Fantastic Metropolis

With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire, or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made up of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, its rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

—Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

The urban landscape has featured prominently in some of the best and most provocative literature of our time. Seldom has the metropolis lent itself to escapist fantasies—which so far have been mostly at home in settings like the idyllic countryside where hobbits frolic, or the pleasantly uncomplicated small town where everybody knows everybody. Not without reason. Cities are complex, sometimes inescapable beasts; each an unpredictable, unknowable, unique matrix of humanity and architecture, as much flesh and blood as it is steel and concrete. These are places of discovery, man-made mysteries deceptively familiar to their citizens, but full of both wonderful and terrible promise in the tourist’s eye. They are the primary symbols of human civilization, where the paths of many different cultures intersect.

But the modern city can also be an ecological blight, and its streets witness to innumerable social injustices, even as glistening skyscrapers reach for the heavens. “I hate them because they are destructive of nature and man; I love them because they work,” writes Frederik Pohl about cities. This ambiguous relationship between man and metropolis can naturally be extended to technology. Gone are the Golden Age of science fiction and its promoters’ naïve faith in progress, something the dreadful culmination of WWII did much to shatter. Speculative fiction now regards humanity’s dependence on machines with a much healthier distrust, and so the adoption of dystopia as the setting of choice for most of today’s sf was a quick and natural one.

Utopia (a word commonly used to describe what should really be termed eutopia) is a dead city, all potential for change drowned in dreary regulations, desire smothered by the sagging bulk of conformism. To achieve utopia is to reach the dead end of our dreams, and to describe one often means engaging in moral or ideological exposition where many embarrassing questions are conveniently left without answer (not the least of all, how to get there).

In Invisible Cities, Marco Polo tells the Khan about Beersheba, a city of gold that has an exact counterpart built with refuse. Even seemingly paradisiacal settings all have their Epsilon Minuses. Remember the utopian plans for society proposed by H.G. Wells later in life, and how much they shared with the nightmare social order brought on by the Third Reich. As João Barreiros puts it, “Cat heaven is the sparrow’s hell.” Utopias fail even as hypothetic models because they can’t acknowledge this Achilles’ heel; it would defeat their intent if they ever did.

So, the perfect world being but an indistinct mirage, it’s much more effective to describe what it should not be.

For these reasons, and others, dystopia stands as a much more alluring background for subversive literature. Dystopia practically shouts for revolution, something which good speculative fiction is always more than willing to dispense. This is where one of the prime goals of good sf can be fully realized, where it can be truly allowed to shine: to challenge, relentlessly, and throw rocks at the windows of the world. In the introduction to his nonfiction collection, The Detached Retina, Brian Aldiss concludes by paraphrasing Descartes: “We doubt, therefore we are.” I couldn’t agree more.