Читать книгу Imagining Urban Futures - Carl Abbott - Страница 10
ОглавлениеCHAPTER TWO
MACHINES FOR BREATHING
South Colony was arranged like a wheel. The administration building was the hub; tunnels ran out from it in all directions and buildings were placed over them…. Each was a hemispherical bubble of silicone plastic, processed from the soil of Mars and blown on the spot.—Robert Heinlein, Red Planet (1949)
“More money, more freedom, more air.”—Total Recall (1990)
Deep Space Nine is a space station. Hovering over the planet Bajor, it monitors wormhole access to the Gamma Quadrant. It’s a trade and diplomatic outpost with a permanent population of perhaps three hundred, augmented periodically by individual visitors and transients. Its population embraces multiple races—humans, Ferengi, Klingons, Bajorans—but the feel is small town. There is only one bar, after all, where everyone runs into everyone else.
Babylon 5 is another space station, floating in isolation at the intersection of translightspeed travel corridors. It is also a city—a place that is big, dense, and full of different sorts of people. Like Deep Space Nine, it has identifiable boundaries—it’s a big metal container in the middle of nothingness—but Bab 5 is larger by three orders of magnitude. Its six levels teem with 100,000 humans and 150,000 members of other species. Interior spaces are specialized into residential neighborhoods and economic districts. A big bustling business district—the Zocalo—occupies part of Red Sector. Facilities range from baseball diamond to casino to courtrooms to factories and machine shops. There are officials, well-accounted citizens, a militant labor union, refugees, and an urban underclass in the partly finished Downbelow, where thieves and gangsters run a thriving black market and illicit businesses. On Deep Space Nine, Constable Odo can pretty well keep tabs on every resident. On Babylon 5, security chief Michael Garibaldi is constantly surprised by new faces, new problems, new gangs, new conspiracies.
Silhouetted in the vastness of space, the space habitat city Babylon 5 sits astride interstellar trade routes that bring it residents and representatives from multiple species and worlds. Tensions between its human majority and its diverse communities model the conflicts of a cosmopolitan crossroads city like fifteenth-century Venice or twenty-first-century London. Courtesy Warner Bros. Television/Photofest © Warner Bros. Television.
These imagined megastructures are the settings for two of the most popular—and simultaneously broadcast—science fiction television series of the late twentieth century. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which aired 174 episodes from 1993 to 1999, was a spinoff from Star Trek: The Next Generation with some secondary crossover characters. Babylon 5 aired 115 episodes from 1994 to 1998. Both shows regularly make lists of the best examples of science fiction TV.
Analogies from the history of the American West help to point out why one of the space stations is a city and the other is not. A good match for Deep Space Nine is Fort Vancouver, the Hudson’s Bay Company headquarters on the Columbia River from 1825 to 1846. It was a trading node with multiple peoples—Scots, French Canadians, Métis, Iroquois, Crees, Hawaiians—but only a few hundred in total. Boss John McLoughlin could take in the single stockaded fort with a glance.
If Fort Vancouver was a tenuous extension of empire, San Francisco during the gold rush and after was another Babylon 5—big, brawling, barely able to hold on to middle-class respectability. It had its Zocalo along Market Street and Union Square, its Downbelow vice district in the Barbary Coast. San Francisco’s population skyrocketed from a handful in 1847 to 57,000 by 1870 and 149,000 by 1880. It was a city of immigrants from Australia, South America, China, Europe, and the eastern United States—not so exotic a mix as at Babylon 5, but as disparate as you were likely to get in the nineteenth century.
Babylon 5 is a vast machine by definition. It is an enormously complex assemblage whose parts all have to work together, from power sources to airlocks, from ventilation systems to docking bays. But then, every city is a physical machine designed to sustain its residents. Into my house in Portland come water, natural gas, electricity, cable TV signals, Internet data to let me check on San Francisco’s early population, bags of groceries, books, and a bunch of other stuff. Out goes water down drains and toilets; heat through my dryer vent and open windows (in summer) and poorly sealed cracks (in winter); solid unneeded objects to recycling containers and trash can; books back to my local library branch; and phone messages back to the world through nearby (and unpopular) cell towers. Multiply my house eight hundred thousand times for my midsize metro area, add millions of square feet of retail and office space, schools, fire stations, and museums, and then add some more—the roads, bridges, rail lines, conduits, pipes, wires, cables, drains, sewers, elevators, and broadcasting towers that hold it all together. Any city is a huge interlinked object, a three-dimensional artifact that reaches above and below the level ground. It is both a vast abstract sculpture and a machine for living.
Cities full of aircars and slidewalks are close cousins of mundane cities with current pieces of technology extrapolated to support story lines. Superhigh cities of soaring towers extrapolate technologies like elevators and steel frame construction that have been available for 130 years. With space station cities, and domed habitats on airless worlds, and cities that float in air or water, and cities that pave over entire planets, something different is involved. Now the entire city with its overwhelming physical mass and form is the new technology that changes the ways that people can live. In short, the reimagined city itself is the new techno feat.
This chapter explores a particular type of city-machine whose fundamental imperative is to maintain and protect breathable atmosphere. A space station is, among other things, a sealed container of air maintained at pressure, humidity, and chemical composition appropriate for human beings. The science fiction future is filled, as well, with buried cities and domed cities that maintain usable air on moons and planets where a natural atmosphere is absent or deadly. “Dome breach!” is one of the most common and useful crises in the science fiction repertoire—after all, humans can live weeks without food and days without water, but only minutes without air.
Techno cities revolve around the promise of new products and technologies that will change everyday life. Bubble cities rely on the potential of engineering for their very existence, assuming the possibility of scaling up construction technologies by orders of magnitude; but they also raise the specter of fragility. First settlements in tunnels and domes are as vulnerable as isolated Massachusetts towns in King Philip’s War or as tenuous as a mining town in avalanche country. Overgrown supercities depend on so many interacting systems that a single breakdown can trigger multiple failures and disaster.
BUBBLES IN THE SKY
“Pa had sent me out to get an extra pail of air.” In 1951, Fritz Leiber opened the classic short story “A Pail of Air” with an irresistible hook that inverts the bucolic image of Jack and Jill. Leiber imagines Earth adrift from the sun and so cold that the atmosphere has frozen out into a layered snow of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and oxygen. A solitary family huddles in an empty city inside a nest built from rugs and blankets, thawing buckets of frozen air to survive. The planet, in effect, has become a great space station with the conservation of breathable air as the purpose of rudimentary engineering. The fact that the family turns out not to be sole survivors doesn’t undercut the impact of imagining air itself as a commodity that requires elaborate care.
Leiber’s story directs our attention away from pipes and wires to the most fundamental technological imperative of spaceships and space stations—the value of breathable air. In a throwaway line, Linda Nagata in “Nahiku West” (2012) touches on the essence of orbiting cities as machines for breathing. She posits a space station city that orbits the sun just inside the orbit of Venus and notes that “most of the celestial cities restrict the height and weight of residents to minimize the consumption of volatiles” (544). The prime engineering directive for cities in empty space, on airless moons, and on planets with unbreathable atmosphere is to encapsulate living space in a way that absolutely delimits in-here from out-there. No terrestrial walled city—not Rome or Constantinople, Toledo or Tallinn—has been as completely separated from its surroundings as Babylon 5 or Nahiku West.
Pell Station in C. J. Cherryh’s Hugo-winning novel Downbelow Station (1981) is a city comparable to Babylon 5. It is big, tightly packed, most definitely bounded, full of diverse races, social classes, and districts, and several generations old. Like other gigantic space stations, it is literally machine as city. It is also the major crossroads of the space lanes. It is the first station outward from Earth where major interstellar trading routes converge. Forty merchant ships are docked when the story opens. With access to in-system mines and to agriculture and mining on the planet that it orbits, Pell is also the key source of supply for a rogue fleet of warships that ostensibly are part of Earth forces but which operate as pirates. Here is Admiral Mazian speaking to his fleet captains: “Look at the map, old friends, look at it again. Here … here is a world. Pell. And does a power survive without it. What is Earth … but that? You have your choice here: follow what may be Company’s orders, or we hold here, gather resources, take action” (242).
Pell is city-size. Cherryh does not specify its population, but two other stations recently destroyed in the ongoing Union-Company war had twenty-five thousand to thirty thousand each. When Pell has to absorb six thousand refugees, it needs to relocate only a small portion of its population. When the refugees come in, there are one thousand units available in guest housing and two thousand more available by emergency conversion of space. Another five hundred units will be available in 180 days through further space conversion. At three persons per unit, Pell could likely absorb more than ten thousand newcomers with social disruption but no serious stress on its basic systems; indeed, it absorbs nine thousand more refugees during the few weeks of the story. At that same time, Mazian’s fleet is requiring new IDS for all the refugees. So far, says a fleet official, “we’ve identified and carded 14,947 individuals as of this morning” (423). The process will take two more weeks, implying that fifteen thousand is a minority. Seventy years later the population of Pell Station and its dependent planet has grown to roughly half a million, according to a follow-on novel, Regenesis, so we can assume a city-station population of one hundred thousand or more at the time of Downbelow Station.
As the population implies, Pell is physically extensive and complex enough that few residents know all its sections and corridors. They need street signs and color-coded corridors. Captain Signy Mallory, the fleet officer who has taken temporary control, orders all the signage removed. Station official Damon Konstantin complains,
“The station is too confusing—even residents could get lost … without our color keys …”
“So in my ship, Mr. Konstantin, we don’t mark corridors for intruders.”
“We have children on this station. Without the colors.”
“They can learn,” she said. “And the signs all come off.” (255–57)
Pell station has the multiple economic functions of a city. All its sectors have retailing: There are “a score of bars and entertainment concessions along green dock and the niner access which had once thrived in the traffic of merchanters … a line of sleepovers and vid theaters and lounges and restaurants and one anomalous chapel completing the row” (433). When levels 5–9 on orange and yellow sectors are displaced, the result is “dockside shops, homes, four thousand people crowded elsewhere” (30). Two distinct working classes maintain Pell City. One of the characters gets assigned work on a salvage line, along with other human workers, taking apart worn equipment by hand and sorting parts for reuse. A social notch below, filling the role of the noncitizen proletariat, are nonhuman hisa from “downbelow” on Pell planet. They live in the maintenance tunnels and do the essential scut work that keeps the station alive.
Pell has persisted for at least two centuries with increasing independence. Seven generations of the Konstantin family have served—dominated—Pell administration as something like hereditary bureaucrats: “The Konstantins had built Pell; were scientists and miners, builders and holders” (50), and they are a powerful voice in the elected governing council. The station is theoretically subject to the control of the Company from distant Earth but effectively operates independently, a status that is confirmed at the end of the wartime crisis that drives the narrative. Pell had been evolving its own way, neither Union nor Company, with its own political values that its leaders try desperately to preserve. At the end of the book, Pell has ridden out a crisis that has nearly cracked it open to space when “a whole dock breached, air rushing out the umbilicals, pressure dropped … troopers who had been on the deck, dead and drifting…. The dock was void” (401–2). As the stationcity avoids being ripped apart like earlier victims of the war, the newly formed Merchanters Alliance claims Pell as neutral territory, effectively making it an independent city state, and people begin to talk about “citizens of Pell.”1
WILL WORK FOR AIR
New Klondike, as its name implies, is a boom town on the Martian prospecting frontier. The treasure this time is alien fossils, not gold, but New Klondike shares many of the traits of instant towns on the North American or Australian mining frontier. Featured in Robert Sawyer’s Red Planet Blues (2013), New Klondike is jerry-built and already shabby: “The fused-regolith streets were cracked, buildings—and not just the ones in the old shantytown—were in disrepair, and the seedy bars and brothels were full of thugs and con artists, the destitute and the dejected” (9). Because the location is Mars rather than the Yukon, however, there is one major difference: it lies under a transparent dome that is four miles across and twenty meters high at its center. Public utilities include “air-processing facilities” as well as water and sewage treatment plants. And air is the most precious of the utilities. The private investigator who narrates the story offers a tongue-in-cheek take on noir fiction: “On the way to the place, I passed several panhandlers, one of whom had a sign that said, ‘Will work for air.’ The cops didn’t kick those who were in arrears in their life-support tax payments out of the dome—Slapcoff Industries still had a reputation to maintain on Earth—but if you rented or had a mortgage, you’d be evicted onto the street” (32).
As New Klondike suggests, space station cities have planet-based cousins. Science fiction could scarcely survive without its hundreds or thousands of air-protecting cities built under domes, under transparent tents, buried under the surface of moons and planets. The most basic job of these cities as physical constructions is to encapsulate breathable air at breathable pressure. Residents must always be on guard for breaks and blowouts that vent the usable air, void the pressure, or perhaps let in the poisonous atmosphere that has been swirling outside. These are cities protected from the vertical dimension—from meteors, from poisonous gases, or from vacuum that stretches upward to infinity.
Air is the one unregulated and unmetered input into our ordinary urban ecology. It is just there. It is not piped and monitored like water, nor packaged and vended like food and fuel. It is just there as we go about our lives—sometimes dry and sometimes rainy, sometimes smoggy, sometimes crisp and clear after a weather front has swept through. It can do violence when stirred into tornadoes and hurricanes, but usually we notice only its attributes—it’s too hot, too cold, too wet. To imagine air requiring technological intervention is a disquieting novum. Science fiction readers may be so accustomed to domed and buried cities that they scarcely notice, but the idea is actually startling, just as Fritz Leiber points out with the very title of his story.
Consider the dual role of air in the film Total Recall (1990). Mars is a mining colony controlled by a corporation directed by the creepy Vilos Colhaagen, who squeezes his workers by charging for the very air they breathe. When Douglas Quaid, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, arrives on the planet, workers are being driven to revolt as the price of air keeps rising: “More Freedom! More Air!” At the same time, the half-buried, half-domed city is terribly fragile. Quaid’s arrival on Mars triggers a shoot-up in the arrivals hall that shatters a window and creates a blowout that sweeps people outside—very exciting and very dangerous, although we wonder who would design such a brittle dome, not to mention being stupid enough to arm guards with projectile weapons.
Writers have converged on consensus architecture for the stages of settlement on airless worlds. Allen Steele in Lunar Descent (1991) describes the moon early in the colonization process. Moon miners live in a single company town constructed from a bunch of “low, square and rectangular monocreete buildings clustered together under bulldozed soil, interconnected by subterranean tunnels and above ground crosswalks” (53). The mess hall / meeting hall has a couple of deeply recessed windows onto the drab moonscape, but the workers live inside under a layer of regolith or outside in pressure suits. Larry Niven set his SF detective novel The Patchwork Girl (1980) on the moon at a later stage of development, but the city is still buried under “rock and moondust piled high atop it for meteor protection” (15). The top level has windows, however, enabling an assassin to attempt murder by targeting a victim in his room with a powerful laser aimed from outside, setting up a reverse locked-room mystery. As lunar settlement continues to mature, we may find the characters living on the surface under a dome, as in the opening of Anniversary Day (2001), a recent entry in Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “Retrieval Artist” series about a science fiction detective in Armstrong City: “Bartholomew Nyquist parked his aircar in one of the hoverlots at the end of the neighborhood. The Dome was dark this morning, even though someone should have started the Dome Daylight program. Maybe they had, deciding that Armstrong was in for a ‘cloudy’ day—terminology he never entirely understood, given that the Moon had no clouds and most people who lived here had been born on the Moon and had never seen a cloud in their entire lives” (15).
The consensus sequence is similar for Mars. South Colony in Robert Heinlein’s classic Red Planet (1949) has a population of a few hundred pioneers, living in double-layered plastic domes connected by tunnels. Arthur C. Clarke’s first published novel, The Sands of Mars (1951), is set sometime in the 1990s in Port Lowell, the largest city on Mars, with two thousand people. Lowellites live inside six nearly invisible plastic domes (the largest half a kilometer across) held up by internal air pressure and intertied by tunnels. Under the domes are “uniform metal houses and a few public buildings” giving the appearance “more of a military camp than a city.” Oxygen is extracted from the oxidized red Martian soil. Residents practice blow-out drills with the goal of getting to cover inside a sealable building within ten seconds.
Heinlein’s and Clarke’s colonists are in the first decade of settlement, but Greg Bear’s Moving Mars (1993) is set on a substantially developed planet in the year 2171. Residents still live underground, but with large domes over the central spaces. Off to the edges of the university, for example, is a maze of old tunnels: “Forty orbits ago—over seventy-five terrestrial years—these tunnels had connected several small pioneer stations. We filed past warrens once used by the earliest families, dark and bitterly cold, kept pressurized in reserve only for dire emergencies” (8). Now Martians live in domed trench complexes, well protected but still vulnerable to pressure-loss accidents and power failures leading to oxygen deprivation and recycler failures. When political crisis explodes, “the white walls and pressure arches [of the new Mars capital] stood out against the ochre and red all around, a beacon for assault” (367)—although it will prove to survive.
Descriptions of cities are secondary in Bear’s narrative, but they are central to Kim Stanley Robinson’s intentions in his trilogy about the terraforming of Mars. He opens the first volume, Red Mars (1993), with a civic festival celebrating Nicosia, the planet’s first fully surface city, coming seventy-five years after initial settlement. “The first town of any size to be built freestanding on the Martian surface; all the buildings were set inside what was in effect an immense clear tent, supported by a nearly invisible frame.” The town is a large triangle on a slope (great views!) with seven radiating avenues and low buildings in Fauvist hues. Its five thousand residents have already divided into ethnic neighborhoods. The air has enough oxygen and weight that the city does not have to be fully sealed, but the atmosphere is still so thin and cold that one cannot survive for long outside without protective suits. “After all those years in Underhill it was hard to grasp…. We’re out of our holes, Maya, we’re on the surface at last” (4–6, 19).
Decades earlier in Robinson’s planetary epic, Martian settlement had started with an expedition camp of modules scattered on the surface, such as might be found in Antarctica or Greenland. Soon Underhill is built as a permanent underground habitat. A double glass dome holds the pressure and keeps out ultraviolet radiation, roofing over a central atrium, with underground rooms branching off. “The sky was a ruby color through the glass panels, and the magnesium struts gleamed like tarnished silver” (163). Settlers built other habitats also largely underground, but with gradually increasing exposure, such as a set of rooms dug into the side of a thirty-meter trench, with three levels of stacked rooms faced with glass, and reflective material on the other side of the trench to direct sunlight. Then the increasingly confident Martians scaled up that model. Japanese immigrants built Senzeni Na, an industrial community at the bottom of Thaumasia Fossae’s deepest canyon. Production facilities on the canyon floor are connected by walktubes because pressure suits were still needed outside. “The town’s actual living quarters were built into the southeast wall of the canyon. A big rectangular section of the cliff had been replaced by glass; behind it was a tall open concourse, backed by five stories of terraced apartments.” The biggest and most beautiful new city is Burroughs, the de facto capital as the base of the United Nations Office of Mars Affairs. It is another cliff city, carved into a set of mesas: “Big sections of the mesas’ vertical sides had been filled by rectangles of mirrored glass, as if postmodern skyscrapers had been turned on the sides and shoved into the hills” (271).
The Martians revolt against Earth domination, UNOMA being the tool of big Earth corporations, but their cities are vulnerable to tent breach. They “lay helpless under the lasers of orbiting UNOMA police ships” (514). Refugees have crowded into Cairo, which is surrounded by UN police. “At 4:30 alarms went off all over the city. The tent had been broached, apparently catastrophically, because a sudden wind whipped west through the streets, and pressure sirens went off in every building. The electricity went off, and just that quick it went from a town to a broken shell, of running figures in walkers and helmets, all of them rushing about, crowding toward the gates, knocked down by gusts of wind and each other. Windows popped out everywhere, the air was full of clear plastic shrapnel” (529).
Heinlein, Clarke, Bear, and Robinson are all authors who respect engineering. Their Martian cities converge in appearance and structure because the logic of pressure gradients, oxygen pressure, and materials mandate a common form. Moreover, it is a form that readers with basic physics can understand, agree with, or critique. Engineering challenges and solutions are not another decorative gizmo like a bounce tube or dilating door, but rather essential background. In The Sands of Mars, for example, Clarke devoted several paragraphs to the completion of a seventh dome.
Hello, Earth. This is Martin Gibson speaking to you from Port Lowell, Mars. It’s a great day for us here. This morning the new dome was inflated and now the city’s increased its size by almost a half….
You know that it’s impossible to breathe the Martian atmosphere—it’s far too thin and contains practically no oxygen. Port Lowell, our biggest city, is built under six domes of transparent plastic held up by the pressure of the air inside—air which we can breathe comfortably though it’s still much less dense than yours.
For the last year a seventh dome has been under construction, a dome twice as big as any of the others….
Imagine a great circular space half a kilometre across, surrounded by a thick wall of glass bricks twice as high as a man. Through this wall lead the passages to the other domes, and the exits direct on to the brilliant green Martian landscape all around us….
When I entered Dome Seven yesterday, all this great circular space was covered with a thin transparent sheet fastened to the surrounding wall, and lying limp on the ground in huge folds beneath which we had to force our way…. The envelope of the dome is very strong plastic, almost perfectly transparent and quite flexible—a kind of thick cellophane. (422)
Several ensuing paragraphs describe the process of pumping in air and inflating the dome. The scene is perhaps not all that high on the sense-of-wonder scale, but Clarke knew that his own technical bent matched that of his readers.
CITIES UNDER THE SEAS
Underwater cities are the mirror image of lunar and Martian bubble cities. The basic challenge is to maintain a bubble of usable atmosphere within an environment at a different pressure. Dome breach is just as much a fear, but the problem is reversed—keeping massive overpressure at bay and preventing implosion rather than holding in air against explosive escape.
Underwater cities have seldom made for good fiction because of the storytelling problem of setting action in dark ocean depths where neither characters (nor readers/viewers) can see or move freely outside. Consider that submerged movies tend to be submarine warfare thrillers, mysterious shipwreck thrillers, or adventures revolving around alien objects that just happen to have fallen to the ocean floor. In The Abyss (1989), the best of the genre, ambience and action are dark and claustrophobic. A cinematic alternative like the cheesy Captain Nemo and the Underwater City (1969) offers implausibly cheerful interiors and no gestures to technical verisimilitude.
A pulp writer’s favorite option was to ignore science in favor of a mythical Venus with warm seas and networks of underwater cities. Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore in Fury, originally serialized in Astounding in 1947, posited a set of undersea Venusburgs: “The Earth is long dead, blasted apart, and the human survivors who settled on Venus live in huge citadels beneath the Venusian seas in an atrophying, class-ridden society ruled by the Immortals—genetic mutations who live a thousand years or more.” The domes themselves, both beneath the waters and covering newer colonies on land, are made from “impervium.” What a handy material that is, excusing the authors from actually thinking through the engineering problems so they can focus the plot on tensions and conflicts within the ruling class. Nevertheless, impervium makes the machines for breathing possible: “Now he stood on the land of Venus, with a transparent impervium dome catching rainbows wherever the fugitive sun broke through the cloud blanket…. The free air of Venus was short on oxygen and long on carbon dioxide; it was breathable, but not vintage atmosphere…. Here, under the dome, the atmospheric ingredients were carefully balanced. Necessary, of course—just as the impervium shell itself seemed necessary against the fecund insanity that teemed the Venusian lands” (93).
Isaac Asimov left only part of his science at the door when he wrote for the juvenile market as Paul French, describing an entire network of fifty undersea cities in Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus (1954). Because the atmosphere contains no oxygen, Venusians make the planet livable by using electrolysis to oxygenate their bubble cities. Rather than Kuttner’s implausible mile-deep citadels, these lie just below the ocean surface so their tops nearly break into the sky at low tide. The dome is two-layered, with carbon dioxide sandwiched in between to absorb shocks. Honeycomb structures between the layers minimize danger, and internal barriers can shut off different sections of the city in case of breach (the first half of the book centers on threatened sabotage). This said, however, the domes themselves are made from a handy super-duper plastic called transite, which is completely insoluble, doesn’t etch, won’t change chemically in reaction with the ocean, and never gets encrusted with slime or Venusian barnacle equivalents. Moreover, the domes are actually supported by power beams that are, explains a city official, “diamagnetic force fields in steel housings. It looks as though steel beams are supporting the dome, but that’s not so. Steel just isn’t strong enough. It’s the force fields that do it” (58).
Maureen McHugh in Half the Day Is Night (1994) made a much more serious stab at imagining underwater cities, in this case a set of cities two hundred meters under the Caribbean that constitute the nation of Caribe. The plot itself—a story of two innocent individuals who slowly realize that they have been caught up in political and corporate maneuvers and scheme to escape—does not require the undersea setting. Much of the action occurs in the boardrooms, cheap hotels, and mean streets that are the familiar settings of noir and thriller fiction. Submarines rather than ferries connect the cities, buses operate on city streets, including the Caribe equivalent of Kenyan matatu and similar vehicles of the third-world poor. The ethnicity of the French Vietnamese and Chinese American protagonists contrasts with the darker-skinned Haitians of Caribe, paralleling the plot tension of individuals from the global North caught up in problems of the global South that drives many stories of intrigue, from Graham Greene novels to the 1982 film The Year of Living Dangerously.
Nevertheless, McHugh refrains from introducing impervium or transite or diamagnetic force fields and pays particular attention to the problems of temperature and air. She never describes the domes or containment systems themselves, but the ambient cold of the deep ocean overburdens heating systems and renders the cities always chill. Only a handful of construction workers and fish jockeys work in the sea outside, taking drugs to speed their metabolism and eating vast piles of carbohydrates to survive the cold. Inside, pressure variations between upper and lower levels affect the composition and quality of the atmosphere. The rich get clean, dry air. The poor on the lower levels breathe damp, oxygen-poor air laden with odors and pollutants because recirculation systems are ill-maintained. Open fires are illegal, a stricture violated in poor districts, but richer residents still drive cars with internal combustion engines. Air is not yet metered like water and power, notes one resident, but the implication hovers that Caribe is not that far removed from New Klondike.
SUPERSIZE US
In 1974, author and editor Frederik Pohl had a brief conversation with New York mayor John Lindsay about whether the city was governable (Lindsay thought that the basic problem was not enough tax revenue). The next year Pohl published The Years of the City, five chronologically sequential novellas about the future of New York. The unifying concern is the problem of governance as the changing cast of characters deal with labor union power and racketeering, political corruption, and changing legal systems.
In the third novella, “The Blister,” Manhattan is being enclosed under one large dome up from the Battery to Canal Street and another over the middle of the island, with a smaller dome to connect them, making a sort of lopsided dumbbell shape like “two humps on a camel, the tall igloo one down around lower Manhattan, the lower connecting bridge from Canal Street to the twenties, the big elongated one covering midtown and Central Park” (177). Pohl might have been drawing on Buckminster Fuller’s 1969 proposal for a dome covering Twenty-Second Street to Sixty-Fourth Street, river to river.2 In line with New York’s tradition of work in high steel, the domes are a network of girders and cables holding plastic panels. The engineers use peripheral skyscrapers as anchors, some of which have to be sheared off to fit the slope. It will not be a Martian-style bubble tent but rather a gigantic cousin of a geodesic dome, although with hexagonal instead of triangular panels.
Pohl never explains why it is necessary or desirable for the Big Apple to become the Big Blister. He refers briefly to creating an enclosed, relatively self-sustaining system—garbage will be recycled rather than barged and dumped at sea, gas-powered cars will be replaced, there will be more recycling of materials—but in the next story the barges are still at work. The dome is periodically vented to get rid of radon, but readers otherwise do not know how air circulates. The dome does allow climate control within the range of 15–28 Celsius, perhaps the reason that a city like Tucson followed with its own smaller “thermal dome.” In the fourth and fifth sections, the existence of the dome is background (it allows for exciting but illegal hang gliding, for example).
A few years after Pohl imagined the evolution of New York, C. J. Cherryh took on the same task in “Highliner,” one of six stories about the distant future of earthbound cities collected and published as Sunfall (1981). Her New York is a superhigh, ever-growing pyramid whose “single spire aimed at the clouds, concave-curved from sprawling base to needle heights” (106). The city is constantly expanding, building and rebuilding its burdened foundations, pushing higher, adding space to intermediate levels. Smaller suburban towers cluster around it, metropolis and mountain range at the same time.
Both authors are careful to undercut the impressions of grandeur that their megastructures might evoke. Pohl’s city is socially messy, with a touch of political repression. His protagonist in “Blister” is an ordinary worker who helps to assemble the great dome. Cherryh’s city is an ultimately futile effort on a dying planet with a fading sun. Like Pohl, she centers her story on the city’s “highliners,” the skilled specialists who risk their lives to inspect and repair the exterior of the tower while dangling from flimsy ropes and harnesses. Her basic plot is routine—workers unite to resist corrupt corporations—but the name of the central character, John Tallfeather, recalls the Mohawk Indians who worked skyscraper construction in twentieth-century New York. With both stories, readers get indirect answers to the questions in Bertolt Brecht’s poem “A Worker Reads History,” which asks “Who built the seven gates of Thebes? … In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished, where did the masons go?”
Cherryh’s future New York is a mighty and monstrous artifact, but it has nothing on Isaac Asimov’s definitive supersized city. Eager readers who bought the first volume of Asimov’s Foundation for its cover art when it appeared in book form in 1951 might have expected, from the lines of rocket ships swirling toward the center of a vast galaxy, to plunge immediately into a space battle or an expedition to alien worlds. Instead they found themselves on the very strange planet Trantor … and in the world-encompassing imperial city of Trantor.
Asimov’s readers were visitors in the ultimate covered city. It’s big, with a population of forty-five billion, many of them administrators who manage the affairs of the twelve-thousand-year Galactic Reich. The city covers all seventy-five million square miles of the planet’s land surface and creeps out onto the continental shelves. Only occasional parks and the imperial palace offer touches of green to relieve Trantor’s metallic gray. Nearly everyone lives underground. Asimov introduces the city by tracing newcomer Gaal Dornick’s breakneck trip from spaceport to hotel in an air taxi that plunges into a high wall “riddled with holes that were the mouths of tunnels” and flies on through blackness “with nothing but the past-flashing of a colored signal light to relieve the gloom” (8). When he wakes the next day, he cannot tell day from night, for “all the planet seemed to live beneath metal” (9). Trantoropolis extends only a few hundred feet above the surface but reaches a mile belowground. From an infrequently used viewing tower Gaal “could see no horizon other than that of metal against sky, stretching out to almost uniform grayness … all the busy traffic of billions of men were going on, he knew, beneath the metal skin of the world” (11). In follow-on books, as the atmosphere deteriorates, Trantorians erect domes to cover their surface buildings in addition to carrying on their lives in the climate-controlled underground.3
Trantor is a long way in time and space from New York, but Pohl and Asimov shared the same impulse to imagine a city as a stupendous engineering project. There is no apparent reason to dome over New York—the ambient atmosphere is quite breathable—but it is definitely an intriguingly futuristic idea that assumes the ability to consume impressive volumes of resources. To imagine Trantor is to take this sort of fascination with the sheer physicality of future cities to its extreme, and also to put their operating systems front and center in the same way as in air-bubble cities, although again there is really no practical reason offered for the gee-whiz gigantism. A world-encompassing city makes extreme demands on the urban metabolism—the importation of the food, fuel, and materials that keep it functioning and the elimination of waste products ranging from excess heat to garbage. Trantor gets its power from the temperature difference between the surface and the deep planetary interior. It depends on the agricultural production of twenty-four planets in the same way that Rome depended on grain from North Africa, wine from Greece, and olive oil from Spain—one of the many parallels to the history of Rome on which Asimov built his galactic history.
Trantor is an ultimate entry in the reimagination of cities along the horizontal plane that began in the later nineteenth century, when the spread of railroads and streetcars broke the physical limits of cities based on walking. Not long after Arturo Soria y Mata imagined a single linear city stretching between opposite corners of Europe, Patrick Geddes, in 1915, coined “conurbation” to describe the growing together of previously distinct cities in industrial regions like the Ruhr and the English Midlands. The U.S. Census tried to give bureaucratic precision to the idea by defining “metropolitan districts” in 1920 and “metropolitan areas” in 1940 to encompass cities and increasingly sprawling suburbs in a single unit. Jean Gottmann simply took the effort another step in arguing that the entire northeastern United States from Boston to Washington functioned as a single “megalopolis”—a concept quickly adapted in Japan as megaroporisu for the Taiheiyo Belt along the southeast-facing coast of Honshu. It got new life in the twenty-first century as “megaregion” in the United States and “mega-urban region” in China.4
Megalopolis is an easy transfer to science fiction, offering writers a quick way give a sense of verisimilitude to their near-future settings. Much of the action in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) takes place in “BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis” (57). The Judge Dredd comics, published since 1977, take place in the twenty-second century in Mega-City One, which extends roughly from Florida to Ontario (or is it Georgia to Montreal—consistency not being a strong point over decades of comic books) with somewhere between one hundred million and eight hundred million residents (ditto). However, fiction has struggled to out-extrapolate mundane planning discourse, especially the work of the enthusiastic Greek planner Constantinos Doxiadis, who envisioned Ecumenopolis—a single supercity that might extend its ten drils across entire continents. Assuming a planetary population of forty or fifty billion, he projected from metropolis to megalopolis to world city in an essay on “Ecumenopolis: Tomorrow’s City”:
