Imagining Urban Futures: Cities In Science Fiction And What We Might Learn From Them

IMAGINING URBAN FUTURES IMAGINING URBAN FUTURES CITIES IN SCIENCE FICTION AND WHAT WE MIGHT LEARN FROM THEM CARL ABBOTT WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT Wesleyan University Press Middletown CT 06459 www.wesleyan.edu/wespress © 2016 Carl Abbott All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Designed by April Leidig Typeset in Whitman by Copperline Book Services Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8195-7671-2 Ebook ISBN: 978-0-8195-7672-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request. 5 4 3 2 1 Cover photo: Shutterstock. Image ID: 367966991. © Antiv. CONTENTS vii 1 Acknowledgments INTRODUCTION 19 ONE 45 TWO 71 THREE 93 FOUR Techno City; or, Dude, Where’s My Aircar? Machines for Breathing Migratory Cities Utopia with Walls: The Carceral City 119 FIVE 143 SIX 171 SEVEN 191 EIGHT 221 AFTERWORD 233 Notes 247 Notes on Sources 255 Index Crabgrass Chaos Soylent Green Is People! Varieties of Urban Crisis Keep Out, You Idiots! The Deserted City Market and Mosaic Cities That Will Work ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I like cities large and small—a good thing, since I’ve been studying and writing about their history for over forty years—while recognizing the challenges that urbanization and urban life can present. In a previous book called Frontiers Past and Future: Science Fiction and the American West, I explored the ways in which American science fiction has adapted the different narratives that we have used to understand the Englishspeaking conquest and settlement of North America. This book is the complement and companion piece, an exploration of ways in which science fiction utilizes the stories that we tell about the mature societies and cultures that cities embody. I have received feedback from the Chicago Urban History Seminar held at the Chicago Historical Society. The Alternate Realities reading group at Portland State University, organized by Annabelle Dolidon and including Tony Wolk and Grace Dillon, has helped me think about different ways to approach speculative fiction. I also received welcome comments and advice from science fiction scholars Carol McGuirk and Rob Latham, historian Robert Fishman, and an outside reader for the Wesleyan University Press. A portion of the introduction appeared in the online journal Deletions and a portion of chapter 3 in the online magazine Clarkesworld. IMAGINING URBAN FUTURES Winner of an Academy Award for special effects, the 1951 film When Worlds Collide is one of the most striking early examples of the disaster movie in which an external force lays low the cities of the Earth, in this case leaving only a handful of earthlings to escape in a highly streamlined rocket ship. Courtesy Paramount Pictures / Photofest © Paramount Pictures. INTRODUCTION Nothing says trouble like a city smashed to smithereens on screen. Meteors and earthquakes, tsunamis and glaciers, earthly monsters and alien invaders—moviegoers might think that the only thing science fiction does with cities is demolish them with big-budget special effects. Giant waves crash over New York in Deluge (1933) and When Worlds Collide (1951), an asteroid pulverizes it in Deep Impact (1998), and ice crushes it in The Day after Tomorrow (2004). Everyone knows that the star of Godzilla: King of Monsters (1956) has it in for Tokyo. Los Angeles takes hits in Earthquake (1974) and Independence Day (1996), whose flying saucer bad guys also take out New York, Washington, and Paris, itself soon reobliterated in Armageddon (1998). Not to be outdone, screenwriters for 2012 (2009) devised a plane