Daughter of the Ring of Fire » Blog Archive

Jun

2009

Speculative Cities

Posted on 14:20, June 19th, 2009 by EKSwitaj

Read my latest story, "A Tale of Two Birthdays", at 52|250.

Recently, Shared Worlds asked five well-known authors of speculative fiction the following question: “What’s your pick for the top real-life fantasy or science fiction city?”. China Miéville‘s answer at least comes as no surprise:

Whereas Paris (certainly in the centre) is the success of a single overarching monomaniacal topographic vision, London is a chaotic patchwork of history, architecture, style, as disorganised as any dream, and like any dream possessing an underlying logic, but one that we can’t quite make sense of, though we know it’s there. A shoved-together city cobbled from centuries of distinct aesthetics disrespectfully clotted in a magnificent triumph of architectural philistinism. A city of jingoist sculptures, concrete caryatids, ugly ugly ugly financial bombast, reconfiguration. A city full of parks and gardens, which have always been magic places, one of the greenest cities in the world, though it’s a very dirty shade of green –and what sort of grimy dryads does London throw up? You tell me.

It’s worth noting that not one of the authors, even those from the US, chose a US city. Certainly, I couldn’t make an argument for any of the cities I’ve lived in within its borders. Seattle is too much on the edge of now, New York and San Francisco too marked by a too recent past.

The cities for which I could make an argument are in Asia. There’s Tokyo of course with its high-tech towers, trains, and phones as well as shrines and forests for the fantasy element; rearranging the syllables gets you Kyoto, where you have a similar level of technology as well as more famous shrines and temples, most of which have been rebuilt to appear ancient. Nagasaki would be my choice for a ghost story; its violent history did not begin with the dropping of the bomb.

Moving on to the mainland, Kuala Lumpur could be supported as a spec-fic city for similar reasons: there are the tremendous heights of the Petronas Towers and the rain forest of Bukit Nanas. In Cambodia, Siem Reap has its proximity to the ruins of a lost civilization, which presents all kinds of story possibilities; the ever-present tourists, and the contrast between their lifestyles and the lives of the local residents provide for the possibility of sub-plots addressing social inequality.

As settings for speculative fiction, however, all of these pale in comparison to Shanghai. The obvious SF zone is Pudong with its glistening skyscrapers and the retro-future Oriental Pearl Tower. Across the Huangpu (and who knows what creatures might rise from that river, resulting perhaps from experiments conducted by the naval ships that pass?), towers behind the old colonial buildings of the Bund appear to have been fitted with lasers. Contrasting the lives of migrant workers and residents of Shanghai’s older districts with these glistening futurismic areas provides the same sort of opportunity for addressing social inequality that I mentioned in Siem Reap, only it is heightened by the general dystopian air created by the PRC‘s authoritarian government. Moreover, like so many of these other cities, Shanghai possesses the temples and shrines that can serve as entrances for powerful and fantastic entities.