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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 English-speaking 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.