in the latter half of the twenty-fourth century, when human memories and consciousnesses are stored in devices implanted at the back of people’s necks (cortical stacks). Takeshi Kovacs (Joel Kinnaman), a former rebel, is revived some 250 years after his body ceased to function when his stack is implanted into the body of a recently deceased cop named Elias Ryker. Kovacs is told that Bancroft Industries has leased his body, which means that he is the property of Laurens Bancroft (James Purefoy) for the duration of that lease.² Ryker’s former partner and lover, Kristin Ortega (Martha Higareda), takes Kovacs to the Bancroft residence. As they traverse Bay City, the visuals suggest dread and despair, as the color palette is dominated by grays, dark blues, and black, with thunderstorms raging in the distance. Although traffic is limited, the entire city appears to be crammed with people, as skyscrapers dominate the scenery. When they approach Bancroft’s estate, they suddenly move vertically upward and break through the clouds hovering above the city. The sun and blue skies become visible; there is open space, room to breathe and to move. Kovacs marvels at the sublime vista. The white, colonial architecture of Bancroft’s home confirms that even in the twenty-fourth century, the style and design of aristocratic buildings has not really evolved; on the one hand, they are perpendicular edifices meant to serve as panopticons, while, on the other hand, they epitomize an imagined past the rich are stuck in.

Illustration I.1. The visual contrast implies economic and ethnic binaries. Screenshots from Altered Carbon, Episode Out of the Past © Netflix, 2018.

The dualisms Altered Carbon visualizes here had informed American ideas about, and imaginings of, the city long before the progressive aspirations of modernism were architecturally inscribed in the city of futurity at the turn of the nineteenth century (see Cindy Miller and Bow Van Riper’s contribution to this volume). After all, John Winthrop, Puritan leader and first governor of Massachusetts, imagined the colony’s works as a city upon a hill in a sermon he delivered to his followers. According to Winthrop, God had disposed of the condition of mankind in a way that at all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity; others mean and in subjection, who should not rise up against their superiors in an attempt to shake off their yoke.³ Essentially a projection of the European imagination onto the New World,⁴ Winthrop established some fundamental binaries that should pervade the American urban imagination, providing what might be called a model of the American national imagination, to draw on the title of an article by Sacvan Bercovitch.⁵ Winthrop’s city epitomized an exceptionalist narrative, with [t]he eyes of all people … upon the Puritans.⁶ Hence, the image of the city was ascribed not only to the Puritan colony; it became the locus of meaning through which God’s promise was to be redeemed for America as a whole in the works and accomplishments of their descendants. Columbia, the city launched into the sky on the occasion of the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago in the video game BioShock Infinite (Irrational Games, 2013), literalizes this idea, since its founder hails the city a last chance for redemption.⁷

At first glance, Columbia might appear to be a manifestation of the utopian ideals projected onto the American city, as it is imagined as another ark which makes possible a do-over that leaves behind mistakes of the past.⁸ However, the outward wealth, abundance, and technological comforts are extracted from the labor of marginalized inhabitants of the city in the clouds, chiefly people of African descent and immigrant communities; they exist in the spatial substrate of Columbia, in service corridors, concealed elevators, and Shanty Town, the habitat of the city’s labor force (illustration I.2).⁹ One of these downtrodden characters makes the systemic racism in the seemingly Edenic place explicit when she states, When I first seen Columbia, that sky was the brightest, bluest sky that ever was. Seemed like heaven. Then your eyes adjusted to the light and you see that sea of white faces looking back at’cha.¹⁰ Through the linkage to the Columbian Exposition, the specters haunting the White City are foregrounded. As the narrator in Thomas Pynchon’s novel Against the Day (2006) notes, the spatial configuration of the 1893 World’s Fair communicated a racial subtext:

Illustration I.2. Columbia’s outward beauty is made possible by exploitation in the city’s underbelly. Screenshots from BioShock Infinite Remastered © 2K Games, 2016.

Observers of the Fair had remarked how, as one moved up and down its Midway, the more European, civilized, and … well, frankly, white exhibits located closer to the center of the White City seemed to be, whereas the farther from that alabaster Metropolis one ventured, the more evident grew the signs of cultural darkness and savagery.¹¹

Similarly, ideas pertaining to the American city have always had their dark undercurrents, as the specter of the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah has always haunted America’s divine mission. As early as the 1830s, Thomas Cole’s series of paintings The Course of Empire (1833–36) invoked this interrelation between the rise and imagined fall of the American empire and its intricate ties to urban spaces. In his series The Rise and Fall of Los Angeles (1995), Sandow Birk adapted Cole’s paintings to a more contemporary setting, but the underlying notion of suppressed wrongs committed in the past and present leading to future failure and destruction remained the same. Consequently, what the American city, and America-as-city, should become, always inevitably includes that which it should not become. It has the seeds of decay and failure inbuilt (a dynamic that, for example, becomes palpable in expressions of nuclear fears, as explored by Andrew Wassermann in his contribution to this volume).

To be sure, until the late nineteenth century, the images and aspirations projected onto and coming out of the New World were primarily rural and anti-urban. A pastoral vision for America’s future informed the westward expansion that followed in the wake of independence. Ironically, it obscured the decidedly (proto)industrial and urban-based power structures driving the westward march of the American empire.¹² Thomas Jefferson arguably did the most to intellectualize the agrarian vision for the United States, trying to lead his nation away from entanglements with the Old World and toward self-sufficiency, economic independence, and, ultimately, supremacy. He bolstered his pastoral vision with a sharp critique of urban environments, adding a call for his fellow citizens to abjure the corruptive effects of the city. In his Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), Jefferson offers that [t]he mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body. For him, [t]hose who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, not least because the [c]orruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example.¹³ For Jefferson, the threats of urbanism were twofold: on the one hand, the city jeopardized the virtues of the individual; on the other, it endangered the democratic fabric of the republic itself.

Fast-forward to the end of the nineteenth century and we find the discourses that shaped both images of the American city informing the emergence of the modern(ist) American city of futurity, as its dualistic character became vertically stratified. The exponential growth of urban areas and the deteriorating living conditions in urban centers (as, for example, captured in Jacob August Riis’s How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York [1890]) only seemed to confirm Jefferson’s apprehensions. By the end of the nineteenth century, concerns had translated into attempts to reinvent and properly plan the city by way of imposing a socio-scientific order upon it.

Despite the increasingly apparent social problems of urban life, American cities became the epicenters of modernity around the same time. Fueled by progressivist ideas, urbanization coincided with a swell in immigration and a peak in utopian aspirations sweeping through the United States.¹⁴ The modern(ist) American city became the place where the possibilities of new technologies, industrialization, and commerce coalesced in a rapidly densifying and localized space. Nowhere was the fantastic vision of a future urban utopia presented more clearly than in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888). Its time-traveling protagonist, John West, awakens in Boston in the year 2000 and finds himself exploring its estranged cityscape:

Miles of broad streets, shaded by trees and lined with fine buildings … stretched out in every direction…. Public buildings of a colossal size and architectural grandeur unparalleled in my day raised their stately piles on every side. Surely, I had never seen this city nor one comparable to it before. Raising my eyes at last towards the horizon, I looked westward.¹⁵

Future-Boston implements scientific socialism in order to achieve equality of labor by steering people away from excessive individualism and toward communal thinking. However, Bellamy’s urban utopia is decidedly undemocratic, bordering on totalitarianism, and exceedingly dependent on automatization and mechanization, not to mention surveillance. Nevertheless, the novel furnished architects, urban planners, and progressive policymakers with a blueprint, including a visual and ideological grammar, for designing the American city of futurity.

Looking Backward’s version (or vision) of America’s urban future illustrates the idea that cities are imaginary constructs. The American city first has to be imagined before it becomes believable, accessible, and meaningful. Indeed, rather than through firsthand experience, we primarily encounter the American city on the movie screen, at the end of the TV remote, or while operating a game controller. (This is, of course, even more true for us European American studies scholars observing American culture from the purported outside.) After all, the United States is often perceived as a vast urban space, as urban planner Thomas Adams understood as early as 1931 when he remarked, New York is America, and its skyscraper a symbol of the spirit of America.¹⁶ The American city is created (and recreated) from popular culture images circulated in movies, television shows, music videos, video games, and a host of advertisements. A project at Tate Modern in London in the summer of 2019 tapped into this pervasive omnipresence, as Islandic artist Olafur Eliasson invited visitors to make their vision of a future city using one tonne of [white] Lego bricks. Literalizing the semblance of materiality these images are imbued with, visitors then kept (re)constructing an urban brickolage where it is up to them what they decide to keep, take apart or rebuild … [, as] there are no instructions and the bricks are constantly reused and recycled each time the work is shown in a new place.¹⁷

Illustration I.3. Dystopian renditions of major American cities are ubiquitous in twenty-first-century popular culture. Washington, DC, in Fallout 3 © Bethesda, 2008, and Manhattan in I Am Legend © Warner Bros., 2007.

In short, American cities appear to be everywhere, whether we reside in the United States or not. These cities include, but are certainly not limited to, the flashy opening credits of the various incarnations of CSI (CBS, 2000–2016), the desolate urban wastelands of Washington, DC, in the video game Fallout 3 (Bethesda, 2008),¹⁸ and the pastoral urban island of Manhattan in I Am Legend (2007) (illustration I.3). These images are powerful not least because they are simple in that they appear to make the American city hold still for the benefit of the observer.

Fueling the many dichotomies ascribed to what Josiah Strong labeled the nerve center of our civilization,¹⁹ the American city, however, is anything but simple; it is messy, complex, and refuses to remain static. As such, the American city is intricately interconnected with the notion of America as a perpetually unfinished country, a nation in a state of constant becoming-some-utopian-ideal-that-it-will-never-be—a nowhere-place if there ever was one.²⁰ Consequently, both America and America-as-city demand an exercise in the fantastic. The city of Bellona (whose schizoid character is explored in greater detail by James McAdams) in Samuel R. Delany’s 1975 novel Dhalgren illustrates the notion of perpetual unfinishedness. Located at the geographic center of the United States, Bellona exists in a perpetual state of flux: street signs constantly change, making directions meaningless, structures are ablaze for days but do not show any signs of damage afterwards, and entire neighborhoods seem to fade in and out of existence. Multiple spatial dimensions of urban life coexist simultaneously on different temporal planes, coalescing into a cityscape. What is true for Bellona, holds true for the American city, more generally; clean dichotomies do not apply to it, either. Dualistic images belie a procedural and multifaceted indeterminacy that undergirds the American city and thus the fantastic urban imaginary.

American Cities—American Fantasies

The reflections, refractions, and (re-)imaginings of the American city provide the template for urban spaces found in the fantastic imagination. In fact, the American city, much like America itself, has always been a fantastic construct. It fuses past and present real-life topographies and circumstances with divine aspirations and visionary urban geographies which often willfully ignore material, social, and economic realities. Indeed, more often than not, American cities become cities of illusion, as their representational and discursive framings reduce them to positively connoted images which often ignore the realities of homelessness, unemployment, and social injustice so characteristic of America’s urban centers. To draw on Italo Calvino, similar to dreams, American cities are made of desires.²¹

For example, the ecological realities impinging on American urban life in the current stage of late-stage capitalism are pertinent and pressing, yet often consciously ignored in American public discourse. In 2015, Florida’s governor, Rick Scott, became internationally renowned for avoiding the use of climate change and global warming in official reports and other documents. As several employees from Florida state agencies have confirmed, climate change denialism has been an unofficial state policy since Scott came into office in 2011. Indeed, the Miami Herald reported in March 2015 that the number of references to climate change on the website of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection dropped from 209 to 34 during Scott’s tenure.²² Read against this political backdrop, the idea of constructing a flood wall to protect Miami’s ostentatious ocean front is floated at regular intervals only to meet with outcries over its impracticality and unsustainability. Such a wall exemplifies the ways in which the discursively constructed vision of Miami incorporates easy workarounds that would treat the symptoms rather than causes. Instead of implementing long-term changes to adapt to the irreversible effects of global heating, policymakers decide not to face and act on scientific facts.

This notion of finding easy solutions to problems arising for urban planning due to climate change (or events symbolically connected to climate change) is a well-worn trope in science fiction (sf). Examples such as the flood walls protecting Los Angeles in Blade Runner 2049 (2017) and New York City in The Expanse (SyFy, 2015–18; Amazon, 2019–) (illustration I.4), whereas the migration to New York City’s highest skyscrapers in a world made largely uninhabitable by rising sea levels in novels such as Lev Rosen’s Depth (2015) and Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 (2017), makes explicit the impracticality and unsustainability of these measures (in his chapter, Carl Abbott tackles the distinct communal formations that Robinson constructs in his cities). Vacating Earth and settling on another planet offers another easy solution. Indeed, as Chris Pak demonstrates in his contribution to this volume, terraforming narratives do not necessarily explore the ways in which humanity adapts to a changing environment but rather how humankind adapt[s] the external world for their own ends, as he puts it. Sf texts that are more explicitly ecologically aware sidestep these seemingly easy solutions and detail the longer-term consequences of climate change on human and nonhuman lives. As María Isabel Pérez-Ramos’s chapter in this volume shows, climate change has exacerbated a historically systemic problem in the urban Southwest of the United States: water shortage. As she suggests, the environmental problems in the area are, at least partly, a result of the oppression of native inhabitants; listening to these silenced voices would open up ways to imagine alternative futures—an idea which in theory would seem easy enough to implement.

As an imaginary formation, the Fantastic City projects ideals while it simultaneously speaks to urban realities. In a 1998 monograph, sociologist John Hannigan charts the development of (primarily) American cities in the twentieth century. He suggests that the urban evolution of the twentieth century was inextricably tied to an urban economy which increasingly centered on entertainment—tourism, sports, and culture. Since this mushrooming of entertainment spaces entails a movement away from reality toward an imaginary, perhaps even hyperreal, domain, Hannigan calls the phenomenon Fantasy City and argues that it was defined by six central features (to varying degrees, of course),²³ which we will partly draw on and partly expand upon to characterize the Fantastic City. In so doing, we acknowledge the productive dialogue between cities of the imagination and urban planning, which urban studies scholars have repeatedly emphasized. For example, Lynda H. Schneekloth has identified uredeemably utopian aspirations in urban planning, as [a]rchitecture, landscape architecture, planning, and other environmental design fields … give … form to some vision of human society and place.²⁴ Carl Abbott has likewise stressed that planning history and theory has long accommodated what we might call design science fiction. The Radiant City of Le Corbusier, the Broadacre City of Frank Lloyd Wright, and the fantastic Arcologies of Paolo Soleri are all extrapolations of the possibilities of new technologies and new cultural values.²⁵ Hence, fantastic cities invite us to reflect on social changes by convert[ing] real political tensions into mythical terms and dream-like images and localizing them at what Vivian Sobchack has termed a hypnogogic site.²⁶ These imaginary cities are ground[ed] … in architectural practice.²⁷ And Amy Butt has thus issued an unabashed call … for architects to raid the bookshelves, find the most lurid cover and glaring font and lose themselves in the exuberant worlds of science fiction because sf provide[s] a unique set of overlapping tools and perspectives for architectural imagination and critical thought.²⁸

Illustration I.4. Imagined countermeasures against the effects of climate change include the construction of flood walls. Screenshots from Blade Runner 2049 © Sony Pictures, 2017, and The Expanse, Episode Dulcinea © Legendary Television, 2015.

More broadly, architect Kevin Lynch has opined that Charles Dickens helped to create the London we experience as surely as its actual builders did.²⁹ Similarly, novelist and critic Jonathan Raban has maintained that the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture (on Raban’s distinction between soft and hard cities, see Steven Joyce’s chapter).³⁰ These observations by urban studies scholars testify not simply to the power of the imagination, but, more specifically, to the force, use, and utility of representations of (futuristic or otherwise) urban spaces—a topic Marleen Barr’s chapter in this volume addresses by discussing recent advances in mycelial urban design and architecture prefigured by Eleanor Campbell’s The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet (1954). Indeed, the city, Benjamin Fraser has concluded, is an image, an idea, as well as a physical reality.³¹

Fantastic Cities

Drawing on these ideas, the first characteristic of the Fantastic City is its (1) representational character. Fantastic cities are imaginations, captured in words, images, and sounds. Importantly, this separation of fantastic cities from urban spaces in physical reality does not diminish their cultural significance. When Morpheus tries to make Neo understand what the Matrix is all about, he stresses that the virtual world of the Matrix is the world [they] know.³² Similarly, the contemporary world is saturated with human-made images and sounds—this is the world we know. Accordingly, understanding representation is the key to understanding cities.³³

When looking up fantastic in a dictionary, one will find several definitions. Merriam-Webster, for example, suggests that fantastic may be synonymous with excellent; it might also mean unbelievable, exceedingly large or great, eccentric, conceived by unrestrained fancy, or, simply, not real.³⁴ Our understanding of the Fantastic City embraces all of these ideas. Notably, the Fantastic City is fantastic insofar as it is a product of the fantastic, this umbrella term subsuming the speculative modes of sf, fantasy, and horror. To be sure, as the center of American futurity, the city is a plausible topos for sf, bringing forth such creations as Isaac Asimov’s Trantor, Suzanne Collins’s Capitol of Panem, and Gerald Brandt’s San Angeles.³⁵ However, the urban imagination also attracts the truly fantastic—from comics such as Witchblade (1995–2015) and novels such as Lisa Maxwell’s The Last Magician (2017) to television shows such as Beauty and the Beast (CBS, 1987–90), Charmed (The WB, 1998–2006), and Grimm (NBC, 2011–17) and films such as King Kong (1933), Ghostbusters (1984), and Bright (2017)³⁶—just as much as it becomes the site for the horrific, from Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Friday the 13th, Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) to the hallucinated horrors depicted in American Psycho (novel, 1991; film, 2000).³⁷ While perhaps an unexpected locale, the city of Olympia in Washington State serves as a nodal point for Lovecraftian horrors in Laird Barron’s Old Leech Cycle, which John Glover explores in his contribution to this volume.

The fantastic character of these urban spaces might, in fact, overemphasize their fictitiousness; that Los Angeles as depicted in movies such as Southland Tales (2006) or The Purge: Anarchy (2014) might not be the actual Los Angeles. Nevertheless, there is a complex interplay at work between actual urban and social realities, their representations, and how these representations feed back into our experiences and imaginations of urban spaces such as Los Angeles. Indeed, there is clear evidence, Rob Kitchin and James Kneale have noted, that some sections of society seek to make real the sociotechnical futures articulated in sf.³⁸

Like most representations, the Fantastic City relies on particular (2) scripts. John Gagnon has explained that scripts are symbolic and nonverbal elements in an organized and time-bound sequence of conduct through which persons both envision future behavior and check on the quality of ongoing conduct.³⁹ Gagnon, of course, describes social scripts rather than representations here. We draw on his idea to suggest that representational scripts entail visual, verbal, and sonic elements and configurations which constantly appear and reappear in representations of the Fantastic City, such as the latent influence of binaries (and the liminal spaces in-between) mentioned above.

As the description of the project Scripts for Postindustrial Urban Futures: American Models, Transatlantic Interventions correctly points out, scripts combine procedural knowledge gained through observing past patterns and present applications of the script in question with blueprints for the future.⁴⁰ After all, future applications are expected to (largely) rely on the script in its contemporary shape. In other words, scripts are akin to conventions, but more emphatically procedural in nature.

These scripts are (3) modular. As Hannigan has noted, the Fantasy City allows for the mixing and matching [of] … an array of components in various configurations.⁴¹ This notion of assemblage also holds true for fantastic cities. Similar to collages, these imaginary constructs combine—sometimes seemingly not very selectively—aesthetics and ideas from various sources.⁴² By merging often disparate elements, both from fiction as well as material and lived reality, fantastic cities are gigantic agglomeration[s].⁴³

Blade Runner’s (1982) iconic portrayal of what Los Angeles might look like in the year 2019 not only incorporated images alluding to the eponymous city in Metropolis (1927; see also point 4 below) into its postmodernist textual body (illustration I.5); the movie also borrowed from the looks of late 1970s/early 1980s Hong Kong and Tokyo. Although this transnational aesthetic could be said to question the film’s Americanness (and to inquire into national identities in an increasingly global village⁴⁴), Blade Runner vigorously reassert[s] and spatialize[s] … racial and national hierarchies, as street life is Asian, while the largely white police force moves above it in airships, and a white corporate hierarchy … remains insulated in its elevated interiors.⁴⁵

Illustration I.5. Blade Runner visually references Metropolis a number of times. Screenshots from Metropolis © Transit Film/Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau Stiftung, 2016, and Blade Runner: The Final Cut © Warner Bros., 2010.

On the other hand, the architectural aspirations which inform Gulf Futurism, and the petro-capital and unfree labor that fund it, seek to make real Blade Runner-esque urban visions (while ignoring the film’s critique of these exploitative practices). Lived reality in the Persian Gulf region hence showcases the Fantastic City’s impact on real-life urban planning and the actual urban experience. Indeed, the connections between Blade Runner and early twenty-first-century urban realities became tangible in January 2013 when a photograph of a Beijing skyscraper covered in smog first made its way to the Wall Street Journal’s Photos of the Day online section before Gizmodo featured a brief article titled "This Is Not a Scene from Blade Runner" in response to the image a few days later.⁴⁶ By stressing the fact that the photo was not taken from a dystopian, cyberpunk vision of the future, but rather depicted lived reality, the Gizmodo article’s title arguably exposed our world as a cyberpunk future which is inescapably compromised of visual and virtual interstices and intersections.⁴⁷ This notion that we seem to live in a Gibsonian reality has become an established trope in news media. For example, reports on civil unrest in Hong Kong stressed that pro-democracy protestors used lasers to combat AI-powered facial recognition systems and hacked traffic cones so they could be deployed as effective countermeasures to tear gas.⁴⁸ All of this happened while news and rumors surrounding the cyberpunk video game Cyberpunk 2077, developed by CD Project Red, made the rounds. Clearly indebted to Blade Runner’s version and vision of Los Angeles, the game is set in Night City, a metropolis covering all of California and spreading its tendrils far and wide around the Pacific Rim.

As the examples of Blade Runner’s Los Angeles and Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City imply, the Fantastic City is (4) transnational. On the one hand, this transnational character applies to individual incarnations of the Fantastic City. As urban areas merge into metroplexes forming the heart(s) of megacities, national borders—walled-off or otherwise—lose their