by Ken Liu
Baltimore could exist without Philadelphia, Nagoya without Kobe, Portland without Seattle. The closest we have come in North America is the relationship Los Angeles and Las Vegas, which boomed in the later twentieth century as, in essence, a specialized recreational annex of LA separated by a hefty chunk of desert.
Another comparison are the “global cities” described by sociologist Saskia Sassen. She argues that the global economy has produced an interchangeable elite of corporate managers and financiers who inhabit the most expensive apartments and prestigious office buildings in New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Dubai and move with complete ease from one place to the next. Their “upper city” (think Metropolis here) is effectively a single place that happens to be distributed among several continents, given that the highest level .001 percent are at home anyplace their expensive wants and tastes can be satisfied. An example in contemporary fiction is the twenty-eight-year-old protagonist in Don Delillo’s aptly titled Cosmopolis, an asset manager who spends the novel in a limousine between his Manhattan apartment and a haircutting salon while running a bet against the yen.
In urban theory circles, interest in distributed cities comes in part from concerns about urban survivability in the face of disasters like Hurricane Katrina and anticipation of the long term crisis of climate change. In response, a few planners have begun to explore the creation of resilient cities through massive decentralization that goes many steps beyond classic suburbanization. This is not nostalgic, anti-urban back-to-the-land thinking of the sort that permeates much of American culture and some of its science fiction (like Clifford Simak’s City). It is about using the power of long-distance communication to create new urban forms.
The government of Scotland offers an example. A report by Design Innovation Scotland recently offered up the idea of distributed city as a new way to think about regional economic development. The report calls it an “imagined city” in which enterprises and communities across a large region (it suggests the Highlands and Islands) are linked laterally into a functioning whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Thinking in these terms, the Scottish planners see a distributed city as a way in which “apparently disparate resources—intellectual, physical, social and material—can be usefully related to one another to create motivational, distributed enterprises within a regional ecology of cultural and economic activities.” The economic development jargon from Edinburgh bureaucrats is a bit painful to read, but the idea is there.
Because the term is still in the process of settling firmly into urban planning, there are some alternative applications for “distributed city” that emphasize devolution from large-scale metropolitan systems to small-scale and localized planning. Australian environmentalist and “green urbanist” Peter Newman argues for a model of distributed cities in which energy systems, utilities, and transportation have been decentralized to avoid disastrous system-wide crashes—an idea that Stan Robinson embodied in Pacific Edge nearly a quarter century ago. Michael Blowfield and Leo Johnson in the brand new book Turnaround Challenge: Business and the City of the Future use “distributed city” to emphasize the importance of scattered, small-scale innovation nodes that can network from places as different as Nairobi and Austin. It is an appealing idea in its own right, but Cory Doctorow stole their thunder with his depiction of the New Work in Makers (2009).
We can understand the more radical sort of distributed city by revisiting Terminal World, where Reynolds contrasts the Swarm with Spearpoint, a vast towering city in the shape of a tapering cone that is home to 30 million people. Fifteen leagues across at its base, it narrows to one-third league across at fifty leagues above the ground and keeps rising into the vacuum.
Spearpoint represents the much more common science fiction type of the city as megastructure—the Urban Monads in Robert Silverberg’s The World Inside, the self-contained moving cities in Greg Bear, Strength of Stones, or the huge block of Todos Santos in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Oath of Fealty (1981), which is a single arcology a thousand feet high and two miles on a side with enough floor area to overlay the entire five boroughs of New York.
Where these writers were imagining the ultimate coalescence of high-rise Manhattan or Chicago into a single accreted super-structure, the distributed city offers a sharp contrast with some new and innovative ways to think about urban futures in science fiction as well as urban planning.
Distributed cities do the science fiction work of upsetting the image and reality of cities as vast, fixed agglomerations that grow higher and wider as time passes. They embody the ability of science fiction to challenge basic economic and social assumptions.
The antecedent of the radically distributed city is a brief theoretical speculation by the early Soviet sociologist and planner Mikhail Okhitovich, who wrote in opposition to high modernist theorists of the high-rise city like Le Corbusier.
Associated with the radical Soviet architects of the Constructivism movement, Okhitovich in 1929 published a short article on “The Problem of the City” that proclaimed the idea of “disurbanism.” With modern technology, he said, the new socialist society would not have to crowd together in the centralized capitalism city. His alternative was the Red City of the Planet of Communism—perhaps envisioned for Earth or perhaps as a socialist utopia for Mars in the tradition of Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star (1908).
The new city would be structured by social relations rather than territory, he argued, and the different functions of a city no longer needed to exist in one physical place. Instead, he wrote, “the whole world is at our service.” He envisioned overlapping activity waves of greater and lesser intensity that would span the planet, sometimes overlapping and reinforcing to create a network of urban nodes that together constituted urban society.
Okhitovich himself ran afoul of Joseph Stalin and was executed in a gulag in 1937, plunging his ideas into official disrepute. Architectural historians in the 1980s resurfaced his work along with other advocates of the radical Soviet architectural theories of Constructivism. His ideas now make it into blogs on architecture and utopias.
The distributed cities that are now appearing in science fiction, with their indirect debt to Okhitovich, have yet to settle into a standard pattern. In a simple example, Iain M. Banks in Surface Detail uses the term “distributed city” for a set of supersized high-rise structures scattered over a planetary surface. It is as if the suburban “edge city” nodes described by journalist Joel Garreau were uprooted from their locations outside Washington and Houston and plopped randomly across a much wider landscape.
Jay Lake takes an opposite tack in imagining a distributed “Cascadiopolis” in the near-future Pacific Northwest. His story “Forests of the Night” appears in the original anthology Metatropolis. The stories from other contributors such as Tobias Bucknell and editor John Scalzi take place in recognizable extrapolations of regular cities like Detroit and St. Louis, and their plots revolve around the classic tension between privilege and powerlessness in urban centers and peripheries.
Lake, in contrast, imagines an alternative city that weaves its way through the forests and mountains of the Cascade Range in the Pacific Northwest. His city consists of a networked set of isolated enclaves that look individually like forest compounds but together amount so something much more. As he said in a recent email, “it’s not like I had a map or anything. Just visualizing a distributed, zero-footprint city environment spread out through lava tubes, tree platforms and low-impact temporary surface structures.”
The refugee fleet that comes together in the re-imagined television series Battlestar Galactica is also a distributed city. It consists of several dozen physically distinct and sometimes quite distant units. Because series continuity was not always great, the number of ships at different times and in different episodes ranged variously around several dozen. There are big “neighborhoods” like Galactica with more than 2500 people and smaller ships with populations in the mid-hundreds. The tot
al population of this discontinuous settlement totals just about 50,000, the size of a small city like Binghamton, New York or Grand Junction, Colorado.
Like cities with neighborhoods and districts, the fleet’s individual ships specialize in particular activities that together make up a functioning city. There are cargo ships, mining ships (Monarch), industrial ships like the tylium refinery ship Daru Mozu, a hospital ship (Rising Star), a prison ship (Astral Queen), residential ships like Cloud Nine, a government center on Colonial One, and, of course, military ships like Galactica.
They function together, exchanging personnel and residents, sometimes shifting functions, and battling over politics. The fleet lacks the permanence of a real city, but for a few brief years it amounts to a city parceled out among vast reaches of space.
These are innovative ways to think about cities, which have always been grounded in very specific locales, but there is a precedent from 2450 years ago, as recounted from the Greek-Persian wars. William Adama had an ancestor in Themistocles, also the captain of a distributed city-fleet standing against the overwhelming might of an implacable enemy.
Here is what Herodotus reported about debates among the Greek leaders after Athens had fallen to the invaders:
When Themistocles thus spoke, the Corinthian Adeimantos inveighed against him for the second time, bidding him to be silent because he had no native land, and urging Eurybiades not to put to the vote the proposal of one who was a citizen of no city; for he said that Themistocles might bring opinions before the council if he could show a city belonging to him, but otherwise not. This objection he made against him because Athens had been taken and was held by the enemy. Then Themistocles said many evil things of him and of the Corinthians both, and declared also that he himself and his countrymen had in truth a city and a land larger than that of the Corinthians, so long as they had two hundred ships fully manned.
A distributed city highlights interrelations among the different parts of a great city—their simultaneous specialization and interaction. It also requires flexibility that is the opposite of a vast, stable arcology. A distributed city can grow by accretion and shrink by secession, like the Galactica fleet. Half a century ago, urban planner Melvin Webber proposed that the increasing power of communication technologies would allow “communities without propinquity.” Webber was thinking of the loosened constraints of geography within metropolitan areas, but his idea of a “non-place urban realm” is excellent shorthand for distributed cities envisioned on much vaster scales. Planners and theorists are still coming to grips with the possibilities, and imaginative writers have an open invitation to step in and help.
About the Author
Carl Abbott has taught urban studies and planning at Portland State University in five decades (not fifty years!). His interest in science fiction began with reading Rocket Ship Galileo in fourth grade and the much scarier Star Man’s Son: 2050 A.D. in fifth grade. He has since written Frontiers Past and Future: Science Fiction and the American West (2006) and published several articles about science fiction in history and urban planning journals as well as in Science Fiction Studies, on topics as diverse Jack London, Kim Stanley Robinson, and cyberpunk cities. His current project is tentatively titled Science Fiction Cities: Seven Ways We Image the Urban Future.
Driving through a Cloud with Pat Cadigan
Jeremy L. C. Jones
Used to be that Pat Cadigan could “do anything in five thousand words or less,” but these days she’s running a little long. Her stories are bumping up closer to ten thousand. Not much else has changed. Her work remains relentlessly unpredictable, and simultaneously forward-looking and retro-flective.
It’s been easiest for critics, reviewers, and fans to label Cadigan a cyberpunk writer and then offer a variety of caveats. Indeed, she has written and continues to write about the many and varied intersections of technology and biology, but once you try to put Cadigan in a category you rapidly find more exceptions to than confirmations of the rule.
Cadigan is driven to write.
“The same thing that compels me to live [compels me to write],” she said. “It’s just what I do, and I’m always doing it, even if I’m not at the keyboard.”
There is often an undercurrent of dark humor and the looming shadow of dark past in her fiction; occasionally there’s even nagging feeling that someone is pulling one over on you while also being deadly serious.
Cadigan can dodge any bullet the future fires at humankind, it seems. She speculates around corners and sees into the shadows of even the darkest possibilities. Her vision of tomorrow is kaleidoscopic.
Author of the novels Mindplayers, Synners, and Fools, as well as numerous stories and novellas, Cadigan has been nominated numerous times for the Hugo but it wasn’t until this year that she finally won the award, along with the Locus Award for the novelette “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi.” Orbiting Jupiter, humans opt to surgical modify themselves to be like marine lifeforms such as octopuses. She recently released a holiday story, “The Christmas Show.” Additionally, “Chalk,” tells a story of two friends who a private place to be creative away from the prying eyes of adults only to discover magic.
What do these stories all have common beyond their author? They’re all different.
Is there ever a limit to the “exciting possibilities and dangerously unpredictable” aspects of writing?
The only limits are those the writer sets, either consciously or unconsciously. I am primarily a fiction writer but twenty years ago, I ran away with a carnival sideshow so I could write an article about it for Omni magazine. Well, I didn’t really run away. I had been GOH at a convention in Calgary, Alberta, and they brought in Scott McClelland’s Carnival Diablo to perform. It was wonderful. After the performance, I got to know Scott and the other performer Ryan Madden and we kept in touch.
Later that year, the sideshow had some dates to play in British Columbia and I decided that it would make a great article. So I pitched it to then-editor-in-chief Keith Ferrell, who gave me the go-ahead and I traveled with Scott and Ryan and Julianne Manchur who had joined the show. It was a total departure for me. Travelling through the Canadian Rockies in a van in December can be exhilarating but it can also be scary. I remember when we drove through a cloud—we were high up and the clouds were that low. I’d thought it would be like driving through a patch of fog but it was decidedly different. It wasn’t an easy trip but I’d do it again in a heartbeat.
I’ve since written two nonfiction books—I lucked into an assignment to write the book about the making of the Lost In Space movie in 1997 and I was able to write it because I’d learned how to write nonfiction with Carnival Diablo. The next year, Universal re-made The Mummy and I was lucky enough to write the making-of book for that one, too. After the book came out, Mike Resnick told me I had done a very good job. I felt like I’d gotten an Olympic medal; Mike has traveled extensively in Africa and has forgotten more about Egypt than I’ll ever learn.
And just FYI: I was in my mid-to-late forties when I took on those making-of assignments. You don’t have to be a young person to try something new.
Are there any stories in which you feel as though you got it “wrong” or took a misstep? And, conversely, what are some of the stories that helped you turn corners or take leaps forward? And why?
Well, I had to make a late correction in the galleys of my first novel, Mindplayers. When I started the novel, there was no way to signal someone who was in the middle of REM sleep, to tell them they were dreaming, without waking them up. By the time I turned the novel in, a method had been developed to do that, so a person could receive a low-level stimulus to tell them they were dreaming, so they could dream lucidly—i.e., they know they’re dreaming and they take charge of the action. I had to change that part of the novel in which I stated it wasn’t possible.
Conversely, Synners isn’t as science-fictional as it used to be. Some of the technology is now possible. The technology that isn’t possibl
e has not been proved to be impossible yet.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on the novel based on/inspired by/taking off from “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out For Sushi,” working title: See You When You Get There. I also have several other novels simmering on the back-burner as well.
Without getting into content, how are you moving from “The Girl-Thing” to See You When? Are you adding on, launching off, what?
“Girl-Thing” will not be part of the novel, which occurs a few hundred years after.
How has it challenged you so far?
I’ve had to learn even more nuts-and-bolts about the solar system, interplanetary travel, habitats in space, and all kinds of other stuff I won’t go into right now because I don’t want to spoil the surprise.
How much of what you do just happens and how much is planned out beforehand?
That depends on what I’m working on. Sometimes an idea arrives whole; other times I have to write my way through it and keep slogging. When I work at novel-length, I always have a roadmap—I know where I’m starting out from and where I want to go, and I know the major milestones I’ll hit in between. But it’s not so mapped out that there won’t be surprises. I like to leave room for spontaneous combustion/generation, not to mention the occasional detour/side-trip/scenic overlook.
You’ve been doing this now for a good while, has your process changed much? If so, how?
I’ve been a professional writer for thirty-four years; for the first thirty-three, I simply wrote whenever, however I could. These days, I lounge on the sofa with my iPad and my Bluetooth keyboard, often with the cat curled up on my lap and music playing. I start early in the morning and go until I’m dry. At some point in the late afternoon, I put on the TV, even if I’m still working. As the quintessential American teenager, I did all my homework in front of the TV and I still do.