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.

However, many with limited reading experience of dystopia mistakenly conclude that such dire scenarios must somehow constitute predictions of what tomorrow will be like, or, worse yet, the author’s sordid dream of a better world, and immediately dismiss them as being “difficult” or “too negative.” I know I’ve heard them complain. Where are the desires Marco Polo speaks of, then? they would ask.

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four may well be at the source of the above misconceptions, as the book tends to be regarded nowadays as nearly prophetic in its “vision of the future.” I put these words in quotes for a reason. Above all else, the dystopia of Nineteen Eighty-Four is a reflection, however distorted, of Orwell’s own time. This is an idea hinted at even in the novel’s title, obtained by reversing the final two digits of the year the book was finished—1948. In the book, Orwell expresses his concerns about the apathy of British society, while his mustachioed Big Brother is a dead ringer for dictator Josef Stalin.

Of course, the widespread (and still extant) notion from the days of Gernsback that science fiction exists to foretell the future also had a helping hand in it. Granted, those were educated guesses that were advanced, but they were still guesses and, in the wider realm of probability, virtually as accurate as any other prediction. No matter how hard people try to look into the future, their knowledge and intellects are still grounded in the present; and although they can pretend to, they really can’t describe what they don’t already know. It was Francis Bacon who wrote that “books must follow sciences” and not the other way around. Not that books have much choice in that regard, really.

With the decline of Amazing Stories and the rise of Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds, speculative fiction shifted its focus from guesses about the future to a critique of the present and a more earnest contemplation of humanity. And so the mostly escapist fantasies about the far-flung future gave way to darker cautions against impending catastrophe. Not surprisingly then, speculative fiction has since seen more hells than it has heavens, peaking with the pessimistic rule of cyberpunk in the 1980s.

A few years before the New Wave emerged, Tolkien’s brand of fairy-tale fantasy took up the mantle of utopia. If the “perfect world” didn’t lie in a future that was surely hopeless, then it had to dwell in a romanticized version of the past, where doubt could be conveniently sidestepped for the mere sake of vacuous entertainment. Not exactly a new concept, this sort of (pseudo-) historical retreat that most high fantasy inspires, but it didn’t gain true momentum until the largely reassuring and uncomplicated Lord of the Rings trilogy was released in the United States after a tepid UK reception.

Given the choice between a commodified heaven and a provocative hell, it’s not hard to imagine where the general audience flocked to. Sadly, there’s a large number of readers who are reluctant to take risks, to stray from the beaten path. People like to be told what they want to hear, not have their assumptions continuously questioned, and it didn’t take long before the public started demanding more—more of the same. Naturally, publishers were happy to oblige.

Despite the different settings and casts of characters, the underlying archetypes for these stories remain basically the same. Each is a copy of a copy of a copy, and in spite of ever-increasing glitz, audiences keep getting treated to the lowest common denominator. This fiction hasn’t evolved like the rest of literature, because you can stray only so much from established formulas. “Expect poison from the standing water,” goes one of my favorite Proverbs of Hell. The chief casualty of the advance of commodified “sci-fi” and fantasy upon mass culture is, therefore, in the Department of Imagination. If things keep up like this, the color of the future will be gray.

Publishing houses, being businesses, merely seek to maximize their profit margins. If I’m allowed to play the Devil’s advocate for a second, I can only say it would be naïve to expect otherwise. Not only that, we’ve already seen a handful of independent presses–key elements in the democratization of print publishing—do an admirable job at injecting quality imaginative literature into the vaster world. What independent presses may lack is reach, but the internet has so far been a helpful and reliable aid in the promotion and distribution of their books.

It’s not for lack of good writers either, as Fantastic Metropolis aims to demonstrate. From the very start in the October of 2001, when Gabe Chouinard founded the site after tossing a few ideas around in his high-voltage “Dislocated Fictions” column, we have been trying to oppose the constant barrage of mediocre and platitudinous sf by telling the world about talented people who tend to be overlooked, or not enough admired, by readers at large.

These are writers who like to leave no stone unturned (and unthrown) in their fiction, fiction that is relevant to our present, even though, as in Calvino’s cities, the thread of their discourse may seem secret. These writers enjoy questioning everything, sometimes even the way stories should be told. They revel in exploration, not exploitation.

Gabe thought of calling this bunch the “Next Wave” but, quite honestly, I don’t think good writers come in waves, and it would be a shame if they were only revealed that way. There’s always someone walking the alleyways of obscurity, someone who does not and will not conform, and who has a good story waiting to be told.

Some of these authors gladly agreed to partner with Fantastic Metropolis, and were brave enough to take risks. They allowed us to run their stories and essays without asking for anything in return. In time, other people joined the project, for no incentive other than a desire to help. We could scarcely believe our eyes—Fantastic Metropolis was up and running, subsisting on people’s goodwill alone.

However, the site almost perished, barely two months after it launched, when several events conspired to force Gabe away from the internet (and, consequently, Fantastic Metropolis). Gabe announced the end of Fantastic Metropolis, and news of its impending demise was already spreading across the internet when I decided to send out a call for help getting the site back, not wanting to see that much hard work go to waste.

Several people replied. Of these, three joined me at the helm of Fantastic Metropolis, all with extensive editorial experience: Jeff VanderMeer, Zoran Živković, and none other than Michael Moorcock himself. Shortly afterwards, Paul Witcover came aboard, another experienced editor who until then had been ahead of Time Warner’s now extinct iPublish imprint; and later L. Timmel Duchamp, who is a discerning critic as well as an exceptional writer.

The courage, sympathy and generosity—not to mention the talent—of all Fantastic Metropolis contributors demanded a reward, and that was how plans for this anthology first came to be. The royalties of Breaking Windows will revert to the authors, while another small share will go to supporting the site and forthcoming FM-related projects. Unfortunately, there are space restrictions and only a handful of people made it into this book, although I hope future anthologies will right this enforced injustice.

As you probably know by now, the entire contents of the Breaking Windows anthology are available for perusal at the site, and so I’m inclined to regard this book as an experiment of sorts, an attempt to determine what sort of impact free online texts have on print publication sales. We are by no means the first to attempt it, although Prime Books should nonetheless be praised for their unwavering commitment to making this book available. Cory Doctorow has recently published Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which can also be obtained via free download, and Eric Flint’s Baen Free Library site has been going for a couple of years now, with astonishing results.

There has been a lot of heated argument on the subject in the past, especially surrounding Harlan Ellison’s famous KICK Internet Piracy campaign. I must make it clear that Fantastic Metropolis in no way condones the illegal distribution of creative works, whatever the medium, but on the other hand I’m not entirely convinced that consequences are as damaging as many claim them to be. Public libraries, friends borrowing books, and people trying out novels at bookshops before they decide on a purchase, all these can be equally harmful. Quite the contrary, I believe the effects may even be positive, as exposure garnered by online works can help offset the handicap of obscurity. I know I’m not alone feeling this way, otherwise Fantastic Metropolis would have never gone past being a castle in the air.

In the end, it’s up to you, the reader, to prove us right or wrong in this matter. I hope that, whatever your choice, you enjoy your stay at Fantastic Metropolis.

Luís Rodrigues
Lisbon, Portugal
February 2003

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Breaking Windows: A Fantastic Metropolis Sampler is available from Prime Books in hardcover and trade paperback.