Cityscapes of the Future: Urban Spaces in Science Fiction 2017057290, 9789004361300, 9789004361317

Table of contents :
Cityscapes of the Future: Urban Spaces in Science Fiction
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
Part 1: The City and the Body
Urban Twinship: The Body of the Futuristic City in Jeff VanderMeer’s Veniss Underground
Past Future Cityscapes: Narratives of the Post-Human in Post-Urban Environments
Architecture of Punishment: Dystopian Cities Marking the Body
Part 2: Cities of Estrangement
Time Travel, Dystopia, and the Manhattan Skyscraper in George Allan England’s The Last New Yorkers and Murray Leinster’s “The Runaway Skyscraper”
Wires are the New Filth: The Rebirth of Dickens’ London in Cyberspace
City of Lights No More: Dystopian Paris in French Science Fiction
Spatiality in the Cyber-World of William Gibson
Part 3: Cities of Imagination
“Divided Against Itself”: Dual Urban Chronotopes
Experiencing the Cityscapes and Rural Landscapes as ‘Citizens’ of The Hunger Games Storyworld
‘Final Men’, Racialised Fears & the Control of Monstrous Cityscapes in Post-Apocalyptic Hollywood Films
Imagination Reloaded: Transfiguring Urban Space into Virtual Space in the TV Series Caprica
The Dame Wore Skyscrapers: The Science-fictional City as a Detective Story
Index

Citation preview

Cityscapes of the Future

Consciousness, Literature and the Arts General Editor Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe (University of Lincoln, uk) Editorial Board Anna Bonshek (Prana World Group, Australia) Per Brask (University of Winnipeg, Canada) John Danvers (University of Plymouth, uk) Amy Ione (Diatrope Institute, Berkeley, usa) Michael Mangan (Loughborough University, uk) Jade Rosina McCutcheon (Melbourne University, Australia) Gregory Tague (St Francis College, New York, usa) Arthur Versluis (Michigan State University, usa) Christopher Webster (Aberystwyth University, uk) Ralph Yarrow (University of East Anglia, uk)

volume 53

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/cla

Cityscapes of the Future Urban Spaces in Science Fiction Edited by

Yael Maurer Meyrav Koren-Kuik

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: pixabay.com. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov lc record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2017057290

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1573-2193 isbn 978-90-04-36130-0 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-36131-7 (e-book) Copyright 2018 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgements VII Notes on Contributors VIII Introduction 1 Meyrav Koren-Kuik and Yael Maurer

Part 1 The City and the Body Urban Twinship: The Body of the Futuristic City in Jeff VanderMeer’s Veniss Underground 13 Inbar Kaminsky Past Future Cityscapes: Narratives of the Post-Human in Post-Urban Environments 28 Eduardo Barros-Grela Architecture of Punishment: Dystopian Cities Marking the Body 49 Elsa Bouet

Part 2 Cities of Estrangement Time Travel, Dystopia, and the Manhattan Skyscraper in George Allan England’s The Last New Yorkers and Murray Leinster’s “The Runaway Skyscraper” 69 Rosalind Fursland Wires are the New Filth: The Rebirth of Dickens’ London in Cyberspace 87 Keith Daniel Harris City of Lights No More: Dystopian Paris in French Science Fiction 102 Henri-Simon Blanc-Hoang

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Spatiality in the Cyber-World of William Gibson 120 Imola Bülgözdi

Part 3 Cities of Imagination “Divided Against Itself”: Dual Urban Chronotopes 139 Elana Gomel Experiencing the Cityscapes and Rural Landscapes as ‘Citizens’ of The Hunger Games Storyworld 151 Natalie Krikowa ‘Final Men’, Racialised Fears & the Control of Monstrous Cityscapes in Post-Apocalyptic Hollywood Films 168 Glen Donnar Imagination Reloaded: Transfiguring Urban Space into Virtual Space in the tv Series Caprica 186 Torsten Caeners The Dame Wore Skyscrapers: The Science-fictional City as a Detective Story 206 Shawn Edrei Index 219

Acknowledgements First and foremost, we want to express our deepest gratitude to all our contributors for being a part of this project and composing the interesting and insightful chapters of this volume. Your diligence and patience are truly appreciated. We would like to thank our very tolerant and very kind editor Professor Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe; the completion of this collection would have been impossible without your continued support and understanding. We are also indebted to Dr Christa Stevens at Brill | Rodopi for her invaluable help in making this collection of essays a reality. Our heartfelt appreciation goes to Professor Elana Gomel for contributing a chapter to this volume, and for being an inspiration for many academic endeavours past, present and future. Last but not least, we would like to acknowledge our colleague, Shawn Edrei, who has been instrumental in the early stages of this project.

Notes on Contributors Henri-Simon Blanc-Hoang holds a PhD from the University of Florida. He has been a regular contributor for the “World Film Locations” book series since 2012. In 2014, his chapter on masculinity in Spanish cinema appeared in Collapse, Catastrophe and Rediscovery: Spain’s Cultural Panorama in the 21st Century (Cambridge Scholars Publishing); and his essay on nationalism in French graphic novels during the Cold War became the first chapter of the Comics as History, Comics as Literature anthology (Rowman & Littlefield). In 2015, his chapter on graphic novels about the Camino de Santiago was published as part of the “Routledge Studies in Religion, Travel & Tourism” collection: The Camino de Santiago in the 21st Century: Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Global Views. In 2016 Blanc-Hoàng contributed a chapter for the anthology entitled French Cinema and the Great War: Remembrance and Representation (Rowman & Littlefield). P ­ resently, Blanc-Hoang is working on several entries for the next edition of The New ­Encyclopedia of French Cinema. Elsa Bouet received her PhD in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Her ­thesis, entitled “Hitting the Wall: Dystopian Metaphors of Ideology in Science Fiction”, focused on the tensions between ideology and utopia surrounding the image of the wall in dystopian science fiction. Her forthcoming publications include articles on the intersection of the Gothic and utopia, and further analysis of China Miéville’s fiction. Imola Bulgozdi is an assistant professor teaching American literature, gender and cultural studies at the University of Debrecen, Hungary. She specialises in the cultural embedding of the creative process of Southern women writers, also branching off to the comparative analysis of Southern novels and their film adaptations. Her recent publications include “Myths of Youth and Gendered Ageing in ­August: Osage County by Tracy Letts” (albeit. 2016) and “Girls in Search of a ­Viable Identity in Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples” (Critical Insights: American Short Story, 2015). Her other publications include: “Some Genetics are Passed on Via the Soul’: The Curious Case of Susan Sto-Helit” (Gender Forum, 2015), “Artificial Intelligence and Gender Performativity in William Gibson’s Idoru” (Navigating Cybercultures, 2013) and “Knowledge and Masculinity: Male Archetypes in Fahrenheit 451” (Critical Insights: Fahrenheit 451, 2013).

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Torsten Caeners studied British and American Literature and Culture as well as Computational Linguistics at the University of Duisburg, Germany. He completed his PhD in 2010 with a thesis investigating the application of poetic writing for psychoanalytical treatment in the context of post-structuralist literary and cultural theory. He is currently a senior lecturer at the University of DuisburgEssen. His teaching and research focuses on popular culture, cultural criticism through film and tv, and contemporary literary and cultural theory. Among other things, Torsten has published on poetry (Tennyson, Seamus Heaney and Douglas Dunn), memory and memory work, Heroes and Battlestar Galactica. Glen Donnar is a Lecturer in the School of Media and Communication at rmit University in Melbourne, Australia. He has published diversely on stardom, celebrity and popular cultural representations of masculinities, monstrosity and disaster in film and television, including on 9/11 and the Great Recession in action, horror and post-apocalyptic film. He has also written on the mediation of terror in news media and the ethics of news viewership. Shawn Edrei completed his doctoral thesis at Tel-Aviv University, and continues to pursue research in the field of interactive narratology and digital humanities. An avid gamer and observer of online fandom dynamics, Shawn has also recently ­published his first collection of short stories, Visits to Aisling Glen. Rosalind Fursland has been studying for a PhD in English Literature at the University of Birmingham and is due to complete in 2017. Her main area of exploration traces the intermingling of everyday theatricality with urban reality and the emergence of representations of the city as stage-like following the escalation of m ­ odernity from the early twentieth century. She focuses on the distinct districts of Greenwich Village, Harlem and the Lower East Side and primarily incorporates literature, as well as elements of the magazine culture, cinema, theatre, visual art, photography and music. She is particularly interested in works by writers including Djuna Barnes, Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, Anzia Yezierska and Michael Gold. Eduardo Barros-Grela is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at A Coruna University (Spain), he teaches American Studies and Cultural Studies. He is interested in

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inorganic bodies and spaces, visual studies, and the dialectics of representation and performance. Recent publications include studies of violence in the areas of American Studies, and contemporary film and literature (“Bullying Bullies. Narratives of Territoriality in American Popular Culture”, in Changes in Bullying in Pop Culture, 2015, and “Space and Children in Post-apocalyptic Film. The Road and Les Temps du Loup”, in The Child in Post-Apocalyptic Cinema, 2015). Elana Gomel is an Associate Professor at the Department of English and American ­Studies at Tel-Aviv University. She has taught and researched at Princeton, Stanford, University of Hong Kong, and Venice International University. She is the author of six books and numerous articles on subjects such as postmodernism, narrative theory, science fiction, Dickens, and Victorian culture. Her latest books are Narrative Space and Time: Representing Impossible Topologies in Literature (Routledge 2014) and Science Fiction, Alien Encounters, and the Ethics of Posthumanism: Beyond the Golden Rule (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2014). She is currently working on a project about history and zombies. Keith Daniel Harris is a research assistant at Tel Aviv University in the Department of Zoology. Keith received a ba/BSc in English Literature (magna cum laude) and Biology from Tel Aviv University in 2012, and is currently working towards a PhD in Zoology, and an ma in English Literature. For the past four years he taught an academic writing course for ba students at the Department of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University. His research interests include: the evolution of chemical signaling in the brain, posthumanism and the narratological aspects of fictional world construction. Inbar Kaminsky holds a PhD in English and American Studies Department (Tel Aviv University). Her research interests are narrative theory, Jewish studies, American studies, body theory, urban studies, speculative fiction and film adaptation. She has contributed essays to Philip Roth Studies about Operation Shylock (2012) and Nemesis (2014). Her essay about George MacDonald’s Lilith was published in North Wind: A Journal of MacDonald Studies (2017). She contributed several articles to edited collections, among which: Michael Chabon’s America: Magical Words, Secret Worlds, and Sacred Spaces (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014); Critical Reflections on Audience and Narrativity (Ibidem-Verlag, 2014); The Male Body in Medicine and Literature (Liverpool up, forthcoming 2017); New Women’s

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­Writing: Contexting Fiction, Poetry and Philosophy (Cambridge Scholars, forthcoming 2017). Natalie Krikowa holds a Doctor of Creative Arts in Media, Screenwriting and Cultural Studies from the University of Technology Sydney. She currently teaches in the School of Communication at the University of Technology Sydney. In addition to this she works as the Creative Director of Zenowa Media, writing and producing media works including The Newtown Girls (2015). Natalie researches and teaches in digital media and media cultures, screenwriting (particularly transmedia and multiplatform), genre studies (with a focus on science fiction and fantasy), audience engagement (including participatory culture and fan culture), and Australian cultural histories of lesbian and queer media.

Introduction Meyrav Koren-Kuik and Yael Maurer Cityscapes of the Future: Urban Spaces in Science Fiction examines representations of science fictional cityscapes in literature, film, television shows, video games and anime, by employing an interdisciplinary critical approach. It reiterates the fascination with urban spaces as they are reconfigured and reimagined in the science fictional mode. The chapters in this collection examine the intersection of the city and the body, engage with existing cities such as New York and Paris in their estranged forms within speculative narratives, and look at formulations of imaginary urban spaces. The cities discussed in this collection are actants in the narrative, ‘bodies’ and networks of connections, which become a nexus of socio-political and socio-cultural malaise. This collection addresses the increasing interest in both urban spatiality and science fiction within critical discourse and popular culture. Cityscapes are frequently at the heart of science fiction narratives, and often serve as a catalyst for the exploration of binary relationships such as human/ alien, real/virtual, past/future, biology/technology and self/other. For example, in Clifford Simak’s novel City (1952), the continued existence of humanity depends upon their symbiotic relationship with their cities; the Wachowski’s film series The Matrix (1999–2003) pits the city of Zion against its titular virtual counterpart, and Wadjet Eye Games’ Primordia creates a contrast between the supposed utopia of Metropole and the wasteland surrounding it. In science fiction, the exploration of these dichotomies is often done by eliciting a sense of estrangement, which in turn generates a feel of both fascination and alienation in an audience. In visual culture this sense of fascination and alienation often materialises through the connection between socio-cultural currents and the urban. A futuristic depiction of technological culture and urbanity was produced as early as 1927 in Fritz Lang’s epic science fiction masterpiece Metropolis. The modernist epistemology of fragmentation receives a cultural turn in the techno-dystopic settings of the film, and clearly mirrors the undercurrents of political anxiety during the days of the Weimar Republic in Germany. Metropolis marks the point at which the technological-urban became a staple of the collective visual imagination. In his exploration of the cultural significance of the cityscape in Blade Runner as a postmodern global mélange, David Harvey writes:

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004361317_002

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above the scenes of street-level and interior chaos and decay, there soars a high-tech world of zooming transporters, of advertisement, of familiar images of corporate power … The city streets are full of all sorts of people … A “city-speak” language has emerged, … The image of decay everywhere in the landscape reinforce exactly that same structure of feeling. The sense of shattering and fragmentation in social life is highlighted. harvey 2008: 310–311

The modernist sense of personal fragmentation which is projected into, as well as mirrored by, urban space becomes a global-scale symptom, drowning any echoes of the self and of the real by way of simulacra. More recently, this type of cultural-urban dynamics found its way into small-screen productions in series such as Defiance (Syfy: 2013), and The Expanse (Syfy: 2015), where the scale of urban spatiality extends beyond the global and into galactic space. In Defiance, the same postmodern sense of chaotic pastiche which exists in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner is recreated by multiple species of aliens inhabiting Earth alongside humans. This blend of invading cultures, which inevitably leads to aggravated tensions, is depicted against the background of the dystopic ruins of St. Louis, Missouri, with its iconic Gateway Arch. In The Expanse, cityscapes in space are commonplace, and the layered urban cultural dynamic works in much the same way (both thematically and visually) as it does in Blade Runner. The metropolitan space has been a defining feature of modernity. As Gyan Prakash reminds us in Noir Urbanisms, technological innovations impact the cityscape, shaping it as a utopian space. This utopian vision of the metropolis is undermined by the grim realities of capitalism’s oppressive forces. The “shadow” that hangs over the city as utopia is expressed by creating “dark visions of mass society forged by capitalism and technology” (2010: 3). However, as Prakash notes, these depictions “did not mean a forthright rejection of the modern metropolis but a critique of the betrayal of its utopian promise” (2010: 3). Nowhere is this critique more evident than in the science fictional narratives which this collection explores. If we return to the cultural figure most associated with the idea of the urban as a utopian space, Baudelaire’s (and Benjamin’s) flâneur, we shall see how even at its most optimistic, this figure of the idle stroller in the urban landscape foreshadows the darker elements of modernity, and more recently postmodernity, expressed in science fictional narratives. The cultural figure of the flâneur – envisioned in Walter Benjamin’s essays on French poet Charles Baudelaire – also serves as a useful introduction to the theoretical trajectory of urbanity as an imagined construct. Benjamin defines

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the flâneur as a figure who “goes botanizing on the asphalt … The street becomes a dwelling place for the flâneur; he is as much at home among house facades as a citizen is within his four walls” (2006: 68). The flâneur is primarily defined by his compulsion to explore the city, both as part of its tapestry and as an outsider; this dual perspective enables a simultaneous process of superimposing a mental projection on the ‘real’ while strolling through the streets. As such, Benjamin’s flâneur is an apt metaphor for consumers of fictional texts, who similarly project themselves into imaginary worlds and navigate them at leisure. Michel de Certeau’s “Walking in the City”, a section from his seminal work The Practice of Everyday Life, further elaborates upon the connection between cityscapes and fictionality, comparing the city itself to a story which ‘escapes’ its planned spatial character (as mapped out by architects and politicians), and thus acquires additional dimensions. By walking in the city, the walker’s body writes an urban text which he or she cannot read. De Certeau aims “to locate the practices that are foreign to the ‘geographical’ space of visual, panoptic, or theoretical constructions” and arrive at what he calls “another spatiality” which is an “‘anthropological’, poetic and mythic experience of space” (1988: 93). The city is a constantly shifting ‘text’; and by traversing it, its inhabitants create alternate discourses; what emerges is “[a] migrational, or metaphorical city” which “slips into the text of the planned and readable city” (1988: 93). In de Certeau’s terms, “the figures of pedestrian rhetoric”, or city stories, have a “mythical structure” which breaks down the totalitarian regime of a “technological system of a coherent and totalizing space” (1988: 102). They are a mythical discourse, says de Certeau “at least if one understands by ‘myth’ a discourse relative to the place/nowhere (or origin) of concrete existence” (1988: 102). In other words, these very stories of no/place, or as de Certeau puts it, of “lacking” a “proper place”, end up re-inventing space and re-telling it to create a new “urban fabric” (1988: 103). This unique “urban fabric” is what the texts explored in this collection aim to uncover. Readers of fictional texts in general and science fiction texts in particular take part in this journey in which the imagined city is constantly shifting, and by traversing the depicted space is reinvented, its stories retold. This process of conceptualising the city as a shifting text is directly linked to cognitive processes which lie at the core of the science fiction genre. In Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, Darko Suvin identifies the concept of ‘novum’ – an inherently new or innovative concept which is not native to the reader’s consensus reality – as a fundamental requirement of science fiction; an act of “cognitive innovation … deviating from the author’s and implied reader’s norm of reality” (1979: 64). Although newness can be a feature in any literary

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genre, science fiction is unique in that its novum explicitly requires a redefinition of the entire fictional ontology. For example, the sight of flying vehicles in the urban skyline may seem impossible within the context of realistic fiction, but such things are commonplace in science fictional cities. In some cases, the city itself is a novum; in Philip Reeve’s Steampunk novel Mortal Engines, moving cities act as biological entities driven by the law of “municipal Darwinism” (2012: 10), devouring each other in order to survive. If we accept Suvin’s claim that science fiction is based on “the essential tension … between the readers, representing a certain number of types of Man of our times, and the encompassing and at least equipollent Unknown or Other introduced by the novum” (1979: 64), then it is the novum which facilitates the cognitive aspect of science fiction. According to Carl Freedman, “science fiction is determined by the dialectic between estrangement and cognition. The first term refers to the creation of an alternative fictional world that, by refusing to take our mundane environment for granted, implicitly or explicitly performs an estranging critical interrogation of the latter” (2000: 16–17). In other words, what distinguishes science fiction as a genre is its ability to incorporate concepts which not only challenge the reader but may run counter to their individual perception of consensus reality. As such, the readers of science fiction narratives function as flâneurs, both detectives and strollers in the fictional space, experiencing precisely that dialectic which Freedman refers to. This exploratory phenomenon, in which the reader navigates and cognitively maps estranged cityscapes, merits further investigation particularly because of the paradigmatic shift from temporality as the focus of critical attention towards viewing spatiality as a principle of equal importance. This shift, championed by critics such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Joseph Frank, and Gaston Bachelard, has recently crystalised with the growing interest in urban studies. This reprioritization demands a closer analysis of the role of the city in science fiction narratives, not just as a blank canvas on which the author can construct a fictional world, but rather as a presence within the story that further estranges the reader’s perception of reality. Bakhtin’s concept of the ‘chronotope’, the “intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships” (2002: 15), redefined the narratological significance of spatiality. Gaston Bachelard further explored spatial conceptuality in connecting the immensity of space with the production of imagination. It can be extrapolated that Bachelard’s investigation into the immensity of the forest as a space which encourages poetic creativity is similar to the effect that city space has on the imagination – the city emerges as a “concrete forest” of winding streets and towering buildings. For Bachelard, space proposes a “dialectic of inside and outside” (1994: 85). Accordingly, in science fiction narratives urban space reflects both physical space

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and mind space, much like the representation of the urban mosaic in modernist fiction. Thus, Frank’s assertion regarding a “unified spatial apprehension” (1991: 97) applies to the representations of urbanity in science fiction as well. Cityscapes of the Future demonstrates the ways in which these Cities of the Future are viewed through multiple lenses and media: literary analysis, film and television studies, gender studies, and ludology. Featuring contributions from a multinational group of scholars from varied academic fields, with chapters ranging from Dickens’ Victorian London to China Miéville’s hybrid cities to the alien constructs of urbanity in interactive games and beyond, this collection provides a uniquely multifaceted examination of one of the more popular genres of fiction today. The chapters in this collection are organised according to a specific progression that delineates significant and central themes in the critical discussion of the city in science fiction. The first section, The City and the Body, discusses the symbiotic relationship between urbanity and the human form. Augmentation of the human body, whether technological or genetic, is a frequent feature in futuristic narratives; this change is often reflected in the cityscape. Moreover, the city itself can emerge as a ‘body’, capable of growth and functioning as a biological actant that can influence its own interactions with its inhabitants. The relationship between the human body and the city is explored in Inbar Kaminsky’s chapter “The Body of the Futuristic City: Corporeality and Urban Spaces in Jeff VanderMeer’s Veniss Underground”. The novel’s complex narration is focalised through three different protagonists, mirroring the multi-layered­ design of the city. In this environment, corporeality is no longer viewed as a desirable means of existence, and the characters constantly seek to subvert it. By tracing the characters’ disengagement from the physical body, the chapter explores the ways in which the narrative compensates for the aforementioned disparity, including the personification of the city, the formation of the posthuman, the use of decadent technology and the poetics of violence. In “Past Future Cityscapes: Narratives of the Post-Human in Post-Urban Environments”, Eduardo Barros-Grela discusses the popular Japanese anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion and Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark. Though rooted in different cultural perspectives, both narratives feature a symbiotic link between the malleable, unstable city and the characters’ ever-evolving posthuman identities. Futuristic urban spaces shift and change in tandem with the fragmented self-identity of the people found within them. Elsa Bouet further explores the connection between city and body in China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station, Alistair Reynolds’ Terminal World and Christopher Priest’s Inverted World. In her chapter “Architecture of Punishment: Dystopian Cities Marking the Body”, Bouet views these cities as both prisons and simulacra of

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the human body. This physical/physiological imprinting of urban ideology is typically countered by representations of movement, diversity and openness as potential alternatives to this dystopian environment. The second section, Cities of Estrangement, explores representations of non-fictional cities such as Paris and New York within science fiction. These well-known locations are often used as triggers for cognitive estrangement. Rosalind Fursland focuses on New York City in the chapter “Time Travel, Dystopia and the Manhattan Skyscraper”. Discussing George Allan England’s Darkness and Dawn and Murray Leinster’s “The Runaway Skyscraper”, Fursland demonstrates how both texts depict a skyscraper as a vehicle for time travel to preColumbian Manhattan or a post-apocalyptic dystopia. Fursland argues that by incorporating modern architecture within early twentieth-century time travel narratives, the skyscraper is juxtaposed with its surroundings, acting as a versatile symbol with multifaceted connotations. The skyscraper’s arrival in preColumbian Manhattan can be interpreted as an omen foretelling the rise of a civilisation, while its manifestation in post-civilisation America allows it to act as an ethereal beacon haunting the fallen masses. Keith Harris examines Charles Dickens’ London as a model for virtuality in the chapter “Wires are the New Filth: The Rebirth of Dickens’ London in Cyberspace”. By juxtaposing Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend and the Japanese anime Serial Experiments Lain, Harris posits that Dickens’ texts feature the assimilation of human subjectivity by the agency of the metropolis: the city becomes a disembodied superorganism­composed of a network of interactions between its inhabitants. Cyberspace becomes a function of this Dickensian model, in which the city’s role as actant bears specific social implications, particularly regarding the ‘cyberisation’ of the city. In “City of Lights No More: Dystopian Paris in French Science Fiction”, Henri-Simon Blanc-Hoàng adopts a multimedia approach by looking at Julien Leclercq’s film Chrysalis, Benoit Sokal’s video game Nikopol and Pierre Bordage’s podcast Chroniques des ombres to demonstrate how science fictional dystopias subject Paris to an erasure of cultural and historical identity. BlancHoàng argues that the decline of Paris in these works reflects concerns over postcolonial immigration, neo-liberal globalisation and the loss of secular values. The chapter that closes this section, Imola Bülgözdi’s “Spatiality in the Cyber-World of William Gibson”, discusses the various forms of urbanity introduced by Gibson in Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive – also known as the Sprawl Trilogy. Boston, Paris, Tokyo and London are the key settings in Gibson’s Trilogy, but the texts include an additional layer by giving each city a virtual counterpart in cyberspace. The chapter analyses Gibson’s

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use of space and waste in representing each city, and how these aspects fundamentally reveal different cultural responses to the historical and environmental aspects of cyberpunk urbanity. The final section, Cities of Imagination, focuses on wholly-fictional constructs of urban spaces. Rather than engage with existing cities which have been transformed and re-imagined in futuristic scenarios, thereby requiring near-constant comparisons between fact and fiction, these chapters address texts which establish imaginary ontologies. In the absence of the known and familiar, these imagined cities require a different process of mapping: the audience must navigate unknown territory and directly confront alien concepts and visual cues without the anchor to consensus reality. Bridging the nonfictional­and the fictional, Elana Gomel’s chapter “Divided against Itself: Dual Urban Chronotopes”, discusses the ways in which postmodern urban science fiction narratives explore these cities by transplanting topography into topology. The chapter further examines the double-layered urban chronotope in China Miéville’s The City and the City and Tim Lebbon’s Echo City. These texts present impossible cityscapes which ultimately reflect the self-contradictory nature of postmodern urban politics, in which the rise of global cities, with their exaggerated political and ethnic divisions, paradoxically threatens the very foundation of urban life: mobility and heterogeneity. Natalie Krikowa examines the future society depicted in Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games in “Experiencing the Cityscape and Rural Landscapes as ‘citizens’ of The Hunger Games Storyworld”. The novels establish two distinct and separate societies occupying the same geographical space: the rich and decadent Capitol and twelve segregated districts where the poverty-stricken citizens have little control over their lives. Krikowa examines the books, films, games and websites that have emerged in the wake of the novels’ increasing popularity, all of which expand the core narrative and provide opportunities to experience the cityscape in new and immersive ways. In his chapter “‘Final Man’, Racialised Fears and the Control of Monstrous Cityscapes in Post-Apocalyptic­Hollywood Films”, Glen Donnar explores the horrific experience of the “final man”, the lone survivor, in dystopian near-future cityscapes through a comparative analysis of three films: The World, The Flesh, and The Devil (1959), The Omega Man (1971) and I Am Legend (2007). The “final man” initially enacts the desire to control urban space. Nevertheless, the city is revealed as an ambivalent, fearful place for the film’s male protagonist: a spatial configuration which irrevocably resists any attempt to re-civilise it. Indeed, this post-apocalyptic­experience inevitably acknowledges both the blurring of the inside/outside binary and the resulting absence of control.

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The chapter “Imagination Reloaded: Transfiguring Urban Space into Virtual Space in the tv Series Caprica” by Torsten Caeners explores the relationship between real and virtual cityscapes. The chapter illustrates how urban space becomes the place of imagination in a postmodern setting, and how the city is transfigured into a virtual manifestation of imagination itself. Using Baudrillard’s notions of simulacra and simulation as well as Thomas Docherty’s concepts of postmodernity, the chapter demonstrates how urban spaces in the series, virtual and otherwise, are mutually interdependent while constantly evolving in separate ways. Concluding the collection is “The Dame Wore Skyscrapers: The Science-Fictional City as a Detective Story” by Shawn Edrei, in which the science fictional cityscape is viewed as an extradiegetic mystery constructed for the reader to solve. Edrei argues that these alien landscapes are deliberately configured to serve as ontological enigmas which the audience must decipher, using embedded clues to unravel the mystery even as the diegetic protagonists continue along the trajectory of their own plots. Thus, the reader becomes a detective, following leads and piecing together fragmented bits of background information in order to solve the mystery of how these cities came to be. It seems only fitting that we end our collection with an extended meditation on the reader as a detective figure, trying to unearth the mystery at the heart of the cityscape. The urban spaces explored in this collection, be they real or imagined are all, in some sense, enigmas to be deciphered by characters and readers alike. The science fictional mode offers the creators of the texts a chance to explore the manifold meanings of urbanity as a forever unfolding narrative. If the science fictional narrative provides the reader with an estranged version of her ‘consensus reality’ then the role of the reader/viewer/ player is to attempt to untangle what de Certeau names the “urban fabric” and negotiate the cityscape at her peril. Cityscapes have the power to baffle, fascinate and entrap the dweller and traverser. Science fiction helps us reimagine this sense of mixed wonder and terror offering a striking testament to the power of urbanity as a generator of multiple and contradictory meanings, constantly reshaping the ways we view our ever changing worlds. Bibliography Bachelard, Gaston. 1994. The Poetics of Space (tr. Maria Jolas). Boston ma: Beacon Press Books.

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Bakhtin, M.M. 2002. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics” in Narrative Dynamics, Richardson, Brian (ed.) 15–24, Columbus oh: Ohio State University Press: 15–24. Benjamin, Walter. 2006. The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Jennings, Michael W. (ed.) Cambridge ma and London: Harvard University Press. Certeau, Michel de. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. (tr. Steven Rendall). Los Angeles: University of California Press. Frank, Joseph. 1991. The Idea of Spatial Form. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Freedman, Carl. 2000. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Hanover and London: Wesleyn University Press. Harvey, David. 2008. The Condition of Postmodernity. Malden, Oxford and Carlton: Blackwell Publishing. Prakash, Gyan. (ed.). 2010. Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Reeve, Philip. 2012. Mortal Engines (Predator Cities 1). London and New York: Scholastic.

Part 1 The City and the Body

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Urban Twinship: The Body of the Futuristic City in Jeff VanderMeer’s Veniss Underground Inbar Kaminsky Abstract This chapter strives to examine the relation between the urbanite and the city he resides in and to redefine the representation of the body in futuristic urban novels by using Jeff VanderMeer’s Veniss Underground as a case study, maintaining that the representation of characters’ corporeality is inevitably entangled with the corporeality of the city. By tracing the characters’ disengagement from their physical bodies, this chapter explores the ways in which the narrative compensates for the aforementioned disparity, including the personification of the city, the formation of the post-human, the use of decadent technology and the poetics of violence. In addition, the article discusses the contribution of postmodernism to the formation of the surreal body of the city by tracing the collapse of the characterisation body from the collapse of master narratives and onto the collapse of unifying systems of meaning and understanding.

Key Terms Veniss Underground – Jeff VanderMeer – urban corporeality – doppelgänger

Perhaps we shall be able to overtake that elusive feeling of absurdity in the different but closely related worlds of intelligence, of the art of living, or of art itself. camus 1942: 18

The absurdity of death, urban life and the necessity of art are themes that reemerge throughout Veniss Underground, a futuristic urban novel that seems to constantly test the boundaries of its setting. As the plot unfolds, the multileveled city of Veniss becomes more animated than the novel’s protagonists, who roam passively through the decaying urban maze. Much like the city, the narrative itself offers a multi-level structure; focalised from the perspective of

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three different protagonists, the three parts of the novel are in the first, second, and third person narration, respectively. The first part concerns Nicholas, an aspiring Living Artist who genetically engineers grotesque creatures and hopes to become famous for it. The second part centers on Nicholas’s twin sister, Nicola, who abates her lonely nights in the arms of holograms and then one day mysteriously disappears. The third part revolves around Nicola’s saver and former lover, Shadrach, who embarks on a journey to rescue Nicola from the depths of the seedy underground maze. The city of Veniss is situated above a vast underground labyrinth of decaying spaces, aptly named Veniss Underground. Both levels of the city are examined in relation to their metaphorical function as an alternative body of the protagonists, who no longer view corporeality as a desirable means to exist and constantly seek to subvert it; whether by creating morbid creatures with patches of human organs, by surrendering to the virtual reality of holograms, or by trying to defy the imminent death of a loved one. This chapter additionaly examines the relation between the urbanite and the city he resides in and strives to redefine the representation of the body in futuristic urban novels by maintaining that the representation of the corporeality of the protagonists is inevitably entangled with the corporeality of the city. Detached from the corporeality of the human body, the protagonists often find themselves identifying and even merging with the characteristics of the city. The city, in turn, endows the protagonists with a sense of body. In other words, by tracing the characters’ disengagement from the physical body, this chapter examines the ways in which the narrative compensates for the aforementioned disparity, including the personification of the city, the temporal dimension of the city, the formation of the posthuman, the use of decadent technology and the poetics of violence. When interviewed, VanderMeer discussed the juncture between futuristic technology and human memory – “The future setting allows me to use as-yet-undeveloped technology, such as the ability to view another person’s memory, to examine what it means to be human” (Levy 2003: 60). VanderMeer elucidates this connection by posing an inherently posthuman question via his novel – “Veniss, in addition to the adventure and mystery elements, asks questions like … How does memory function? … As our memories, in a sense, become something separate from us-stored in emails and Web sites-these seem like questions worth exploring” (Levy 2003: 60). Since the storage place of emotional experiences and personal information has been ‘outsourced’ to a great extent in the digital era, its impact on human

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life is evident in Veniss Underground mostly through its aftermath – the transient status of the body. The corporeal detachment that afflicts all of the characters in the novel is the inevitable side effect of a futuristic world in which one can invent a new body and the physical form one is born into is completely reversible and temporary.

The Urban Voice(s)

One might identify a thematic significance to introducing three different types of narration in the same novel; in the case of Veniss Underground, the city of Veniss is an extension of the protagonists’ body and so, as the plot descends deeper and deeper into the underground levels of the city, the narration moves further away from the diegetic realm of the text. The underground Veniss seems to represent a dark unconscious that cannot be articulated by any characterised agent and this characteristic of underground Veniss can provide an explanation for the switch in narration – second person narration casts the diegetic presence of the protagonist into doubt and third person narration by definition represents an extra-diegetic omniscient presence. Part 1 presents the first-person narration of Nicholas, who resides on the upper level of Veniss. Accordingly, his focalisation-narration seems to remain ‘on the surface’; Nicholas’s depiction of the city is mainly concerned with its outer shell, its admittedly superficial exterior – “The city is sharp, the city is a cliché performed with cardboards and painted sparkly colors to disguise the empty centre – the hole … we started calling it Veniss – like an adder’s hiss, deadly and unpredictable” (VanderMeer 2005: 7). Part 2 introduces the second-person narration of Nicholas’ twin sister, Nicola, who also resides on the upper level of the city but is snatched by Quin’s men to the underground level of Veniss. Matt DelConte asserts in his essay, “Why You Can’t Speak: Second-Person Narration, Voice and a New Model Understanding Narrative”, that this very act of assigning second-person pronouns both impersonalises the protagonist and eliminates his temporal dimension, since the reader can be anyone, at any time – “The inclusiveness of the you pronoun lumps reader and protagonist together” (2003: 205). However, in her article, “Second-Person Narrative as a Test Case for Narratology: The Limits of Realism”, Monika Fludernik establishes a different view than that of DelConte; while DelConte asserts that the ‘you’ pronoun merges the protagonist with the reader, Fludernik points out the necessary transformation of this pronoun from general to specific in second-person narratives, which eventually does evoke the protagonist (1994: 450).

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These two diverse approaches do share some common ground; they both seem to consent to the fact that the protagonist’s materiality is cast into doubt by virtue of this unusual choice for a narrative voice. In other words, the diegetic presence of the protagonist is put into question when second-person narration is employed. It is important to note that second person narratives have always been a far less common phenomenon, in comparison to first and third person narratives. Some researchers, such as DelConte, claim that second person narration does not fit the category of narrative voice, to which first and third person narration belong (2003: 204). This shift in focus, from an authoritative narrative voice toward the underprivileged other, be it the narratee, the reader or both, inevitably calls for a different kind of protagonist, one who also implicates the reader precisely because it lacks a diegetic presence, a ‘body’. In this case, second-person narration also seems to represent a liminal stage, in between the shallow upper level of Veniss and the uncharted depths of underground levels of Veniss, which is often referred to in terms of an endless structural void, such as ‘abyss’ (VanderMeer 2005: 91). In Part 2, the upper level is still conceptualised as a mask, a superficial glitter: you stood at the window of your apartment on the seventy-fifth floor of the Barstow, staring down at the city spread out below you; multi-colored, flowing lanes of hover traffic defining the shape and height of buildings as the light fled the sky in streaks of orange and green. Here, the great, greedy glitter of the industrial sectors, there the glamorous but petit languor of the Canal District. vandermeer 2005: 26

The underground levels of Veniss are represented through the memories of Nicola’s former lover, Shadrach, who ascended to Veniss from “the darkness of Veniss Underground” (VanderMeer 2005: 44). Nicola’s feelings towards Shadrach are intermingled with his knowledge of the city –“He became familiar to you. He mastered the city” (VanderMeer 2005: 46), and much like the city of Veniss, the status of their former relationship is also composed of the structural dichotomy of upper and underground: somehow, instead of becoming more real to him, you had become less real, until you existed so far above him and yet so far below that to become real again, you had to escape – his body, his scent, his words. vandermeer 2005: 46

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Part 3 consists of third-person narration, focalised through the eyes of Shadrach, who descends back to Veniss Underground in order to save Nicola. Shadrach’s descriptions often entail a dimension of depth, which is sorely lacking in Part 1 and sporadically used in Part 2. This dimension of depth is evident on the emotional level of Shadrach’s feeling towards Nicola: Hours passed into memory. He found a place in his mind that locked him into silence, locked him into glimpses of his beloved when, like a miracle, like a curse, light crept in and made her [Nicola’s] face visible to him. vandermeer 2005: 108

The end of the novel offers a closure in the form of a circular motion, a return to one of the first descriptions of the upper Veniss, originally rendered by Nicholas, regarding the artificially produced sunset – “Sunsets courtesy of Holo Ink, so you don’t have to see the glow of pollution, the haze of smog-shit-muck” (VanderMeer 2005: 11). In Part 3, this very notion is focalised by Shadrach as he witnesses “The particular hue of a chemical sunset” (VanderMeer 2005: 185) upon reemerging from Veniss Underground, symbolising the rise from the darkness of Veniss Underground into the decline of technologically-produced light. The multi-leveled spatiality of Veniss Underground also brings into question the temporal dimension of the plot – “… the city is the only infinite – a maze … a palate of undigested time” (2005: 66), this form of temporality corresponds to what Gilles Deleuze refers to as circular time in Difference and Repetition; the linking of past and present in such a way that “the pure past which defines them [ideas] is itself still necessarily expressed in terms of present, an ancient mythical present” (2004: 110). In Veniss Underground, the temporal dimension essentially collapses into the multi-leveled spatiality of the novel and becomes a mythical present that is not experienced linearly but rather circularly. As such, most of the pivotal events in the lives of the protagonists are rendered in a cyclical manner. For instance, Nicholas’s transformation into a Living Art is delivered in the following repetitive descriptions: Let me tell you about the city … Only the flesh comes off me and the flesh goes on like a new suit. Only the needle goes in and the needle comes … But the needle goes in and … Let me tell you about the city …. vandermeer 2005: 21

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This form of temporality corresponds with the passivity of the three protagonists; as time is essentially trapped in a loop, creating an eternal present, so the protagonists seem to be trapped in a body they no longer identify with, only to be consumed by the city.

Detachment Issues: The Body in Pain

In How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, Katherine N. Hayles declares that “Nowhere are these questions [of post-humanism] explored more passionately than in contemporary speculative fiction” (1999: 247). Hayles also implicitly relates to the issue of spatiality by maintaining that “The construction of the posthuman is also deeply involved with boundary questions, particularly when the redrawing of boundaries changes the locus of selfhood” (1999: 279). Indeed, the issue of boundaries of the self is pertinent to the formation of the body of the city, since it is precisely the dissolution of such boundaries which can potentially create a corporeal city; a city constantly personified by its inhabitants, who come to experience the city as an alternative body. In The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, Lyotard raises a theoretical question that is pertinent to our discussion as well as to the general discussion regarding post-humanism – “Can thought go on without a body?” (1988: 8). Indeed Lyotard devotes an entire chapter to this debate and one of its central conclusions has to do with the relationship between suffering, presumably a strictly physical phenomenon, and thought. Lyotard maintains that “thinking and suffering overlap” (1988: 18), referring to suffering as part of the mechanism that enables the human thought process; when one delays one’s action despite immediate impulses and desires, one inevitably conjures up mental notions regarding the aforementioned suspended gratification (1988: 19). Lyotard concludes this debate by posing a question regarding the relation between post-humanism and suffering – “To sum up – will your thinking-, your representing-machines suffer? What will be their future if they are just memories?” (1988: 19). VanderMeer manages to answer this question by introducing the theme of the suffering body that is detached from any mental activity; Nicola is found in a comatose state, “still hooked up to her life-support apparatus” (VanderMeer 2005: 107), while her dismembered body is left to cope with its self-contained pain. This state of physical pain devoid of the faculty of thought corresponds to what Elaine Scarry refers to in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World when she maintains that “The pain and the imagination are each

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other’s missing intentional counterpart” (1985: 169). Scarry’s definition of the suffering body hinges upon the claim that even in a state of consciousness, physical pain “has no referential content. It is not of or for anything” (1985: 5). Indeed, the subversion of physicality is a central theme in the novel as each part of Veniss Underground employs a different tool in order to dissolve corporeality – in Part 1, it is the theme of Living Art, as Nicholas manufactures genetically engineered creatures, only to eventually become his own Living Art – “Only the flesh comes off me and the flesh goes on like a new suit” (VanderMeer 2005: 21). In Part 2, it is the structural tool of second-person narration that inevitably evokes a post-human protagonist, since this form of narration transgresses diegetic boundaries. Also, the fact that Nicholas and Nicola are twins, often referred to as two parts of the same whole – “You. Were. Always. Two. As one: Nicola and Nicholas” (VanderMeer 2005: 25), further complicates the issue of the diegetic presence of the protagonist. In Part 3, there are numerous representations of human disembodiment on one hand and personifications of urban space on the other hand. Shadrach finally finds the disfigured and comatose Nicola in one of the underground levels, after an exhaustive search through a “mountain of legs, in all states of disrepair, guarded by a sullen, naked dwarf” (VanderMeer 2005: 106), determined to reverse her bodily state and bring her back to life, even though she is “stuck in the step before death” (VanderMeer 2005: 117). Shadrach is adamant in his relation to corporeality as a reversible state; Nicola can and will be reassembled as if her body were a puzzle. Still travelling through the decaying urban terrain of the underground levels of Veniss, Shadrach encounters Nicholas, who has been transformed into human clay by Quin – “He put things into me – flesh that flowered and took root” (VanderMeer 2005: 130), as part of the dark deal that would enable Nicholas to become Quin’s Living Art. The theme of the double reemerges, this time as a form of defying corporeality; Nicholas confesses to murdering Nicola as a form of suicide, “I killed myself. I knocked on the door and she opened it … It was like looking in the mirror and I just wanted to end it all and I strangled her to death”. (VanderMeer 2005: 132). However, the most consistent and thematically significant feature is the decapitated head of a humanoid assassin, who Shadrach names ‘John the Baptist’ and carries along his journey down to hellish Veniss Underground. The head of the assassin is a temporarily functioning unit after its separation from the body (VanderMeer 2005: 86), thus offering a post-human model that defies corporeality but at the same time displays possible limitations of such an alternative to corporeality; lack of mobility, dependence upon others and a relatively short life span.

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The Urban Twins

The eerie symmetry between Nicholas and Nicola brings into mind the sensation of the uncanny, which is inherently linked to the phenomenon of the double, the doppelgänger (Freud 2003: 141). According to Freud, it is precisely the encounter with doubles that provokes the contradictory feeling of familiar and unfamiliar, as rooted in the etymological basis of uncanny in German – homely and unhomely (Freud 2003: 126–127). VanderMeer’s characterisation of Nicholas and Nicola is certainly conscious of the uncanny and it is directly referred to on several occasions. For instance, when Nicola recall what her foster mother had said to her about their birth – “the first sight of the world, for you, for Nick, besides the air itself, the ceiling, the bed, the chair, was the other, the twin, the sweet sweet mirror of the flesh” (Vandermeer 2005: 26). The recognition of the other as you is at the heart of the experience of the uncanny, and Nicola goes on to reiterate similar statements of her foster mother regarding their twinship – “You’d been taken from the womb like all the other vatlings, but Nick was your brother, grown from the same egg, and in his eyes you saw yourself staring back” (Vandermeer 2005: 26). It is not entirely clear to what extent the visual similarities play a role in their uncanny duality; on one hand, Nicholas and Nicola are characterised as male and female which, biologically speaking, rules out the possibility that they are identical twins. On the other hand, the text clearly indicates that they were conceived by the same egg. This kind of inconsistency only serves to enhance the uncanny sensation that surrounds their twinship. However, the twinship of Nicholas and Nicola is first and foremost a narratological one, the first-person narration of Nicolas and the second-person narration of Nicola are a narratological ploy through which the reader can distinguish between the two. This type of subversion of the narrative voice is reminiscent of another famous text concerning doubles and duality; in Jose Saramago’s The Double, the third-person narrator interjects a direct appeal to the reader regarding the supposed interjection of his own feelings onto the protagonist’s focalisation, thus characterising himself into briefly becoming a first-person narrator, who is part of the diegetic realm of the story: An unavoidable parenthesis. There are moments in a narrative and this, as you will see, has been one of them, when any parallel manifestation of ideas and feelings on the part of the narrator with respect to what the characters themselves might be feeling or thinking at that point should be expressly forbidden by the laws of good writing. saramago 2013: 371–373

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This interjection and its narratological duality (third-person/first-person narrator), is paralleled by the thematic significance of the protagonist’s internal duality, which predates his encounter with his doppelgänger. The protagonist essentially experiences a moment of estrangement, defamiliarising his mirror image: He was looking at himself in the mirror the way someone looks at himself simply in order to gauge the damage done by a bad night’s sleep, he was thinking about this and nothing else, when, suddenly, the narrator’s unfortunate thoughts about his physical features and the problematic possibility that, should he reveal the necessary talent, they might, at some future date, be placed at the service of the dramatic or cinematographic arts, unleashed in him a reaction which it would be no exaggeration to describe as one of horror. saramago 2013: 378–381

In Veniss Underground, the narratological twinship and its uncanny resonance exceeds the somewhat clichéd portrayal of Nicholas and Nicola as ‘inseparable’ twins who bear a psychic connection to one another. Coupled with the lack of visual descriptions of their physical resemblance and the abundance of statements that simply attest to their twinship without ‘proving’ it, the result is a narrative in which the diegetic voice of the narrators, Nicholas and Nicola, is the only true mark of their twinship.

The Anatomy Lesson: City under Siege

Richard Sennett offers two concepts that are directly linked to the relation between body and city in Veniss Underground – the passive body and the empty volume. The passive body concerns the contemporary urbanite, whose technological gadgets and facilities have become an extension of his corporeality, to the extent that his body is no longer used when one wishes to engage in physical activities: The traveler, like the television viewer, experiences the world in narcotic terms; the body moves passively, desensitized in space, to destinations set in a fragmented and discontinuous urban geography. sennett 1996: 18

Among the fragmented urban landscapes, there is a potential for an empty volume, a space Sennett introduces in relation to the guillotine executions in

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Paris during the French Revolution, but can also apply to any other designated place of institutional or otherwise organised violence, which is meant to be viewed by other urbanites – “In them [empty volumes] the crowd was freed from responsibility; the space lifted the visceral burden of engagement. The crowd became a collective voyeur” (Sennett 1996: 304). In the case of Veniss Underground, the collective gaze that is liberated from the need of ethical judgment is in fact an aesthetic impression, part and parcel of the poetics of violence that the plot of Veniss Underground evokes. Part 1 presents the technological substitutions of urban setting, which might have had the initial purpose of masking urban decay but have evolved into a reminder of that very decay: At the end, it looks like a dead ender because there are recycling bins and other debris from the last ten centuries. But don’t be fooled. Just close your eyes – it’s a holo … Just walk right in. vandermeer 2005: 14

The holographic representation of decay, which is meant to mask secret doorways within the city, essentially reverses the axioms of urban life; the inaccessibility of the city is only an illusion, the only thing that the urbanite can trust to be real is the urban decay. Part 2 also discusses the upper level of Veniss while using adjectives that are borrowed from the animated world such as ‘diseased’ ­(VanderMeer 2005: 38), strictly human depictions such as “broken-down ­individuality” (VanderMeer 2005: 39), or depicting the conflict between Veniss and sister city Balthakazar as analogous to the growing emotional distance between Nic holas and Nicola, the estranged twins who can also be conceived as one fragmented self – “Cities turned from cities, self-devouring” (VanderMeer 2005: 26). In Part 3, Shadrach’s epic journey into the hellish platforms of Veniss Underground is still essentially an urban journey towards the neglected and dark corners of the city, as illustrated by the image of a malfunctioning elevator, stuck in between the upper and underground levels of Veniss: The elevator, which glowed a faint green, had gotten stuck between floors, halfway to the bottom of the open elevator door. It smelled of old rust and new oil. Below it lay the abyss; a shaft that might descend three levels or three hundred. vandermeer 2005: 91

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Shadrach later personifies the elevator, both as a “beast eager to plunge into the heart of Hell” (VanderMeer 2005: 94) and as an extension of his own corporeality – “He thought that the elevator must be a manifestation of his own bloodlust, the berserker love that had crashed his nerve ends, hijacked his cells” (VanderMeer 2005: 94). Much like the elevator, Shadrach is also caught between the two urban spaces, as a native of Veniss Underground, who managed to escape and build a life for himself in the upper level of Veniss, only to reluctantly return to his hellish home in order to retrieve Nichola.

Looks Like a Subconscious: The Deleuzian Simulacrum

It is instrumental to conceive of the representation of characters’ corporeality in Veniss Underground as a form of simulacrum since the visual field depicted in the novel is full of inconsistencies, delusions and ploys. Contrary to the common definition of simulacrum as “a copy without an original” conceptualized by such scholars as Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard, Deleuze maintains that simulacrum is not of the order of likeness or sameness but only creates the illusion of resemblance. The simulacrum, according to Deleuze, is built upon difference and is of the order of the Other: If we say of the simulacrum that it is a copy of a copy, an infinitely degraded icon, we then miss the essential, that is, the difference in nature between the simulacrum and copy, or the aspect by which they form the two halves of a single division. The copy is an image endowed with resemblance, the simulacrum is an image without resemblance. deleuze 2005: 295

The Deleuzian Simulacra are inevitably entangled with the corporeality of the city of Veniss due to its illusionary landscape; its dead-ends, holograms, chemical sunsets and maze-like structure create what Deleuze refers to as “the world of simulacra … the world itself as phantasm” (2005: 299). The Deleuzian simulacrum is not of the order of resemblance and the city of Veniss does not become familiar to the reader throughout the novel, despite countless urban depictions, it remains a foggy maze, a distinct Other. Moreover, the Deleuzian simulacrum only projects the illusion of resemblance, which corresponds to the evident Dantean references embedded in the text of Veniss Underground. Two main signifiers create an allusion in relation to Dante’s Divine Comedy: the phonetic resemblance between Veniss and

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Venice and the Dantean echoes of a protagonist who descends to the depth of an underground hellish maze. These allusions certainly create a sense of resemblance, but do not follow through; Veniss Underground creates an inherently different epic journey, one that does not include the spiritual journey toward God that is at the heart of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Both these points can be linked to the visual field of Veniss Underground, which is fragmented throughout the novel; the focal point of vision constantly shifts from one protagonist to another, while each focaliser offers different, and at time even contradictory, visual interpretations of the city. The city itself supplies countless mirages in the form of holograms; whether as sunsets or as dead-ends, the holograms seems to aptly capture the crisis of the visual field. Essentially, the visual field undergoes a transformation into an illusionary status that also projects upon the body and the city, as they merge together to the extent that the reader cannot distinguish between the corporeality of the characters and the spatiality of the city.

The Future (of the) Body

One might rightfully ask what does the future hold for the body in literature, or in other words, what kind of representation may become the alternative to corporeality in futuristic novels. This search has already commenced, and speculative fiction provides an answer in the form of the city, which is transformed from mere setting into an animated body that is in fact an extension of the bodies of the characters. In fact, one of VanderMeer’s recent texts indicates that his fascination with the urban body is a recurring theme. The Situation is a dark and surreal tale, depicting the trials and tribulations of a first person narrator through a layered maze of interchangeable spaces; office-body-city. The unnamed narrator spends his days in an office building that is often stripped to its bare flesh-andbones, relating to individuals as collections of organs that also function as a peephole into an otherwise inaccessible urban terrain. The narrator of The Situation employs the narratological device of external focalisation while he undergoes his paradoxical journey. The zigzag voyage that constantly alternates between inward (cavities of the building) to outward (external focalisation), followed by inward (human inner cavities) then outward once again (decaying urban landscape) inevitably produces disorientation; the reader is perpetually ‘lost’ within the realms of the city. The city landscape of The Situation ‘looks’ at the narrator; it is seemingly animated. In fact, this constitutes a paradoxical shift, while the city’s physical

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attributes are the ‘false’ surroundings, the grotesque bodies of the office building and its inhabitants are the ‘actual’ surroundings: We found ourselves locked in endless meetings in the cavernous meeting rooms on the forty-fifth floor. The rooms were more like the mess halls for refugees that I remembered from my teens. The windows provided an excellent view of the dying city, for those who wanted a reminder, but this was offset by the fact that we had to wear the slugs on our spines almost continually, and a herd of Human Resources had to be ready to escort us at a moment’s notice. vandermeer 2008: 9–10

The movement inwards continues as an inner cavity provokes nightmarish visions of a decaying urban space; the sense of paradoxical movement is evident on the narratological level as well, since the city visions constitute an internal focalisation of the narrator’s inner thoughts, yet the depiction itself is external, illustrating a crumbling urban landscape: My manager forced me to put my beetle in my own ear, a clear waste, and an act that gave me nightmares: of a burning city through which giant carnivorous lizards prowled, eating survivors off the balconies. vandermeer 2008: 3

At times, the inner cavity is of the office body, as the building’s shaft delivers the narrator into nowhere as he is “falling forever”: In these nightmares, I was falling forever down a shaft lined with thousands of decomposing bodies. Human bodies. Bodies of leopards and of rats, of baboons and of lizards. I could smell the rot of them, sense their spongy softness. And yet my horror would be mixed with a sense of delight: so many animals in one place. vandermeer 2008: 4

The movement inwards can be spiraling; the frame of nightmares certainly belongs to internal focalisation and so does the sensory input. On the thematic level, the urban body of the shaft is the perfect host for the disembodied thoughts of the nightmare. The grotesque bodies depicted in VanderMeer’s The Situation stand in opposition to the urban landscape; while the grotesque bodies seem to defy death, the urban landscape is not only dead in the sense of its decaying scenery but

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also in the sense of its representation in the narrative. The urban setting is beyond the reach of all its inhabitants, even those whose corporeality is ambiguous – it is a blind spot. As the case of Veniss Underground clearly shows, the urbanite’s relation to the urban spaces that surround him is never simple. This relationship is constantly complicated by the physical presence of the urbanite as a passive body that seeks empty volumes within the urban terrain in order to restore his sense of the gaze. It is not incidental that such a heavy emphasis is placed upon the crisis of the visual field; the search for an alternative to corporeality is primarily concerned with the materiality of the text following the crisis of the visual field and can be linked to what Lyotard refers to in The Inhuman as the post-sublime. Lyotard first conceptualises the Kantian sublime, which occurs “due to the very failing of the faculty of presentation” (1988: 136), only to further maintain that while the Kantian sublime has to do with the visual of formlessness, the post-sublime has to do with presence that is material rather than visual. VanderMeer’s conscious play with different levels of narration in Veniss Underground constitutes such a post-sublime, since narration is conceived as part of the materiality of the narrative, as distinguished from focalisation, which is inherently a visual phenomenon experienced by characters. The shifts from diegetic (first-person) to extra-diegetic (third-person) and in-between (second-person) presence fulfill the post-sublime state of “approaching presence without recourse to the means of presentations” (Lyotard 1988: 139). This form of abstraction correlates to the fragmented image of the city; the urban landscape of Veniss constantly plays with the dichotomy of presence and absence, switching from one to the other in order to remain an eternal maze, a city that is constantly defamiliarising itself. In fact, disintegration becomes the overarching theme of the novel – urban decay, amputated bodies, split selves, conflicting focalisations and a fractured narrative voice all collide and become the ‘body’ of the city, the epitome of an enigma. Bibliography Primary References

VanderMeer, Jeff. 2005. Veniss Underground. New York: Bantam Dell. VanderMeer, Jeff. “The Situation”. On line at: http://www.pspublishing.co.uk/thesitua tion (consulted 01.04.2009).

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Secondary References

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Camus, Albert. 2000. The Myth of Sisyphus. (tr. Justin O’Brien) London: Penguin Classics. DelConte, Matt. 2003. “Why You Can’t Speak: Second-Person Narration, Voice and a New Model Understanding Narrative” in Style 37(2): 204–219. Deleuze, Gilles. 2004. Difference and Repetition (tr. Paul Patton) London: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles. (1969) 2005. The Logic of Sense (tr. Mark Lester) London: Continuum. Fludernik, Monika. 1994. “Second-Person Narrative as a Test Case for Narratology: The Limits of Realism” in Style 28(3): 445–479. Freud, Sigmund. 2003. The Uncanny (tr. David McLintock) London: Penguin. Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Jameson, Fredric. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: the Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso. Levy, Michael. 2003. “PW Talks with Jeff VanderMeer: Underground Author Rises to the Surface” in Publishers Weekly 250(5): 60. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1991. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. (tr. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby) Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991. Saramago, Jose. 2013. The Double (tr. Margaret Jull Costa) Random House. Kindle Edition. Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press. Sennett, Richard. 1996. Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Past Future Cityscapes: Narratives of the PostHuman in Post-Urban Environments Eduardo Barros-Grela Abstract Neon Genesis Evangelion (Hideaki Anno), a Japanese anime series, presents a postapocalyptic space that is exposed to continuous attacks by external mechanical devices. This space shows a bipolar identity defined by the permanent possibility of ­destruction and an obsession about the defence of the city (Tokyo-3). Evangelion looks at urban spaces as places for production of post-human subjectivities, as it identifies human beings with robotic evolutions of their minds in the same way as it portrays the unstable plasticity of the city. This plasticity is represented by an inversion of traditional urban patterns, which results in a mind-challenging post-urban space. This chapter focuses on the analysis of how these representations originate the paradigms of post-human spatialities in a post-urban space. The same problematic relation is also discussed in Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark, where the urban settings appears again as a destructed cluster of spaces whose recreation is taken up by an imaginary yet tangible place. In both instances (Auster’s novel and Anno’s manga) the alternate city is created as a referent for spatialities. It is presented as a disorganised object, as a body without organs, either as a retractable city (Evangelion), or as a space in permanent deconstruction (Man in the Dark). This chapter analyses how space and spatialities perform and are performed by reconstructions of new urbanities, and how they are related to the dialogue between post-human identifications and the affective visualities of place and urban territory.

Key Terms Neon Genesis Evangelion – Paul Auster – spatiality – post apocalypse – post-human

Neon Genesis Evangelion (Hideaki Anno) was a Japanese anime series which aired for the first time in 1995. It depicted a post-apocalyptic urban environment under a constant threat of annihilation by external mechanical forces, sometimes in the form of monstrous beings called Angels, and at other times as bio-machines built to fight those Angels. Set in Tokyo-3 (a meta-representation © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004361317_004

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of destroyed original Tokyo), Evangelion explores the relation between urban space and the production of new, post-human subjectivities. This exploration relies on the permanent dichotomy between the defence and the destruction of the city, and it also relies on a variable identification of humans with robotic humanoid evolutions, paralleled in this anime series by the unstable and residual malleability of the city.1 Such plasticity of the city represents a subversion of traditional urban structures, and it fosters instead the fictional environment of an unfixed post-urban space. Thus, these representations constitute the new paradigms of post-human post-urban spatialities, while Auster’s Man in the Dark, a novel published in 2008, which echoes the attention given by Anno to post-human spaces, crystallises the problematic relation between the human and the urban in contemporary aesthetics. Similarly, to the urban spaces in Anno’s anime, the cityscapes in Auster’s novel appear as devastated environments whose representation is taken up by an imaginary yet tangible place. In both Auster’s novel and Anno’s anime series, the city of the future is created as a referent for the production of spatialities, but never as a modern conglomerate of inorganic buildings. The city is rather presented as a disorganised entity, as a body without organs. While Evangelion presents a retractable city that is self-reconstructed underneath the surface every time it receives attacks from enemy forces, Man in the Dark introduces spaces that are continuously constructed and deconstructed by the main character’s own drives, as the city belongs to his own imagination although we can see throughout the novel that the frontiers of his imagination have long been beyond his control. This chapter proposes to investigate how space and spatialities perform – and are performed by – reconstructions of new urbanities. Also, it looks at how space and spatialities are related to the dialogue between post-human identifications and the affective visualities of place and urban territory. In his book Rebel Cities, David Harvey argues that the different futures to be considered by contemporary inhabitants of urban spaces materialise as a result of their actual relationship with the city. Their acting role in the production of the urban space stems not only from their condition as dwellers of a given space, but also as performers of that space. Harvey’s observation of the potential development of the city as a constituent part of its populations’ identities, implies that the idea of the urban space is clearly sedimentary. His observation 1 Although this chapter focuses only on the anime television series, it is important to notice that Neon Genesis Evangelion refers to a much ampler spectrum of fictional productions, including manga, visual and graphic novels, films, or video games, among other forms of intermediality. For further information about the whole franchise, see Redmond 2007.

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resonates with other critics of spatial and urban theory such as Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, and Edward Soja, who articulate a vision of space as a form of agency to both individual and collective identifications with the city. The beginning of the twenty-first century has been clearly influenced by a rhizomatic conception of space.2 As Deleuze has widely argued in A Thousand Plateaus, as well as in Anti-Oedipus, space must be resignified in order to fulfil both the necessities and the identifications of contemporary individuals. According to Deleuze and Guattari, a shift from an arborescent structuring of ideas to a rhizomatic interpretation of reality is necessary. They claim rhizome must be confirmed in order to reflect the interconnectivity between all the planes of knowledge that encompass the different spatial epistemologies. This fundamental idea in Deleuze’s discussion of space critically articulates the concept of multiplicity to refer to his vision of space, in which the many is not opposed to the one, but it springs out of a system based on multiplicity. This rhizome becomes a fundamental tool for the study of urban movements and urban settlements in Michael Hardt’s and Toni Negri’s critical discussion of multiplicity in Multitude: War and Democracy the Age of Empire. David Harvey’s study comparably reads all of these approaches from the perspective of an urban-based class struggle, and it questions some of the inertias established for city dwellers through history. The aforementioned treatments of space provided by Harvey, Deleuze, Foucault and Hardt (in their respective contributions) are highly significant in the discussion of Neon Genesis Evangelion and Man in the Dark. According to Susan J. Napier, time has become a principle of uncertainty in Anno’s anime series, because it refers to an apocalyptic celebration of what Janet Steiger defines as ‘future noir’ (2005: 108), a compound of labyrinthine cityscapes with a problematic attitude toward the real. Napier explains that a fundamental feature of Japanese prewar literature was a ‘pervasive spirit of homelessness and loss’. This sense of loss is especially embodied in Kobayashi’s vision of the city of Tokyo, which serves ‘not as a repository for memories … but only as an ever-shifting marker of disassociation from the past’. It makes modern Japan into a society in which both urban and

2 Deleuze and Guattari discuss the concept of ‘rhizome’ in their seminal work A Thousand Plateaus. Defined as a non-hierarchical and multiple structure, a rhizome is characterized by representing a cartography and a multiplicity, rather than a tracing or a linear composition of space.

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natural landscapes are considered ‘different versions of phantasmagoria, as spectral images without substances’. napier 2005: 423

Napier’s discussion of time through concepts such as loss, memories and disassociation from the past, includes an aspect of urban spatiality. Her reference to urban and natural landscapes as different versions of phantasmagoria reminds us of the construction of a terrain vague3 (or empty space) that is consistent in the works by Auster and Anno. As the title of this chapter suggests, the focus on these types of fictional cityscapes, which belong to a future that might be considered as belonging to the past, results in a scheme of post-urban spatialities. In agreement with Napier’s claims, it will be in those ineffable spatialities that the phantasmagoria component becomes evident in both Evangelion and Man in the Dark.

Neo Genesis Evangelion: On Preterit Futures

Viewers of Anno’s anime series in 2014 experienced a sense of phantasmagorical exposition to the representation of Tokyo-3, a visual representation of a futuristic East Asian megalopolis. This feeling is probably similar to the effect that audiences experience while watching urban spaces in other science fiction films, for example: Blade Runner (1982), 2001, a Space Odyssey (1968), Back to the Future (1985), or 1984(1984). In Evangelion the portrayal of the future version of Japan’s capital city becomes obsolete. Today, an unsettling emotion of melancholy appears when one finds out the dates of the futures portrayed, as they have already passed or are about to come: 2019 (Blade Runner), 2001 (Space Odyssey), or 2015 (Back to the Future), among many others. The film industry has always ventured to provide particular scenes of probable futures, and as it normally happens with literature as well, those portrayals have indeed manufactured the collective imagery of the future (Collie 2011: 426). In that sense, Steiger argues that viewers have cultivated a natural tendency to experience feelings of deception and disappointment as they approach those significant dates, and they finally perceive the world around them not as technologically sophisticated as expected:4 3 See Solà-Morales Rubió (1996: 10–23). 4 See the celebrated 1964 interview with Isaac Asimov about how he predicted the world to be in 2014.

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As Samuel Delaney (1980: 179) notes about literary sf, ‘with each sentence we have to ask what in the world of the tale would have to be different from our world in order for that sentence to be uttered – and thus, as the sentences build up, we build up a world in specific dialogue with our present conception of the real’. Without much difficulty, such a comment applies as well to filmic representations of future cities. Consequently, the mise-en-scène of cities in sf might be understood as utopian commentaries about the hopes and failures of today or, inversely, dystopian propositions, implicit criticisms of modern urban life and the economic system that produces it. steiger 1988: 22

The experience of this dissatisfaction might have been triggered by two fundamental agents: first, the relation of the individual’s agency with space, and second, their production of imagined spatialities. The case of the connections between the individual and space raises some concerns regarding how identity is produced in relation with spatiality. The work of Edward Soja clearly addresses the relationship between space as a narrative and the human abilities to both perform an act within that space and create that space. In particular, Soja refers to the process of spatiality production (or the construction of geographies). In his Postmodern Geographies, Soja establishes that spatiality begins with the body and with the construction and performance of the human subject as an entity, which is particularly spatial and particularly involved with its own environment. Human spatiality would be the product of human agency and environmental structuring. Following Soja’s claims, Evangelion may be seen as an animated exercise to reflect on the human capabilities to interact with, act within, and produce the spaces of those past future cities. In Thirdspace, Soja explains that there is a type of space where all the formerly legitimate binaries related to space seem to converge: real and imagined, subjective and objective, corporeal and social. I would add another binary to this list: arborescent and rhizomatic spaces. Soja claims that ‘thirdspace’ is related to Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia to the extent that they both work as detonators of the transformation of spatiality in human life. At the same time, these two concepts – thirdspace and heterotopia – are comprehensive devices that encompass yet question all the fields of knowledge and spatial identification. In this sense, Evangelion depicts an urban structural framework that dilutes traditional boundaries between future imaginations of the city and present spaces. Simultaneously, it also brings the ontological question of post-humanity to the discussion. Evangelion

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interrogates the validity of the borders between the individual and the environment that make humanity become human.5 A clear example of merging human and non-human to produce the posthuman spatiality, would be the nature of the different characters in Evangelion. Set in 2015, Neon Genesis Evangelion introduces an urban space that denotes for current viewers a past vision of the future. Originally intended to represent a ghostly configuration of the city, with time, Evangelion has come to illustrate an actual manifestation of the post-urban space, both through its characters and through the epistemological transformations of the city. Evangelion’s proposal of urban space is transgressive inasmuch as it intervenes in the (probably fallacious) dispute between the human and the post-human conditions. From both structural and epistemological perspectives, the human and post-human mediations in the city are capital in the construction of the spatial structures introduced by this anime film series. As Harvey explains in his approach to the relations between space and time in relation to the geographical imagination, societies change and grow, they are transformed from within and adapt to pressures and influences from without. Objective conceptions of space and time must change to accommodate new material practices of social reproduction. How are such shifts in the public and objective conceptions of time and space accomplished? In certain instances, the answer is simply given. New concepts of space and time have been imposed by main force through conquest, imperial expansion or neocolonial domination. harvey 1990: 419

As will be discussed later in this chapter, the transgressive reaction against an imposed space or time is fundamental to acknowledge the concealed spatialities of our society, and Evangelion is not impermeable to these vindications. Harvey argues similar preoccupations later in his article and claims that, The dialectical oppositions between place and space, between long and short-term time horizons, exist within a deeper framework of shifts in time-space dimensionality that are the product of underlying capitalist imperatives to accelerate turnover times and to annihilate space by time. The study of how we cope with time space compression illustrates how 5 This redundancy refers to the traditional associations of the individual with the environment in order to legitimise the concept of human.

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shifts in the experience of space and time generate new struggles in such fields as aesthetics and cultural representation, how very basic processes of social reproduction, as well as of production, are deeply implicated in shifting space and time horizons. harvey 1990: 428

The struggle that affects both space and time, as explained by Harvey, transports the same dynamics into the human and post-human critical dialectic. It conveys a status of legitimation to the transgressive spatial epistemologies trying to reconfigure their own identifications. Evangelion’s narrative of the city presents an urban plasticity that defines Anno’s photographic approach to reveal forms of human and post-human interactions. The future Tokyo (from the past) as represented in Evangelion responds to a fantastic yet trustworthy interpretation of the human complex relation with space. The representation of space in this series is intimately connected to the manipulation of space. The opening scene of the Evangelion series depicts the introspection of its main character, Shinji Ikari, as he exposes the main lines of the chapters to come. In this introduction, Ikari lets the viewer witness the profound connection between humans and ‘machines’, as he simultaneously emphasises the power of that connection in the production of space and time. In one of his interventions in the soliloquy, and referring to himself as a post-human being in a thirdspace, he utters, “But someday you’ll recognize you have the wings to fly to the near future” (0:00:56). His alleged ability to travel to the future by using the wings in his back is a reference to the construction of a spatiality that allows post-human beings to reconstruct space as they will. Space, of course, is mediated by the character’s understanding of time. In this sense, its literal representation in Evangelion is not just metaphorical, because it literally alludes to current viewers’ understanding of space from 1995 as well as today. The plot of Evangelion is fairly simple. A future Tokyo is represented as a post-apocalyptic scenario in which survival wars between ‘human’ forces and threatening ‘Angels’ occur repeatedly. In fact, this anime is generally included in the mecha genre,6 although the questioning of the spatial boundaries between human and non-human provides in Evangelion a distinguishing element. The wars are set in a time after a global cataclysm (fifteen years later, to be precise), and the contenders are supposed to represent human forces fighting against the threat of exterminating machines. Certain particularities 6 The ‘mecha’ genre is a type of – mostly Japanese – animated narratives in which machines or robots are protagonists, but they are controlled by human will (Santos, Schaub).

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of these participants are, however, an interference to provide a clear definition of their identifications. They seem to recreate an imagined spatiality to favour the questioning of human integrity and machine artificiality. The giant bio-machines called Evangelion,7 or Eva, are super-robots intended to defend humanity and the city from the catastrophic attacks of Angels, the antagonistic robots that were responsible of the previous global cataclysm. These Evas need to be controlled by selected fourteen-year-old pilots, whose personalities present some specific features to act as souls of the machines. One of the features these pilots share is the fact that they all lost their parents in the previous cataclysm, the souls of the dead parents were uploaded into the Evas through complex computing programs: He [father] saved me for his life, and then died, in that Second impact. I don’t see if I’d loved him or hated him. One thing clear was that I had to defeat the Angels that had caused the Second Impact. To do that, I joined nerv. It might be that I was trying to revenge on my father, in order to be free from my father’s spell. (1.12) This way, whenever the pilots are physically plugged to the robots, a psychological and emotional link is developed between them and the machines, thus creating a new ontological form. This new resulting form goes beyond the conception of the cyborg in the sense that, in the Evangeline, affect and emotions are fundamental for the articulation of this new identity, and define both their actuality as subjective beings and their optimal performance. Angels are not different in that respect. Although they are perceived as machines designed to put an end to humanity, these demiurgic demons are actually very close to humans themselves, as their genetic code fits that of humans’ in as much as 99.89 percent. This apparently makes them even more human that the Evas. The different battles that take place between these two groups of posthuman beings are set in Tokyo-3. According to the descriptions provided by this anime series, Tokyo-3 could easily be interpreted as a postmetropolis (a term Soja suggests to dscribe the global metropolis), since it transcends the boundaries of traditional visions of urbanity. Tokyo-3 has the sufficient flexibility to continuously transform itself in the same way as its inhabitants do. Tokyo-3, unlike the cities discussed by Soja (mainly Los Angeles in California), 7 There are many references about the origin and the reminiscences of these humanoid machines. Many identify them with the Japanese folklore ogres called Oni (Redmond), but they also do have resemblances with the figure of the Golem, and most significantly, with that of the cyborg.

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represents a city that literally changes its shape as necessary. Tokyo-3 is an underground urban space that is able to move up to the surface and go back down according to the specific necessities of any given moment or situation. Soja argues that a post-metropolis is characterised by its formal complexity (2000: 40). He explains that processes of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation are continuously present because the post-metropolis disengages itself from previous identifications of the urban space and is, at the same time, exposed to reconceptualisations derived from the new realities of every urban modification. Soja’s claims about the new forms of the city imply that the traditional boundaries between the spaces affecting the identity of urban territories are now difficult to recognise. In the post-metropolis, the urban and the non-urban are spaces that coalesce to form a complex and malleable posturban structure, exactly as Tokyo-3 is presented in Evangelion. The original Tokyo was destroyed by a nuclear bomb in the year 2000, becoming a flooded and devastated empty space (or terrain vague). An empty space occurs when an inhabited territory suffers a vast migration and becomes unoccupied. As explained by Solà Morales, these empty spaces have a vital importance in our understanding of the space around us. The empty spaces have a place in the different cartographies, but are at the same time deprived of the elements that make them actual spatialities – people. From this approach, the urban space is particularly significant when affected by the emptiness described above, because the city becomes conceptually problematic if we erase the human component. The empty city becomes an abject space,8 one that is neither an object (there still are spectres of former 8 Stelarc (2005: 158) alludes to the aspect of emptiness as an element that is also present in the body. Her critique to the inertias established to interpret the body as an isolated component of human identity stimulates my reading of the empty space as a border spatiality (capitalized in the original): ABSENT BODIES: We mostly operate as Absent Bodies. That is because A BODY IS DESIGNED TO INTERFACE WITH ITS ENVIRONMENT – its sensors are open-to-the-world (compared to its inadequate internal surveillance system). The body’s mobility and navigation in the world require this outward orientation. Its absence is augmented by the fact that the body functions habitually and automatically. AWARENESS IS OFTEN THAT WHICH OCCURS WHEN THE BODY MALFUNCTIONS. Reinforced by Cartesian convention, personal convenience and neurophysiological design, people operate merely as minds, immersed in metaphysical fogs. The sociologist P.L. Berger made the distinction between ‘having a body’ and ‘being a body’. AS SUPPOSED FREE AGENTS, THE CAPABILITIES OF BEING A BODY ARE CONSTRAINED BY HAVING A BODY. Our actions and ideas are essentially determined by our physiology. We are at the limits of philosophy, not only because we are at the limits of language. Philosophy is fundamentally grounded in our physiology.

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inhabitants) nor a subject (there are no possible subjectivities involved). These would be appropriate places for post-human subjects, because they are spaces from the past that have been resignified in the present. However, according to the aforementioned discussion on multiplicity and rhizome, this city needs to be flexible and plastic. In order to get that flexibility and that plasticity, Tokyo-1 is re-placed in Evangelion by/as Tokyo-2 and Tokyo-3, the latter being the ultimate evolution of the post-urban city. Buildings in Tokyo-3 are designed to retract to the underground under certain conditions, and be substituted by armed defence buildings to produce the effect of a permanently reterritorialised city. Inhabitants therefore are exposed to the reidentification of themselves as former occupants of the devastated city, but are at the same time identified with the post-metropolis characterisation of the retractable city. In terms of spatiality, this would represent the perfect situation for the settling of post-human subjects. Shinji, the main character in the story, comes to Tokyo-3 to become the pilot of an Evangelion. A tormented individual, he has reservations about becoming part of the Eva project, because he knows emotions are crucial in the wellfunctioning of the project and he knows his body is not ready to bear that kind of effect. Soon, however, the connection with his Eva starts to function and Shinji is ready to make the machine become one with himself. He sees what the Eva sees and he is able to feel everything the Eva feels, even if it is not his own body that suffers attacks from the Angels. If an Eva’s arm is twisted or fractured, Shinji’s own arm will feel the exact same pain despite its physicality remaining intact. This means that there is a strong dissociation between his body and Shinji’s knowledge and experience of his body, in the same way as the organicity of the city has become detached from its structural body. Such alienation of the spatial experience of the body beyond its organic structure contributes to the possibility of constructing alternative spatialities. At the other end of the ontological palette defined by the Evas we find the Angels. These creatures are not exactly the opposite of humans. In fact, although they have a mechanical structure and a robotic appearance, the Angels are described in the Evangelion episodes as beings that could well have been humans. They have just followed a different evolutionary path, but these Angels’ ‘bodies’ are made of mostly natural materials rather than substances coming from human technological science. These subjects,9 who perform their

9 They are subjects in the sense that they have subjectivities and agency, being able to act according to their own will.

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actions according to their own agency, use quantum mechanics10 to legitimise their existence as well as their ‘right to the city’. According to David Harvey, the right to the city was a concept developed by Henri Lefebvre to refer to the responsibility that the populations have as citizens to modify the city – and themselves – in parallel and interconnected ways: The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves. LEFEBVRE 2008: 23

Angels claim their right to the city by destroying the city. Although their intentions considering a total annihilation of humans are never plainly presented, it is evident that they aim their missiles at the destruction of the city models proposed by humans: They say that when an Angel comes into contact with Adam, who is sleeping underground here, all humans will be terminated, which will be the Third Impact. It can be stopped only by Evangelion, which is as powerful as Angels. (1.19) As messengers, these Angels interpret their necessity for a space as a total transformation of the city, and insist on designifying the (apparently) legitimate forms of human urbanity. Along the same lines, their use of spatiality to understand their urban identifications makes of the Angels yet another example of post-human interpretation of, or intervention in, the city. Earlier in this chapter, some resemblances between the nature of the Angels and the nature of Cyborgs were mentioned. Following the description of these beings, it becomes obvious that the subject of matter acquires an enormous relevance for the interpretation of their role in Evangelion. Naturally, 10

Related to the use of probability theory and its connections with quantum mechanics, the concept of stochastic systems of great interest, as its state is non-deterministic but based on probability. Following this idea, the very essence of the Angels cannot be other than one based on probability, as their apparently random appearances in Evangelion seem to suggest. For further investigation of this theoretical aspect, see Commandeur and Koopman 2007.

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the tendency of viewers when determining these Angels, and Evas, is to try to ­ontologise them from an anthropomorphic point of view: “and all that stands between them and our complete annihilation are the ‘Eva Units’; huge, anthropomorphic weapons engineered from human and angel genetic material … Evas are made of meat. They bleed. They scream” (Wojcik 2012: n.p.). An interpretation derived for this approach could define the Angels as inanimate robots functioning as antagonists of humanity. However, their independency from human actions, and from human bodies as elements integrated with nature, provides a twofold complication of the main characters in Evangelion. First, it is the Evas, and not the Angels,11 that are built from inanimate materials and are subject to human control – rational and emotional. Therefore, they are the ones representing a constant threat to the survival of the species. Second, as constituent parts of the Evas, the human individuals who pilot the Evas are also to be interpreted as a human intervention to give life to inanimate objects, therefore acquiring a demiurgic status. This powerful position makes these individuals a possible new threat to humanity, but they are at the same time conceived as sole saviours of the species and responsible for the defeat of the apparently inhuman Angels. The hermeneutic regression derived from interpreting as post-human all of the most significant characters in Evangelion is caused by the influence of space. Again, the spatiality constructions hastened by the Angels provide a perception of the city from a totally different point of view. They understand Tokyo-3 as the model of a ductile post-metropolis that favours the transformations of its inhabitants by participating in the multiple reinterpretations of its forms and identifications. As R.L. Rutsky puts it, To accept this relation is to let go of part of what it has meant to be human, to be a human subject, and to allow ourselves to change, to mutate, to become alien, cyborg, posthuman. This mutant, posthuman status is not a matter of armoring the body, adding robotic prostheses, or technologically transferring consciousness from the body; it is not, in other words, a matter of fortifying the boundaries of the subject, of securing identity as a fixed entity. It is rather a matter of unsecuring the subject, of acknowledging the relations and mutational processes that constitute it. A posthuman subject position would, in other words, acknowledge the otherness that is part of us. It would involve opening the boundaries 11

One of the paradoxical references of these Biblical-mythical beings is that the very evil represented by the Angel is a component part of the post-human Evas (Ev-angel-ion).

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of individual and collective identity, changing the relations that have distinguished between subject and object, self and other, us and them. rutsky 1999: 21



Man in the Dark: The Post-Human, the Post-Urban

Similarly, to the ways in which Evangelion questions the reformulation of space and humans as fixed concepts, Auster’s narrative has also shown a particular preoccupation about the production of space(s) and its relation with human identifications and human urban dwelling. Auster is widely known for his narrative approaches to the production of subjectivity and for his questioning of legitimate spaces, namely urban cartographies. In his early short novel City of Glass (1985), he had already put forward a discussion of contemporary identity and writing that was rooted in a displacement of subjectivity on both a human and an urban level. City of Glass deals with a set of characters who manage to deconstruct the city as they question their own identity through a parodic detective novel. The manner these characters interact with the urban space they inhabit is definitely bidirectional, or reciprocal, and this space is thus defined by an identity movement that fluctuates between the city as an organic spatiality and the post-human as an inorganic subjectivity. Already in the first stages of Auster’s popular narrative, traces of a questioning of the production of human identifications, similar to the ones found in Evangelion, can be found, and strong connections between this process and the influence of urban spaces are also present. More than twenty years after the publication of City of Glass, Auster’s novel Man in the Dark (2009) continues to explore the dialogue between subject and subjectivity and space and spatiality. In this novel, August, a retired book critic rewrites his own identity by creating an alternate universe as he lies awake in his daughter’s home. In this new and imagined space, his nation, the United States of America, is fighting a civil war after the 2000 presidential election. The protagonist of his story is a man whose mission is to fluctuate between both types of spaces, ‘real’ and ‘imagined’, in order to assassinate August, the author of the story, and thereby end the war within imagined space. Both spaces coalesce around the inability of those two border men – author and p ­ rotagonist – to identify themselves with one particular space among the ones they are both creating. Their ontological uncertainty is reflected on the description of two contradictory places that make impossible the existence of each other, and that favour, at the same time, the resemantisation of traditional cartographies of spaces and spatialities.

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Another of Auster’s relatively recent novels, Travels in the Scriptorium (2006), also perseveres to prove the intimacy of identity and spatiality. It reinforces the amalgamation of subjectivity production and spatial reconfiguration in Auster’s narrative, and proves that Man in the Dark is not just a cog in the wheel.12 In Travels in the Scriptorium an old man is disoriented in an emptied, claustrophobic space and is not able to recollect who he is or why he is ‘forced’ to stay confined in that room. The man has access to a manuscript that tells the story of another prisoner, located in an alternate world, whose actions and deeds have repercussions on the old man’s reality. As this old man advances in the reading of the manuscript, more and more facts are shared by both spaces, intradiegetic fiction and intradiegetic reality. The subjectivities of the characters on both sides merge into a state of in-between, particularly represented by the decrepit figure of the old man. He deconstructs his identity by regaining the ‘artificial’ memories provided by the manuscript he is reading/writing, in a manner similar to the way in which Angels in Evangelion reinterpreted the denotations of Tokyo-3. In this case, however, urban space is minimised to the expression of a locked down room whose lines of flight towards multiplicity are not defined by architectonic elements but rather by narrative devices. Auster’s City of Glass, Man in the Dark, and Travels in the Scriptorium show, therefore, a preoccupation with the relations between identity production and space reconfiguration as modes of deontologisation and epistemic diversification. The concept of space is in the centre of these movements from and towards multiplicity. Thus, the analysis of a renewed spatial configuration, applicable to the spatialities of Auster’s characters as well as to the acts of Evas and Angels in Evangelion, takes as a starting point several critical debates proposed by theorists of space in the last few decades. Urban theory critics, such as Lefebvre and Reyner Banham, pose the question of centre and centrality as pivotal to the understanding of city space as a contemporary model site of social growth and development. However, Deleuzean ontological readings of space claim that arborescent conceptions of urban locations are not suitable for fragmented, globalised, or postmodern identities. Therefore, he argues together with Felix Guattari that both subjectivities and spatialities are constructed on a real yet multidimensional pattern of rhizomatic epistemologies. In this sense, both theirs and Lefebvre’s dialectical postures function as a theoretical milestone in the analysis of Auster’s narrative and Anno’s anime. They articulate machineries of both centripetal and centrifugal spatial inertias with rhizomatic tendencies of post-human identity production. 12 See Barros-Grela 2012.

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Each of these theoretical narratives should be read as acting performances of postmodern thought. Not only does Gilles Deleuze suggest that lines of flight from recognized truths must be performed by collective subjectivities to act in an ontological space of multiplicity. He also claims that a structural revision of epistemological planes must undergo all forms of mobility in order to transcend the borderlines of the imaginary identities. Taking this into account, if discussions of identity performativity and urban re-imagination have a direct influence on urban structures, only empty (vague) subjects should be able to undertake much of the major social reconfiguration of the spatial deconstruction of the city. An inner terrain vague is thus crucial in the production of new forms of identity difference between acting subjects, human or post-human. This is precisely what Soja defines as the postmetropolis, the contact zone where time and spaces can be interpreted as accommodation for the ­post-human in the narratives discussed in this chapter. Guy Debord encapsulates this idea when he quotes Hegel declaring that, time is a necessary alienation, being the medium in which the subject realizes himself while losing himself, becomes other in order to become truly himself. The opposite obtains in the case of the alienation that now holds sway – the alienation suffered by the producers of an estranged present. This is a spatial alienation, whereby a society that radically severs the subject from the activity that it steals from him [also] separates him in the first place from his own time and space. debord 1967: 161

Subjectivity is thus dependent on the interaction with other subjectivities (either collective or individual) as well as on the recognition of itself as an alienated subject (both time and space related alienations). Auster’s novels, as well as the different episodes of Evangelion, are clear examples of this. Characters in these novels show a need for identity indetermination as they perform narrative lines of flight. These lines will allow these characters to develop their subjective multiplicities in order to problematise all vestige of spatial homogeneity. The intertwined connections between time and space are now transformed into a hierarchical relation that supersedes old-fashioned misconceptions of space as being subjugated to time. In a dialogic confrontation, space is considered to have full semantic power and is therefore enabled to interact with characters according to its status as a ‘displaced’ signifier. In modernity, space grants bodies with zones of dialectic identification so that the resulting multiple subjectivity includes forms of spatial reconfiguration. As Lefebvre puts it,

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With the advent of modernity time has vanished from social space … Economic space subordinates time to itself; political space expels it as threatening and dangerous (to power). The primacy of the economic and above all of the political implies the supremacy of space over time. LEFEBVRE 1991: 95

Contemporary narrative aesthetics, however, relocate Lefebvre’s identification of space as a discourse of power that must be questioned in postmodern ­contexts. Literature and anime, in this case, are read as representations of representations that acquire performative power whenever it is integrated in dialogues with space. Both Man in the Dark and Neon Genesis Evangelion clearly respond to these theoretical needs. In Man in the Dark there is an ongoing parallelism between the male protagonist’s decaying state and that of the city, which is depicted as the reconfiguration of a post-industrial, dystopian urban space. In Postmetropolis. Critical Studies of Cities and Regions, Edward W. Soja proposes a view of the contemporary megalopolis based on spatiality, as well as outlines the itinerary of urbanism since its birth as an academic discipline. Additionally, Soja reflects on current forms of urbanities as the result of a history of successive metropolitan reconceptualisations, evolutions, and revolutions. Soja claims that the consolidation of globalisation at the turn of the twentieth century brought about a reconceptualised urban epistemology, precipitated by urban sprawl, world-wide influence of hegemonic models, and the implementation of a post-human epistemology. Soja uses the term ‘synekism’ to refer to the stimulus of urban agglomeration, a power that is inherent to city growth and that goes beyond either individual and collective control (or, rather, subjective and objective manipulation). The breeding ground for synekism seems to be the globalised city, a non-space of (post)industrial dimensions. This global city inexorably spreads its growth over smaller adjacent towns, cannibalising them, and then appropriating their downtowns to create monstrous multicentre cities that definitively reconfigure contemporary urban patterns. This separation between older modes of space configuration and newer hybrid models of rhizomatic spatiality construction is fully developed in Auster’s Man in the Dark, a fictional discourse that appoints questions to reconcile common grounds between urban spaces and human spatialities. Auster’s novel presents a proposal of the post-human and the post-urban though a disintegration – that is, at the same time, a multiplicity – of the author’s spatiality. From the beginning of the narrative, the reader accompanies the character in their finding out about the dislocated mission they have to fulfil. For instance, when the main character within the story is informed about

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his mission to kill someone, his discourse is already revealing a dysfunction in the traditional patterns of spatial structure. The answer to his question about who he will have to kill is particularly revealing: It’s not who so much as what, the sergeant replies enigmatically. We’re not even sure of his name. It could be Blake. It could be Black. It could be Bloch. But we have an address, and if he hasn’t slipped away by now, you shouldn’t have any trouble. We’ll set you up with a contact in the city, you’ll go undercover, and in a few days it should all be over. AUSTER 2009: 6

For both this character and readers of Auster’s novel, this answer produces a notable uncertainty and discomfort, because the only thing that is clear is that an assassination will be committed. It is unknown why, or when, but most importantly, there is no concrete knowledge about who is to be killed or even if it is a person or something else. From a theoretical point of view, it is clear that Auster is trying to alienate his characters and his readers from the traditional semantics of space and of human beings. His subtle description of spatiality is reinforced by the subjectification of space production and human integrity. In the same dialogue, space and the concept of the human being are undermined by showing the limitations of reason: And why does this man deserve to die? Because he owns the war. He invented it, and everything that happens or is about to happen is in his head. Eliminate that head, and the war stops. It’s that simple. Simple? You make him sound like God. Not God, Corporal, just a man. He sits in a room all day writing it down, and whatever he writes comes true. The intelligence reports say he’s racked with guilt, but he can’t stop himself. If the bastard had the guts to blow his brains out, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. You’re saying it’s a story, that a man is writing a story, and we’re all part of it. auster 2009: 9–10

The obvious paradox is that killing the creator of the war will mean the elimination of the space created by that writer, and as a result the elimination of its inhabitants, that is, the ones that are about to become the perpetrators of the crime. As in Evangelion, characters are compelled to participate in the abject space that is the post-metropolis, becoming performers of their spatialities. In Man

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in the Dark, the writer creates a space that includes characters, and therefore their identity must be intimately interrelated with the space they populate. That is the reason why the assassination of the writer would mean genocide for the character in charge of committing the crime. He would kill all the other ‘characters’ that share the same space with him, as he eliminates their chance to be spatial. However, Auster’s deceptive narrative goes a step further, and it implies that this paradox also works the other way around. The elimination of the writer will mean not only his disappearance from his space, but also the annihilation of space itself. This non-hierarchical structure is absolutely necessary for understanding the concept of spatiality. The old man is not only creating the ‘separate reality’ or the imagined space of the men who are conspiring to kill him. He is actually creating his own space as well, exactly as the characters do when they invent the space of the old man who is inventing their space. Spatiality is intrinsically connected to subject and subjectivity, and the transformations of humans imply a parallel transformation of spaces. That is the reason why the following sentences of the dialogue quoted above say, ‘If things go on like this much longer, half the population will be gone before you know it’. Actually, no matter how long things go on like that, half the population will be gone before anybody knows it. Every interpretation, or affirmation, of a reality entails the negation of another possible reality, and therefore the eradication of every potential alternative existence. The old man is, in fact, similar to the post-human inhabitants of Tokyo-3, functioning all of them as demiurgic entities who have the agency to produce spaces and determine the destiny of the subjects occupying those spaces. The cityscape that is portrayed in Man in the Dark is, therefore, based on a post-human spatiality. Technology is not the only method to adopt the posthuman condition, and although it facilitates the multiplicity of identifications as a process towards post-humanity, space is actually the component that makes it possible.

Conclusions

The cityscapes of the future are multiple in the sense that they encompass the post-human condition and the post-urban structures of the space era. The epistemological revolution initiated with the discussion of spatiality has had a major impact in the way we perceive ourselves and the spaces we inhabit. Both Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion and Auster’s Man in the Dark are diaphanous representations of this approach to the connections between identity and

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spatiality, as they challenge and question the repercussions of p ­ ost-human, post-urban spatialities in terms of control of the populations and power over the Other. These dis-organised structures play a twofold role in the reconfiguration of our subjective spaces. First, they allow readers to permanently ­deconstruct their relation with the environment. Second, they open an unlimited capability of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation of the city, and with it they favour the creation of a permanent identification with spaces. The cityscapes of the future actually resemble to a great extent the past u ­ rban environments that are portrayed in the narratives analysed in this chapter. They fulfill their mission as future cityscapes that became present cityscapes and will soon be defined as past future cityscapes. Their legacy is their participation in the legitimisation of individual subjectivities as devices to perform spaces, as well as their contribution to the understanding of reading subjects as a constituent part of the spaces they inhabit, and to the understanding of space as a constituent part of their identities.

Bibliography



Primary References



Secondary References

Anno, Hideaki. 1994–1996. Neon Genesis Evangelion. Musashino: Gainax Studios. Auster, Paul. 1985. City of Glass. The New York Trilogy. Vol. 1. New York: Penguin Books. Auster, Paul. 2007. Travels in the Scriptorium. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Auster, Paul. 2008. The New York Trilogy. London: Faber & Faber. Auster, Paul. 2009. Man in the Dark. New York: Macmillan usa.

Asimov, Isaac. 1994. “Visit to the World’s Fair of 2014” in The New York Times (16 August 1964). http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/23/lifetimes/asi-v-fair.html. Augè, Marc. 1995. Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. New York: Verso Books. Banham, Reyner. 2009. Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. Berkeley: University of California Press. Barros-Grela, Eduardo. 2012. “Performances of Uncertainty in Spaces of Contingency: Aesthetic Confinement and Mechanisms of Silencing in Paul Auster, Haruki Murakami, and Park Chan-wook” in Carvalho Homem, Rui (ed.) Relational Designs in Literature and the Arts. Page and Stage, Canvas and Screen. New York: Rodopi: 387–398. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity.

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Bruce, Franklin, H. 1983. “Don’t Look Where We’re Going: Visions of the Future in Science-Fiction Films, 1970–82” in Science Fiction Studies 10(1): 70–80. Collie, Natalie. 2011. “Cities of the Imagination: Science Fiction, Urban Space, and Community Engagement in Urban Planning” in Futures 43(4): 424–431. Commandeur, Jacques J.F. and Siem Jan Koopman. 2007. An Introduction to State Space Time Series Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Debord, Guy. 1967. La société du spectacle. Paris: Buchet-Chastel. Deleuze, Gilles. 1976. Rhizome: Introduction. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Deleuze, Gilles. 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1987. Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 2004. The Logic of Sense. London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group. Halberstam Judith and Ira Livingston. 1995. Posthuman Bodies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Haraway, Donna J. 1990. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity. An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge: Blackwell. Harvey, David. 1990. “Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical Imagination” in Annals of the Association of American Geographers 80(3): 418–434. Harvey, David. 2008. “The Right to the City” in New Left Review 53: 23–40. Harvey, David. 2012. Rebel Cities. London: Verso Books. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Napier, Susan J. 2002. “When the Machines Stop: Fantasy, Reality, and Terminal Identity in Neon Genesis Evangelion and Serial Experiments Lain” in Science Fiction Studies 29(3): 418–435. Napier, Susan J. 2005. “The Problem of Existence in Japanese Animation” in ­Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 149(1): 71–81. Redmond, Dennis. 2007. “Anime and East Asian Culture: Neon Genesis Evangelion” in Quarterly Review of Film and Video 24(2): 183–188. Rutsky, R.L. 1999. High Techne. Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Santos, Milton. 2000a. La naturaleza del espacio. Técnica y Tiempo. Razón y Emoción. Barcelona: Ariel. Santos, Milton. 2000b. La naturaleza del espacio. Técnica y Tiempo. Razón y Emoción. Barcelona: Ariel.

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Schaub, Joseph Christopher. 2001. “Kusanagi’s Body: Gender and Technology in MechaAnime” in Asian Journal of Communication 11(2): 79–100. Soja, Edward W. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell. Soja, Edward W. 2000. Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell. Soja, Edward W. 2010. Seeking Spatial Justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Soja, Edward W. 2011. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. New York: Verso. Solà-Morales Rubió, Ignasi. 1996. “Presente y futuros. La arquitectura en las ciudades” in Ignasi Solà-Morales Rubió et al. (eds.) Presente y futuros. Arquitectura en las grandes ciudades. Barcelona: Collegi Oficial d’Arquitectes de Catalunya / Centre de Cultura Contemporània: 10–23. Solà-Morales Rubió, Ignasi. 1995. “Terrain Vague” in Davidson, Cynthia D. (ed.) Anyplace. Cambridge: mit Press: 7–19. Steiger, Janet. 1988. “Future Noir. Contemporary Representations of Visionary Cities” in East-West Film Journal 3(1): 20–44. Stelarc. 2005. “From Psycho-Body to Cyber-Systems: Images as Post-human Entities” in Broadhurst Dixon, Joan and Cassidy, Eric J. (eds.) Virtual Futures, Cyberotics, Technology and Post-Human Pragmatism. London and New York: Routledge: 153–164. Wojcik, Jonathan. 2012. ‘The Spooky Moon Goblins of “Sega Genesis Evangelion Brothers 2”’ in Bogleech. On line at http://www.bogleech.com (consulted 12.05.2015). Wong, Amos. 1997. “Interview with Hideaki Anno, Director of Neon Genesis Evangelion” in Aerial Magazine, January. http://web.archive.org/web/20070613125248/http:// www.aoianime.hu/evangelion/index (consulted 20.05.2015). Žižek, Slavoj. 2003. Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences. New York: Routledge.

Architecture of Punishment: Dystopian Cities Marking the Body Elsa Bouet Abstract This chapter investigates the ways in which China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station, Alastair Reynolds’ Terminal World and Christopher Priest’s Inverted World represent governments which enforce submission by creating monstrous architectural structures and violent forms of bodily punishment. Recalling Henri Lefebvre’s claim that urban centres are favourable environments to the formation of authoritarian power, the depicted dystopian governments foreclose utopian aspirations through spatial control and exhibit their power in threatening architectures which are mirrored in the deformed and branded bodies of those who have been punished. The chapter therefore explores the ways in which the city and the body exist in a dystopian “cobuilding relationship” (Elizabeth Grosz) and argues that the novels suggest that movement, diversity and openness are the utopian solutions offered to the fixedness of the city.

Key Terms China Miéville – Christopher Priest – Alastair Reynolds – punishment – body

In The German Ideology, Karl Marx argues that modes of production create class alienation because of the division of labour, in that owning the modes of production allows for the accumulation of private property at the expense of the working class who is alienated from acquiring wealth (1998: 51–54). Marx asserts that the dominant class rules as producers of ideas and regulates the production of labour (1998: 60–71). The ruling class creates an ideology whose power is concretised by the state, which acts not for the common interest but for the interest of the ruling class. As such the ruling class creates the modes of oppression of the lower class, affected through ideology and state control. In The Urban Revolution, Henri Lefebvre develops Marx’s ideas, arguing that urban space is also organised to further class division: the metropolis is “the creator of capitalism, a result of the manoeuvring of the bourgeois to ­better

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004361317_005

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control the working class” (2003: 91).1 Consequently, this industrial urban space is shaped by those who control the modes of production to ensure urban planning protects and benefits industrialisation by organising population. This generates not only economic and social inequality, but also spatial domination. For Lefebvre, urbanism is nothing more than an “ideology” claiming to serve social needs while serving the interests of capitalism and its modes of production, thus benefitting the ruling class (2003: 158–159). Urbanism spatially perpetuates the conditions of oppression which alienate the working class, whose needs are not served, pushed out in areas of high poverty without ­investment benefitting them.2 Urban planning becomes a political means to enforce control over the working class: “The large city, monstrous and tentacular, is always political. It serves as the most favourable environment for the formation of authoritarian power” (2003: 91). The monstrous city claws for control by fostering disparity via its industrialised socio-political structure. This control and organi­ sation, or hierarchisation of space, is necessary for the sustaining and protecting of the modes of production and for the ruling class to retain its hold on power. Lefebvre argues that science fiction does not represent the ideological issues underlying urbanism: In science fiction, optimistic predictions of the urban phenomenon are rare; pessimism is much more common. The ideology inherent in these mythic stories often extends the imperatives of industrial planning, without clarifying all the implications of the urban phenomenon. Nonetheless, this general pessimism is part of the problematic. In science fiction, the city of the future is broken; it proliferates as a disease afflicting humanity and space, a medium of vice, deformation and violence. LEFEBVRE 2003: 144

Lefebvre does not view science fiction as “clarifying all the implications of the urban phenomenon” (2003: 114), that is, as exposing the mechanisms of spatial division. Rather, Lefebvre contends that science fiction only depicts the cities as polluted centres of violence, spaces of inequality and segregation, in which power represses rebellion. However, this chapter will argue that science fiction 1 See Harvey (2003: 120; 115–123) who argues that capitalism “builds a physical landscape appropriate to its own condition”, that is the urban infrastructure and residential areas are structured to organise the population into their specific social roles. 2 See Lefebvre (2007: 316–317) which he argues that the working class was pushed out of city centres into housing estates and slums during the end of the nineteenth centur.

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offers narratives which denounce the ideologies and mechanisms which shape cities to become spaces of social inequalities and segregation. This chapter will explore how science fiction creates parallels between ­government shaping cities to create divisions, the creation of threatening, monstrous architecture deterring insurgency and the sadistic, deforming ­punishment inflicted on the bodies of those who dare to rebel to create a fairer, more united society. The cities are so restrictive that they become akin to prisons. The characters, failing to change their city, are then forced to look for new utopian avenues, fulfilled through movement, openness and exodus. All these elements feature in China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000), Christopher Priest’s Inverted World (1974) and Alasdair Reynolds’ Terminal World (2010). In these novels, the specific layout and structures of the cities, their centres and tower tops, stand as visible symbols of control and of subjugating ideologies which fragment and corrode the suburban ghettos and lower strata of vertical cities. These authoritarian urban systems impose control, repression and confinement, detrimental to individual freedom and the welfare of the community. These architectures of power are also reproduced on the biological body as the novels present characters who are punished and alienated for not conforming to the ruling structures: they are made alien, mutilated and remade, forced to comply with the rules. However, some characters manage to escape the authorities’ wrath and are left with no choice but to abandon the cities if they are to find compassion and unity.

China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station

China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station presents several characters whose interaction in the city-state of New Crobuzon reveals their experience of the ­ghettoisation of the city and of the harsh repression in place. Yagharek is a Garuda, a bird-like humanoid, from the Cymek desert, a remote egalitarian Garuda community. Yagharek had his wings removed and was exiled by his community for rape, only revealed as such at the end of the novel. He travels to New Crobuzon seeking Isaac, a freelance researcher in Thaumaturgy, a physical, magical force, which could enable Yagharek to have his wings reconstructed. Yagharek also meets Lin, Isaac’s khepri girlfriend, a beetle-like humanoid. She is an artist who faces discrimination by other humans and who struggles to make a living until she is commissioned by the mob boss, who works with the corrupted government, to sculpt his statue. Isaac’s attempts to find a solution to both Yagharek’s mutilation and Lin’s struggles reveal the extent of the

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­government’s totalitarian approach to punishment and the division and poverty it creates in the city. Yagharek is attracted to New Crobuzon by the city’s innovative research and thriving technology, as he had heard of the “science and industry that moves and moves here like nowhere else” (Miéville 2000: 56) and that New Crobuzon is a “rich city” (2000: 739). These images of progress and wealth are contrasted with the portrayal of a polluted and socially fragmented city, which reflects how the urban environment is as toxic as its totalitarian government. New Crobuzon is described as heavily industrialised: “Fat chimneys retch dirt into the sky even now in the deep night” (2000: 1–2), “The gates to the Old City, once grandiose, now psoriatic and ruined” (2000: 2), “Smokestacks punctured the membrane between the land the air and disgorged tons of poisonous smog into that upper world as if out of spite” (2000: 78). This noxious pollution assaults the city, creating a geographical stigma; rivers are named the “Canker and the Tar” (2000: 29), reminiscent of sores and fungal diseases, also evoking the tar and cancer associated with smoking, as suggested by the smog permeating the city. The “bricks of the warehouse had once been red and were now black with grime” (2000: 248). This depiction recalls that of Charles Dickens’ Coketown in Hard Times: “It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it” (2008: 26). This reference to Hard Times not only evokes its polluted urban landscape, but also the social and class divisions it exposes, similarly present in New Crobuzon. The social fragmentation produced by the industrialised city is reified by its division into ghettos. Lin reflects on the history of the khepri in New ­Crobuzon, who had been living in the city for seven hundred years, becoming “natives” at time when “There had been no separate neighbourhoods, no home-grubs, no ghettos” (2000: 257), revealing that the city was once welcoming and not ­always spatially fragmented. However, this does not suggest that the city provided unity: “There were not enough khepri” (2000: 257), implying that it was not financially viable to create a specific ghetto for so few khepri. As more ­khepri arrived as refugees, they were welcomed with unease, but not with official violence. They had settled, become workers and tax-payers and criminals, and found themselves, by an organic pressure just too gentle to be obvious, living in ghettos; preyed on, sometimes, by bigots and thugs. miéville 2000: 258

While they were not the target of official governmental violence, the government implicitly singled them out and initiated and allowed public forms of

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aggression towards the khepri. The government overlooked and did not attempt to rectify their segregation by integrating them in the city, instead confining them to a delineated ghetto. In New Crobuzon, the division of the city is subtly engineered by the government who fosters division and refuses to implement social cohesion. Lin struggles to adapt to this discriminating environment. She leaves her poor ghetto of “Creekside”, described as a “grubby stain” (2000: 258) in the city, in search of artistic fulfilment. She is considered an “outsider” (2000: 26) by other khepri as she dresses in human fashion, different from their ballooning pantaloons. New Crobuzon’s inhabitants also see her as an outcast: as she shops in the city, people are “staring rudely, wondering at the khepri shopping for human clothes” (2000: 254). Lin attempts to leave the ghetto to transcend segregation and fragmentation, trying to mingle with others through “cultural cross-pollination” (Gordon 2003: 458). Quoting Brian Stross, Joan Gordon argues that Lin embodies the hybrid, the result of a mix, able to adapt. Gordon suggests that Lin, who wants to interact with other species, embodies “hybrid vigor” (2003: 457), defined as the acceptance and legitimisation of the hybrid, itself subject to further change and hybridisation, denoting a dynamic, openended process. Lin also dates Isaac, a human, which offers the potential for a new hybrid. However, their relationship is kept covert, reinforcing the lack of acceptance of hybridisation: the fragmentation of New Crobuzon and the negative perception of the alien are a halt to this “hybrid vigor”, reinforcing the set ideological boundaries in place in the city. Closure and stagnation are impediments to change, the dystopian “imprisonment of the utopian horizon” (Somay 1984: 26). The ghettoisation of New Crobuzon and the denial of difference and hybridisation foreclose any utopian possibility. This arrest of the “hybrid vigor” and resistance to change are established by the centralisation of power located in the city centre, in Perdido Street Station, “An industrial castle, bristling with random parapets. The westernmost tower of the station was the militia’s Spike that loomed over the other turrets, dwarfing them” (Miéville 2000: 78–79). The central station overlooks the whole city, asserting the Militia’s authority, threatening the population by displaying its prison and its torture chambers where criminals are turned into “the Remade”, the “sick art” (2000: 115) of refashioning the criminal’s body to reflect his crime. The towers assert their dominance over the city, crushing it and stabbing the sky. The architectures of Perdido Street Station and the Spike become oppressive: It seemed as if all of New Crobuzon’s weather was formed by a massive, gradual crawling hurricane that centred around the city’s heart, the

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enormous mongrel building that squatted at the core of the commercial zone known as The Crow, the coagulate of miles of railway line and years of architectural styles and violations: Perdido Street Station. miéville 2000: 78

The city is affected by a storm whose eye is above Perdido Street Station: metaphorically, the station extends its power over the rest of the city, dispersed via the clouds and the rails. The station, described as a corrupted, bastardised hybrid, a “mongrel” with a “random” mixture of architectural styles, contains “torture chambers” (2000: 79) suggesting that the authorities enforce their rule by any means. Unlike Lin’s positive hybrid nature embodying acceptance, the mongrel structure of the station perversely indicates that a mix of brutal ­methods will suit the authorities to enforce their restrictions to subdue the population. The overbearing clouds create a sense of claustrophobia and inescapability, visually demonstrating the tyrannical control in place. The city is also insular; as the population is scared by the violence facing the city, it is said that “there was simply nowhere to flee” (2000: 531); for the inhabitants of the totalitarian city-state, there is no escape. The Spike evokes the image of a spear: power and authority have to be militarily guarded, as reflected by the roofs of other buildings being “pierced by militia towers” (2000: 156), to protect the “power inhering in [their] bricks” (2000: 758).3 The government is “policing by decentralized fear” (2000: 324), by infiltrating the population and by bribing people into becoming informants for the Militia. Just as the rails of the station spread throughout the city, the power of the government and the Militia lurks in and stretches over the city. Isaac, when talking about the punishment inflicted on criminals, expresses his fear of the Militia. He has “no stomach for the law in this city” (2000: 60) and fears what happens in the Parliament’s “rooms used for uncertain purposes” (2000: 55), used for torture and Remaking. The towers and Remaking provide the Militia with a central platform from which they can overlook the population, assert their dominance and display the violence which faces those who deviate from the government’s rules. Remaking is the sadistic disciplinary solution to crime. A notable example is that of a woman who, in a fit of madness, smothered her baby who would not stop crying. During her trial, she wails her baby’s name, her eyes are “empty” 3 The Spike recalls the Shard in London Bridge Quarter, an area of commerce, investment and exclusive offices and residences. Maczynska (2010: 60) argues that Miéville’s King Rat is set in Thatcherite London depicting its “alienated and deprived urban underclass”, statements which resonate in Perdido Street Station.

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(2000: 115) with disbelief and regret over what she has done. She is sentenced to ten years in prison and some sordid remaking: the Magistrate orders her baby’s arms to be grafted to her face “So she doesn’t forget what she did” (2000: 115). Imprisonment, which should serve as a time of reflection, rehabilitation and healing is no longer sufficient in New Crobuzon. The body is permanently stigmatised and rebuilt as a symbol of the crime one commits; the Remade become objects of “contempt [and] prejudice” (2000: 114) to the compliant elements of the population. Just as the city is divided into ghettos, the bodies of the Remade are marked to “divide [and] rule” (2000: 114), turning them into outcasts and a display of the Militia’s power. Rejected, the Remade are forced into poverty: they become junkies, prostitutes, and homeless “dying in a starving, drunken, stinking huddle” (2000: 159), pushed out in the slums to die. The Remade are also converted into soldiers and organic machinery used as forced labour, ensuring the monopoly of profit and the perpetuation of authority. The corrupted government does business with underground criminals but the government agents “Churn out the commodity, grab the profit, get the militia to tidy up [the] customers afterwards, get a new crop of Remade or slave-miners for the Arrowhead pits, keep the jails nice and full” (2000: 168). The government reaps the profits from illegal activities, and then proceeds to imprison the criminals they were dealing with, turning them into cheap labour and Remade soldiers. Remaking becomes New Crobuzon’s main production: a district annexed to Perdido Street Station has a twilight industry: Remaking. Where the borough met the river, subterranean punishment factories emitted wails of pain, sometimes, and hastily smothered screams. But for the sake of its public face, Spit Hearth was able to ignore that hidden economy with only a slight show of distaste. miéville 2000: 411

A business thrives on the exploitation of the lives of those who rebel, strike and commit crimes: they are commodified, punished by being dispossessed of their bodies. For the government, whose authority is clearly displayed, any deviation from the dominant ideology constitutes the forfeiting of one’s body. Isaac knows that “punishment was for someone. Some interest was served” (2000: 851). Punishment does not serve as vengeance, retribution or rehabilitation; rather, it constitutes an abuse of power, asserting the interests of the government. Instead of using the common word ‘rehabilitation’, Perdido Street Station adopts the word ‘remaking’, satirising the penal system, which is generally described as ‘corrective’, ‘reformative’ and ‘rehabilitating’, that is, transforming

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the criminal to fit the norms of the collective consciousness. David Garland explains that for Michel Foucault the birth of the modern prison signifies a need “to know the criminal, to understand the sources of criminality, and to intervene to correct them wherever possible” which aims at “producing normal, conforming individuals” (1994: 136). This knowledge of the criminal is applied to the body during incarceration: training his body in an attempt to tame his soul demonstrates the enforcement of power while also sustaining it. This echoes Friedrich Nietzsche’s4 formulation of the dialectic of power in which defiling and punishing the body of the criminal suggests a victory over him. For Nietzsche, there is positive pleasure in punishing, or as Garland rephrases it, “to punish another is to gratify the impulses of sadism and cruelty which a will to power over others produces in the human psyche” (1994: 63). This realisation of the need to dominate others by inflicting pain and humiliation is represented in Perdido Street Station by the ghettoisation of the city and by Remaking, the grotesque reshaping of offenders which supplants a caring rehabilitation into society. Instead, offenders are cruelly punished, contemptibly rejected, inciting further division in society and reinforcing the government’s hold on power. Perdido Street Station therefore exhibits a link between the violence of the urban architecture and the sadism inflicted on the body. As Elizabeth Grosz argues: The body and its environment … produce each other as forms of the hyperreal, as modes of simulation which have overtaken and transformed whatever reality each may have had into the image of the other: the city is made and made over into the simulacrum of the body, and the body, in its turn is transformed “citified”, urbanized as a distinctively metropolitan body. GROSZ 2005: 297

The body is not independent from its urban environment. The body and the city exist in a dynamic, “cobuilding” (Grosz 2005: 301) relationship in which they reflect and make each other. However, this hyperreality takes on authoritarian traits: The city’s form and structure provide the context in which social rules and expectations are internalized or habituated in order to ensure ­social 4 See Nietzsche (1998: 118–119).

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conformity, or position social marginality at a safe or insulated and bounded distance (ghettoization). This means that the city must be seen as the most immediately concrete locus for the production and circulation of power. grosz 2005: 302

The city’s centralised power dictates norms, physical and ideological, and marginalises difference and dissidence; the body will face punishment and exclusion if it does not conform. These defining processes of normalisation and rejection between the city and the body are at work in Perdido Street Station: the mutilated, oppressed and exploited bodies of the Remade worsen the ­ghettoisation and impoverishment of the city and its inhabitants. The marginalisation of difference, poverty and dissidence – is stigmatised and drives criminality, nourishing the Remaking process: in a vicious cycle, the ghettos and the Remade co-build one another.

Christopher Priest’s Inverted World

Christopher Priest’s Inverted World also depicts the city as a prison. The story evolves on two coexisting planes: that of Earth, following the laws of gravity as we know them, and that of the closed city of Earth, existing in a hyperboloid, hourglass-shaped plane where the laws of gravity have been inverted. The city of Earth needs to keep moving across planet Earth towards what is called the ‘optimum’, the stationary gravitational centre of the hyperboloid world where gravity is normal. The optimum pushes the ground to infinity: the further away from the optimum, the greater the gravity, which flattens the landscape and the inhabitants of the planet. Pushed away by the optimum, the city needs to be moved on its rail tracks to stay near the optimum and to avoid being crushed. The Navigators, the city’s rulers, determine the direction the city will take. They select men to become members of the various guilds which perform the duties necessary for the transportation of the city – such as protecting it, exploring its surroundings, or laying out its track – and only they are allowed out of the city. The narrative describes the apprenticeship of Helward Mann – a Future Guildsman in charge of surveying the city’s vicinity – and his relationship with his wife, Victoria, who is not allowed to leave the city because she is a woman. Women are scarce in the city and few baby girls are born, which is exploited to justify women not being allowed outside, making a prison of the city.

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The city is forced to buy women from outsiders, “in an effort to boost ­the population”, in “the hope that they’ll produce female babies” (Priest 2009: 55–56).5 Women become a commodity to be exchanged and controlled: the guildsmen have first choice for wives and not all men are able to marry. The feminine, which here embodies renewal and nurturing, withers in the discriminating carceral world of the city. This form of imprisonment is further unravelled as the details of Helward Mann’s apprenticeship are described. The novel depicts an authoritarian environment; the selected guildsmen are forbidden to reveal facts about the outside world and about the city’s movement to the rest of the population, a transgression punished by death. They have to swear the “oath [of secrecy which] is considered a matter of guild security” (2009: 13). Even the Navigators’ decisions on the path of the city are kept covert, leaving them unchallenged as they dictate the direction of the city’s path. They claim to the Guildsmen that the optimum “is the ideal place for the city to be” (2009: 41); this becomes the ideological slogan of the city as, if the city deviates from its stated aim, it will be flattened and punished. The inverted perception of the city inhabitants is revealed to be a distorted construction. As the city is halted by a seafront, the truth about the city’s movement is disclosed to the inhabitants of the city. The Navigators express their fear that the city will be destroyed by gravity. However, it is not flattened out: it remains, unaltered, coexisting on the real plane of planet Earth. John Fletcher comments on the ideological perception of the city-dwellers: “Imprisoned in their inherited and unquestioned beliefs they have for ages been laboriously winching their ‘city’ forward on rails in a continually-frustrated attempt to maintain it near the elusive ‘optimum’ where they claim spatial and temporal distortion is minimal” (1976: 23). The citizens of the prison-city are hypnotised by the obsessive pursuit for the optimum: the claim that the city is always “behind optimum” (Priest 2009: 24), behind production, suggests a n ­ ever-ending drive to control the city’s path. This obsession with the construed ideal results in insularity, as argued by Paul Kincaid: “Here the city that must forever travel forward because staying in one place means losing reality is an extreme representative of the island as prison” (2007: 470). For Kincaid, the city becomes insular, severing its ties with the rest of the world and reality, a prison producing its own inverted reality. The same could be said about New Crobuzon in Perdido Street Station: surrounded by forests and deserts, the city-state is confined, few inhabitants have places to escape to and their perception of reality is shaped by the authorities.

5 According to Lefebvre’s concept of the “urban optimum” (2003: 93), the ideal population of a city offers a useful means to explore this idea of population control.

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In Inverted World, the architecture of the city is designed to enforce the Nav­ igators’ control as it resembles a detention facility. Viewed from the outside, the city is revealed to be “approximately two hundred feet high, but the rest of it was a jumble of rectangles and cubes, fitted into what seemed to be a ­patternless arrangement of varying elevations” (2009: 34): an encased ­cube-shaped city, which has no windows and is fully covered by a roof, is constructed. Victoria reveals that access to the only inner uncovered corridor is limited: “It’s locked at night, and only open at some hours of the day. Sometimes it’s locked for several days on end” (2009: 57), a fact reminiscent of prisoners’ limited outdoors allowance. To compensate for the lack of sunlight, the city distributes vitamin D supplements. Victoria explains that the vitamin is “produced in the body by the action of sunlight on the skin. That’s worth knowing if you never see the sun” (2009: 58). It is administered to counteract the depression and bone ailments caused by the lack of exposure to sunlight. Helward notices how he and another guildsman have benefitted from the outdoors: “Neither man resembled the pale, undeveloped, and naïve boys who had grown up together: suntanned, bearded, muscular, and hardened” (2009: 170). He is now tanned and strong, unlike the rest of the inhabitants who have been depressed and weakened by the dark, carceral urban conditions. While the distribution of vitamins enables the population to remain healthy, it is also an attempt to biologically control the population. Studies by G.B. Gesch show a correlation between the intake of vitamin D by inmates and the “reduction [of] serious incidents” (2002: 26) during their incarceration, suggesting a more receptive attitude to rehabilitation. While Gesch recognises that poor nutrition within prisons is not the reason for antisocial behaviour, he argues that vitamin supplements can help with the mood of inmates. However, in Inverted World, the deprivation of natural light and the dispensing of vitamins are measures which serve to weaken, influence and tame the population, suggesting a total control over mood, thought and body. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault argues that “The more monstrous a criminal was, the more he must be deprived of light” (1979: 14), locked away from the sun and weakened. Foucault adds disciplinary power is “exercised through its invisibility; at the same time it imposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility. In discipline, it is the subjects who have to be seen. Their visibility assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them” (1979: 187). Darkness is used to heighten the effects of artificial light, allowing the criminal to be illuminated and blinded so that he can be observed, supervised and controlled. This subjection to power is apparent in Inverted World: the population is deprived of sunlight and made visible through confinement in the “clean and brightly decorated” (Priest 2009: 34) rooms and corridors inside the city, while the locus of power remains in the dark shroud of Guild

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secrecy. In Inverted World, the architecture of the city supports the power of the Navigators who demand obedience from the population. The confined atmosphere of the city’s indoor cubes is similar to jail cells. However, the bright corridors illuminate everyone, conferring a sense of transparency to the inner city, where everyone can be observed and controlled. For Foucault, the perfect disciplinary apparatus would allow a single gaze to see everything: A central point would be both the source of light illuminating everything, and a locus of convergence for everything that must be known: a perfect eye that nothing would escape and a centre towards which all gazes would be turned. foucault 1979: 173

That is, power is centralised, physically and authoritatively. This structure is mirrored in Inverted World: the brightness of the interior is powered by a nuclear generator at the heart of the city and produces the field responsible for the distorted perception of the population (Priest 2009: 299). It allows the Navigators to subdue the inhabitants of the city. Victoria exemplifies this as she “realized” that she has “been given no option”: as a woman, she has “no choice but to be kept inside” (2009: 59), weakened and oppressed in the city, accepting of the centralised ideology she was subjected to. In Inverted World, the centre of power generates both the distorting ideology which citizens must contemplate and obey, and the light which makes them constantly visible. The Militia Guild enforces this power. The dissident group, the Terminators, is aware that the city moves and doubts it will be crushed; it wants the city to stop and to end the search for the optimum. This group is repressed: “After a noisy argument, the Navigators summoned the assistance of the Militia and the meeting was closed” (2009: 227). The discussion on stopping the city is described as a “no more than a thorn”, the group as having “no real authority” (2009: 228). To make the Terminators understand the importance of moving the city, “It was decided that a programme of re-education should begin, to dramatize the necessity of moving the city” (2009: 227): it becomes imperative to re-educate – that is indoctrinate – the citizens so they comply with the ruling ideology. This echoes Foucault’s argument that the criminal is seen “as an enemy who must be re-educated into social life” (1979: 112) and that “the prison should educate its inmates” (1979: 266) who have to adopt the normative ideology if they are to be integrated into society. This “form of abuse of power” (Foucault 1979: 266) is present in Inverted World in the system of re-education. Not complying with the ideological terms of the Navigators becomes a crime, punished by physical violence and a normalising educational force.

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Alasdair Reynolds’ Terminal World

In Alasdair Reynolds’ Terminal World, the city of Spearpoint is built on a ver­ tical plane. The city is not unified but fractured into ‘zones’, the higher the zone, the higher the level of technology. Technology cannot be transposed from one zone to another, as it stops functioning. People are also affected when crossing zones: “zone sickness” is caused since the inhabitants’ cellular makeup is restructured to adjust to the transition, leading to blackouts and, in extreme cases, death. The zones are not stable, their boundaries shift during tremors, causing people to die and technology to stop functioning. The city faces a ­major zone shift, which could kill everyone and destroy the city. ­Quillon, a doctor who used to live in the highest zone, has to leave the city to find a way to prevent the city from being destroyed by the shift. Quillon meets and joins Swarm, Spearpoint’s former military arm, which was severed from the city during a zone shift. This enables Quillon to understand the reasons behind the zones shifts and to attempt to save the city and end social segregation. Spearpoint is structured and organised to implement class and social division: it is built in a “lazy spiral” (Reynolds 2010: 5), with a “tapering needle” (2010: 6), an almighty “Godscraper” (2010: 82), recalling the Spire in Perdido Street Station. The angels, a post-human race who can fly, dominate the city: living in the highest levels, they benefit from the most advanced technology. They overlook the other zones – Circuit City, Neon Heights, Steamville and Horsetown – whose names indicate the level of their technology. People’s ineptitude in crossing zones signifies a lack of social mobility: people are kept in their position and are not able to ascend to improve their condition and if they try, they suffer physically. The angels are reluctant to allow social mobility, as expressed by their fear of a shift to a lower zone, as it would mean a loss of their privileges and technology: [while] it was feasible for angels and other post-human entities to survive in zones further down Spearpoint from the Celestial Levels, they gained little advantage in doing so, and rather more pertinently preferred not to breathe the same air as lesser “prehuman” mortals. They lived high up because no one else could, enjoying … the warm airs rising from Spearpoint’s lower levels [that] made for ideal gliding conditions. reynolds 2010: 87

The angels have the technology needed to survive in the lower zones, but they do not want to mingle with those they deem inferior. Instead, they want to preserve the comforts they derive from the lower spheres. Interestingly, the

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social fragmentation is here expressed in terms of pre-humans and p ­ osthumans, suggesting an absence of humanity and discord. This division is further represented in the body: the bodies of angels and mortals are different. ­Angels are slender, light and winged, reflecting their elevated status. In contrast, people in Horsetown, where the industrial level is similar to early nineteenthcentury Europe, wear hats as they do not want to be “reminded of a place of swift machines and electric marvels” (2010: 78). By wearing hats, the people of Horsetown purposely block their view of the higher spheres as they do not want to see the luxuries they will never have; they also wish to forget the oppression caused by the lack of social mobility and the angels’ contempt for inhabitants of lower spheres. The restrictive structure of the city is starkly contrasted with the rest of the novel, in which Quillion travels the world. Quillion is the only angel successfully engineered to look human and lives undercover in the lower zones with minimal adverse effects: he is therefore an asset to the angels. As the city faces a major zone shift, threatening to disrupt the urban order, the angels double their efforts to find Quillion, who has escaped the angels’ gaze. A messenger of an angel dissident group warns Quillion that he is being hunted, so he decides to flee the Outzone, the wasteland making up the rest of the planet. If captured, he knows the angels would not share the cure for “zone sickness” with the rest of the city. Acclimatised to the configuration of Neon Heights, he needs to use a drug called Morphax-55 to adjust to the Outzone. Morphax has similar effects to morphine and soothes the pain of zone transitions, helping the body to adapt to a new zone. The words ‘morphine’ and ‘metamorphosis’ share the same Greek root morphe, which means ‘form’. Morphax-55 is not only an analgesic, it is also a drug which allows for transformation. It allows Quillion to travel in the Outzone where he meets Ricasso, Swarm’s c­ aptain, who understands the nature of the zones and the fragmentation of the world. The zones emanate from the Mire, aptly naming the impasse facing the city, whose incursion into reality caused its very fractionalisation, caused the “world [to be] made up of different game boards glued together at the e­ dges” to which “bodies are able to adjust” (2010: 364) by using Morphax. M ­ orphax allows Quillion to travel and therefore offers the possibility to transform the fragmented zone into a unified world, both geographically and socially. In these three novels, this ability to generate unity is achieved through movement and embracing multiplicity. In the Outzone, Quillion meets and rescues Nimcha, a Tectomancer – a compound signifying her ability to divine zone shifts – and her mother. Together, they travel, research and collaborate with Swarm to save the city: they take Nimcha to Spearpoint and realign the zones, successfully unifying the world. In Terminal World, nomadism is used

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as an alternative to the constrictive city: through movement and cooperation, the rigidity of the tyrannical urban environment can be defeated. Similarly, in Perdido Street Station, Isaac and Lin escape the city, after Lin was left in a vegetative state by the slake moths, the government’s escaped experiment. They reach the river docks full of ships “for whom New Crobuzon was just one stop on a journey” (Miéville 2000: 858). Considered alongside the sequel to Perdido Street Station, The Scar which takes place on a moving city sailing the seas, this suggests an open expanse of possibilities for both of them. In Inverted World, Helward also leaves the city and swims in the sea which has halted the city. Through the system of inversion inherent to the novel, this halt suggests movement. Swimming back to the beach, Helward is left to reassess his system of beliefs imposed by the Navigators and we are to understand that the city will be abandoned and that the citizens will mingle with outsiders. In all of these novels, then, the city is sick and corrosive and must be abandoned. Deleuze and Guattari argue that the function of the city and its roads is “to parcel out a closed space to people, assigning each person a share and ­regulating communications between shares. The nomadic trajectory does the opposite; it distributes people … in an open space, one that is indefinite and noncommunicating” (1999: 380). As in non-prescriptive: the nomadic symbolises the freedom of rebellion against a caging form of “territorialisation” (­Deleuze 1999: 347–358), a rigid control of space. However, the abandonment of the city does not solve the urban ideological fixity of the city. Instead, if the city is to be saved, the urban must be reassessed in a “nonideological” (Lefebvre 2003: 166) way, using a discourse of and about the urban, whose “incompletion is an essential part of its nature” (2003: 166). The urban has to be left open to change, to adapt dynamically to the needs of all its inhabitants. Multiplicity and openness should guide the shaping of the city: “Formed by the multitude, the new city is a space of cooperation, community and hybridization”, which points to “intersection, cohabitation and collective dwelling” (Lewis and Cho 2006: 87). Nomadism, in these texts, is used to suggest that the urban needs to be opened up to a cohesive, dynamic and hybridising society. These novels expose how the relation between the brutal imprisonment, the carceral urban condition and sadistic forms of punishment produce closure and inhumanity. As Garland argues, “One can challenge the institution by showing that the control of troublesome individuals can be undertaken in more humane and positive settings, that exclusion is anyway an unacceptable goal in a caring society” (1994: 290). There is a distance between the ideological claims of being humane and civilised, and the violence and exclusion that inmates, and city dwellers, face. This discrepancy is criticised and depicted as irrational and inhumane in the novels. In Inverted World, as Helward sees the

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world around him flatten due to his distorted perception, he explains that “the rationale was without terms of reference” (Priest 2009: 152). In Perdido Street Station, Isaac considers that a machine he is building is very restrictive, in the same manner as the urban and penal environment of New Crobuzon are: “That’s the damn trouble with excessive logic…No allowances for variables like headaches” (Miéville 2000: 582). In Terminal World, Swarm discovers the ruins of a city similar to Spearpoint, destroyed by the zone shifts and a lack of collaboration between its inhabitants. As Quillion considers that Spearpoint faces a similar fate, he thinks that “There was no reason to assume that logic and reason had any further say in the matter” (Reynolds 2010: 336). In these cities, being humane, compassionate and open-minded becomes impossible under authoritarian and irrational ideologies, which have forsaken the humane ability to change and care and opted to oppress their population by asserting their power. The open-ended nature of these novels expresses the need to constantly reassess the approach to the urban and the penal, so that they truly support, nurture and reflect the multiplicity, the difference and the hybridisation at the core of ever-changing communities.

Bibliography Primary References

Dickens, Charles. 2008. Hard Times. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miéville, China. 2011. King Rat. London: Pan Macmillan. Miéville, China. 2000. Perdido Street Station. Oxford: Pan Macmillan. Miéville, China. 2003. The Scar. London: Pan Macmillan. Priest, Christopher. 2009. Inverted World. London: Gollancz. Reynolds, Alastair 2010. Terminal World. London: Gollancz.



Secondary References

Deleuze, Gilles; Guttari, Felix. 1999. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: The Athlone Press. Fletcher, John. 1976. “Cultural Pessimists: The Tradition of Christopher Priest’s Fiction” in International Fiction Review 3 (1): 20–24. Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books. Garland, David. 1994. Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gesch, C. Bernard; Hammond, Sean M. et al. “Influence of Supplementary Vitamins, Minerals and Essential Fatty Acids on the Antisocial Behaviour of Young Adult

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Prisoners: Randomised, Placebo-Controlled Trial” in The British Journal of Psychiatry 181 (1): 22–28. Gordon, Joan. 2003. “Hybridity, Heterotopia, and Mateship in China Miéville’s ‘Perdido Street Station’” in Science Fiction Studies 30 (3): 456–476. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2005. “Bodies-Cities” in Bridge, G.W.S. (ed.) The Blackwell City Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing: 297–303. Harvey, David. 2005. “The Urban Process under Capitalism: A Framework for Analysis” in Bridge, G.W.S. (ed.) The Blackwell City Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing: 116–124. Kincaid, Paul. 2007. “Islomania? Insularity? The Myth of the Island in British Science Fiction” in Extrapolation 48 (3): 462–473. Lefebvre, Henri. 2007. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. Lefebvre, Henri. 2003. The Urban Revolution. London: The University of Minnesota Press. Lewis, Tyson; Cho, Daniel. 2006. “Home Is Where the Neurosis Is: A Topography of the Spatial Unconscious” in Cultural Critique 64 (Autumn): 69–91. Maczynska, Magdalena Spring. 2010. “This Monstrous City: Urban Visionary Satire in the Fiction of Martin Amis, Will Self, China Miéville, and Maggie Gee” in Contemporary Literature 51 (1): 58–86. Marx, Karl. 1998. The German Ideology. New York: Prometheus Books. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1998. On the Genealogy of Morals. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Somay, Bulent. 1984. “Towards an Open-Ended Utopia” in Science Fiction Studies 11, (March): 25–38.

Part 2 Cities of Estrangement

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Time Travel, Dystopia, and the Manhattan Skyscraper in George Allan England’s The Last New Yorkers and Murray Leinster’s “The Runaway Skyscraper” Rosalind Fursland Abstract The skyscraper has assumed a prominent place in the metropolitan landscape, prompting science fiction writers to respond by enfolding these structures into their narratives. I focus upon two early-twentieth century works of science fiction; George Allan England’s trilogy Darkness and Dawn (1914) and Murray Leinster’s short story “The Runaway Skyscraper” (1919). In both narratives, the vehicle enabling time travel is the Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower which, surmounted by a large clock, was completed in 1909 and remained the world’s tallest building until 1913. I will argue that by incorporating modern architecture within the early twentieth-century time travel narrative, the skyscraper is transported into the perceived past or imagined future, acting as a versatile symbol of contemporary modernity.

Key Terms modernism – cities – skyscrapers – architecture – New York

No longer Liberty held her bronze torch aloft. Save for a black, misshapen mass protruding through the tree-tops, the huge gift of France was no more. england 1914: 20

New York has long been the subject of fantasy. Since its accelerated burgeoning in the decades surrounding the turn-of-the-century, the terms ‘dream city’ and the ‘city of unreality’ have been pseudonymous with New York’s spellbinding skyscrapers and glittering lights. As Larry R. Ford states, “by the early 1920s New York City became the undisputed skyscraper capital of the country, with a skyline that was recognized around the world” (1992: 186). Being one

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of the most prominent gateways to America has long associated the city with the pursuit of dreams. New York’s lively and eclectic milieu has, moreover, ­provided inspiration for countless artists and writers throughout its history, generating an image of the city that is portrayed in literature, on film, and in visual art. The skyscraper, itself a manifestation of technological advancement and modernity, has assumed a prominent place in the metropolitan landscape, hence allowing science fiction writers to respond by incorporating these structures into their narratives. This chapter focuses upon two early-twentieth ­century works of science fiction: Murray Leinster’s short story “The Runaway Skyscraper” (1919), which was originally published in Argosy magazine, one of the first to be dedicated solely to pulp fiction and George Allan England’s “The Last New Yorkers” (1912), later published as the first book of the trilogy Darkness and Dawn (1914), under the new title “The Vacant World”. Both works contain Wellsian themes (referring to H.G. Wells) in being early examples of science fiction pertaining to time travel, in both cases occurring through the vehicle The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower. Proto-science fiction (containing science fiction themes but before the ­coining of the term) had been in existence arguably since the mythmaking of early civilisations, but by the second part of the nineteenth century, ­coinciding with developments in technology, the science fiction genre had begun to flourish. The novel often regarded as a turning point in science fiction, and certainly as a benchmark in the time travel narrative, is H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895). Although many previous stories had featured time travel, ­including early concepts in Hindu and Buddhist mythology, The Time M ­ achine was ­instrumental in being the most widely recognised work to prototype a v­ ehicle through which time travel occurred. Many previous examples, ­including Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle (1819), had featured sleep and dreaming as processes of time travel, thus more closely aligning them with fantasy, as “involving magic and adventure, especially in a setting other than the real world, rather than science fiction” (Oxford English Dictionary Online). The  Time ­Machine popularised the time machine as a vehicle for purposeful and selective time travel, although earlier examples appeared in Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau’s El anacronópete (1887) and H.G. Wells’ own short story The Chronic Argonauts (1888). The themes highlighted in The Time Machine have since re-emerged countless times and in numerous guises within literature, film and tv. Variations on the Time Machine occur in bbc’s Doctor Who (1963–), Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future movies (1985–1990), Robert A. Heinlein’s short story By his Bootstraps (1941) and novel The Door into Summer (1957), Robert Silverberg’s

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Hawksbill ­Station (1968), K.W. Jeter’s Morlock Night (1979), Stephen Baxter’s The Time Ships (1995) and Joe Haldeman’s The Accidental Time Machine (2007). The world as depicted by Wells 800,000 years in the future, though at first ­appearing to the time traveller as a concordant Eden of peace and harmony, is soon uncovered as possessing a subterranean light-fearing underclass called ­Morlocks, who toil underground to maintain their Eloi superiors. Wells’ masterpiece i­ nspired many to imagine worlds and futures beyond the realms of their surroundings. For years, science fiction novels and short-stories, not to become science fact until nearly a century later, predicted the creation of m ­ achines to access the moon; Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and Around the Moon (1870), H.G. Wells’ The First Men in the Moon (1901), Jacques Offenbach’s operetta Le voyage dans la Lune (1895), as well as Georges Méliès’ 1902 silent movie of the same title, to name just a few. The ever evolving and expanding boundaries of possibility occurring at the turn of the century, moreover, manifested themselves in the architecture and infrastructure of New York City. With the influence of popular Wellsian and Vernian literature, the zeitgeist of change pervading every vicinity of the city, and the Manhattan skyline itself resembling a cityscape carried from the ­future and brought into the present, the climate of forward thinking was rife in early twentieth century New York. The era was particularly significant in the development of New York’s physical aesthetic which strongly distinguished it from other cities of the time. It was a vision of precocious modernity and its futuristic landscape, radiant lighting and advanced rapid-transit s­ ystems lent to the city oneiric and imaginary associations. The seemingly otherworldly ­architecture, previously only existent in the imagination, also opened the minds of forward thinkers to the multiple futuristic possibilities inherent in this new cityscape. Prophetic designs of New York’s future were demonstrated in various forms. In 1900, for example, The New York World published Louis Biedermann’s ­illustrated prediction of New York in 1999. The illustration features skyscrapers reaching dizzying heights with interconnecting bridges and airships resembling the spherical shape of common conceptions of alien space-craft. The “pictorial forecast of the city” simply accentuates contemporaneous developments beginning to burgeon around 1900 (Biedermann 1900). Manhattan as depicted by Biedermann, abounding with skyscrapers, unfettered by zoning legislation (since building upwards was the natural solution to the space limitations of the island), appears as a futuristic mastodon, monstrous yet majestic. Similarly, the editor and publisher Moses King imagined a futuristic urban landscape in his illustration “The Cosmopolis of the Future”, first published in 1909 and later featured posthumously on the cover of his photographic journal

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King’s Views of New York in 1911. Although the common prophecy of a widespread monorail remains unrealised and the bridges between buildings largely non-existent, the billowing plumes of smoke as shown in Biedermann’s prediction and the aviation innovations foretold by both illustrations are not far from accurate. In providing longstanding inspiration for science-fiction, mythmaking and imaginings of the future, New York has become a city shrouded in legend. From the Gotham City of Batman, which made its first appearance in the fourth ­issue of the comic (1940), to the idealised and exaggerated city of the ‘90s as depicted in Seinfeld and Friends, New York has been viewed by audiences in many manifestations. Therefore, in the light of the Wellsian themes discussed, combined with the awe-inspiring architecture of the city by the early twentieth century, New York was a vast urban playground, a vacant stage set upon which many fictional narratives could and would be played out. Upon her first arrival in the 1910s, the modernist poet Mina Loy commented that the skyline was akin to “architecture conceived in a child’s dream” (Stansell 2000: 6). The skyscraper, at first an alien vessel on the horizon of the city, brought with it fear as much as fascination. The “brooding menace of the floodlit ­skyscraper” (Sharpe 2008: 171) was an architectural manifestation of the times and for many city dwellers, the arrival of modernity filled them with dread. As Christoph Lindner remarks in his introduction to the essay collection ­Urban Space and Cityscapes, many accounts from the era “register deep-rooted c­ ultural ­anxieties about modern urban development and the profoundly transitory nature of ­urban landscape” (2006: 11). The monstrous new urban landscape eclipsed much of the old city and for some the fear of unrestricted growth forecast an apocalyptic vision, the bold and new developments signifying the beginning of the end. In her short story “Behind the Singer Tower” (1912), Willa Cather describes the appearance of the city as if it were a pubescent teenager, just having endured a growth spurt and still unsure of itself. The city itself, as we looked back at it, seemed enveloped in a tragic selfconsciousness. Those incredible towers of stone and steel seemed, in the mist, to be grouped confusedly together, as if they were confronting each other with a question. They looked positively lonely, like the great trees left after a forest is cut away. One might fancy that the city was protesting, was asserting its helplessness, its irresponsibility for its physical conformation, for the direction it had taken. It was an irregular parallelogram pressed between two hemispheres, and, like any other solid squeezed in a vise, it shot upward. cather 1970: 43

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Cather’s personification of the city with its apologetic demeanour incites an air of pity and remorse. As an iconic symbol of modern cities, it is no coincidence, therefore, that in the two stories to be discussed, Leinster and England place the s­ kyscraper at the centre of the narrative. In both instances, it is the skyscraper which ­replaces the Wellsian time machine as the mode of inter-temporal transport. In both cases the temporal anomalies, which occur are accidental, the fact that the phenomena occur within a structure which so embodied modernity is of particular significance. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company tower was to many an emblem of precocious modernity, pushing human capability to its limits. Until 1913, when it was surpassed in height by the Woolworth Building, the Met Life tower dominated the Manhattan skyline. As can be seen in ­subsequent photographs, the tower still dwarfed the buildings in its immediate vicinity. As well as being a notable presence on the 1910s Manhattan skyline, this tower is moreover notable for the four large clocks surmounting it to be viewed from every angle. This fact is very telling when considering two ­narratives which concern time travel and the implications behind their ­chosen ­locus. As Adrienne Brown concurs, “one reason for choosing Met Life over Woolworth was that the latter lacked the iconic clock necessary for a timetraveling story, not to mention the other spectacular accoutrements such as the four bells that played Handel every fifteen minutes and the “guiding light” topping Met Life” (2011: 165). The initial design of the building by Napoleon LeBrun and sons was intended to reflect the Venetian campanile of St Marks, and it was the final design which incorporated the famous clock “visible over a mile away” (Domosh 1988: 337). As Mona Domosh tells us “[t]he enormous hands of the clock were illuminated at night and coordinated with the electric lantern at the top that, through a series of signals, flashed out the time. The image of the tower, with beams radiating from its top and the words “The Light That Never Fails” encircling the beams, became the logo for the company” (1988: 339). Thus, the Met Life tower was a multifarious beacon, not only a symbol of modernity and capitalism, but also a benchmark for the architectural feats of which, by this time, man was capable. The clock as an object was, long before Wells’ popularisation of the time machine method, a frequent mode of time travel in literature, Edward Page Mitchell’s The Clock that Went Backward (1881) being one of the earliest works of literature to explore the concept of time travel through the means of a device. Murray Leinster (1896–1975), whose real name was William Fitzgerald ­Jenkins, was a prolific pulp fiction writer and essayist. Having published his first story when he was just 19, Leinster would become an early pioneer of some of the most influential ideas in science fiction, as well as predicting future science

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fact, for example a prototype of computers and the internet in “A Logic Named Joe” (published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1946). In “The Runaway Skyscraper”, a geological anomaly causes the Met Life tower to become unstable, however, instead of crumbling to the ground, the tower falls backwards in time, transporting its urbane executives to a pre-Columbian Manhattan roamed by Native Americans. The story then becomes one of survival as the protagonists, Arthur Chamberlain and his love interest Estelle Woodward try to maintain civilised society among the ravenous office workers, while also attempting to discover a method to return to their own time. Though the science is highly speculative, Leinster’s short story presents a telling insight into some of the fears of the ordinary people as nature reclaims the city and propels it backwards in time, restoring it to its original state. England’s “The Last New Yorkers” contains similar themes on the war ­between nature and the synthetic existence of present day New York. ­England is known to have been a keen traveller and lover of nature, at one point t­ aking a sabbatical from writing to become a chicken farmer. It is also known that England was a socialist, and some facets of this persuasion are evident in his writing. His stories commonly feature the hypothetical and the s­ upernatural, including alien invasion, time travel, scientific disaster and the Frankensteinesque creation of a perfect woman. Often considered England’s pièce de r­ ésistance is the trilogy Darkness and Dawn, the first chapter of which was published under the title “The Last New Yorkers: A Weird Story of Love and Adventure in the Ruins of a Fallen Metropolis” in The New York Evening Mail in 1912 (Brown 2011: 165). Although the concept does not strictly conform to time travel per se, in this instance, the protagonists Allan Stern and Beatrice Kendrick awaken 1500 years after a meteor disaster has destroyed civilization, and nature has ­begun to reclaim the city. The characters have been preserved in a state of stasis or suspended animation, their bodies preserved in a state anticipating cryogenics, enabling them both to reawaken and explore their surroundings. Upon awaking but before the realisation of time travel has dawned, England’s narrator portends the phenomenon, remarking that from Allan’s haggard appearance, “you might have thought him some incredibly ancient Rip Van Winkle come to life upon that singular stage, there in the tower” (1914: 20). The work conforms to post-apocalyptic tropes while also containing ­parallels with the ‘dying earth’ subgenre (set at the end of time or the end of the earth), as England explores the possibility of Manhattan’s dystopian future. Succumbing to the assumption that all great cities must fall, the characters survey the post-apocalyptic vision as New York’s iconic structures lie as relics in an architectural wasteland.

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In both works by Leinster and England, it is not only the depictions of past and future worlds which are significant, but the writing is also telling of the ­tenor of the 1910s, where the characters originated. Therefore, by ­uprooting characters shaped by the 1910 era and situating them in a pre-or post-­civilisation construction of America, Leinster and England provide just as much of a commentary on their own time as they do on their assumptions of the past and foreboding forecasts of the future. Moreover, by incorporating modern ­architecture within the early twentieth-century time travel ­narrative, the skyscraper can be transported into the perceived past or imagined future, and thus, juxtaposed with its surroundings, acts as a versatile symbol with manifold ­connotations. The skyscraper’s arrival in pre-Columbian Manhattan, for example, can be interpreted as an omen foretelling the arrival of c­ ivilisation, while its manifestation in post-civilisation America allows it to act as an ethereal beacon haunting fallen civilisation. The two pieces provide a portal into the early twentieth century American psyche, as the contemporary ­modernity of the 1910s is juxtaposed with the perceived future and equally dystopian past.

“They had seen New York Vanish Before their Eyes”: Time Travel in Skyscraper City

The skyscraper as a vehicle for time travel was in many ways an obvious choice, its streamlined construction and seemingly airborne design providing much scope for speculation as to its powers of travel. The Met Life tower, moreover, with its pointed summit reaching for the skies, is geometrically not dissimilar from the eventual design of nasa’s Apollo 11 rocket. The front cover of an early edition of Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, features a gold e­ mbossed exemplar of the projectile used in the novel by the Baltimore Gun Club to fire three men into space. The proportions of the vehicle are again not far removed from that of skyscrapers appearing throughout America’s cities, but most prominently in New York. The scientific foundation of Leinster’s short story is as precarious as the geological rift upon which his skyscraper stands, but it is the nebulousness of his explanation for the time travel phenomenon which is most telling of the mores of the era. It is precisely the unlikely course of events which take place in “The Runaway Skyscraper”, all accounted for by “a flaw in the rock on which the foundations rested [that] had developed and let them sink, not downward, but into the Fourth Dimension”, which mark the story as a significant work of science fiction (Leinster 2007: 19). Arthur’s speculation as to the cause of the temporal

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rift seems to mirror Leinster’s own uncertain tone (or his own uncertainty). As he mentally assesses his theory, the protagonist equates the falling of the skyscraper through time to the ascent and descent of an e­ levator: “­Arthur likened the submergence of the tower in the oceans of time to an ­elevator sinking past the different floors of an office building” (Leinster 2007: 36). With the elevator being a key feature of modernity, this is a key e­ xample of Leinster using an ­already existing technology and seeking to parallel and apply its ­motions within a broader pseudo-scientific context. As Brown establishes, “[t]he skyscraper could not have existed without the 1850 invention of the ­elevator and the 1885 invention of the steel-frame skeleton” (2011: 167). Thus, just as the ­elevator ­provides transportation between the floors of a skyscraper, in Leinster’s story, the Met Life tower provides transportation backwards in time as it descends into the earth. In the time travel process presented here, the travellers arrive in post-­ colonial America at a time when “Rome, the synonym for antiquity of c­ ulture, might still be an obscure village” (Leinster 2007: 31). Indeed, Arthur, Estelle and the rest of the office workers in the building witness the phenomenon of time literally rewinding around them. As the renowned Met Life clock begins moving backward, accompanied by a Steampunk (a genre of science ­fiction that typically features steam-powered machinery rather than advanced ­technology) soundtrack of cogs turning with an “ominous creaking and groaning”, visions of past manifestations of New York begin flashing past the building’s many office windows, as the sun rises and falls rapidly in the sky (Leinster 2007: 7). Leinster depicts the journey as the sun “rose overhead, … as if by magic the streets were thronged with people. Everyone seemed to be running at top-speed. The few teams they saw moved at a breakneck pace – backward” (2007: 10). Just like watching movie footage in reverse, therefore, Leinster’s i­ nterpretation of time travel sees the whole world in reverse – the only constant being the skyscraper and those within it. Leinster makes this connection to movies when his narrator observes there to be “hardly any distinguishing between the times the sun was up and the times it was below now, as the darkness and light f­ ollowed each other so swiftly the effect was the same as one of the old flickering motion-­ pictures” (2007: 12). There are cinematic connotations of the city flickering like an old movie in rewind, as New York is literally unmade, “[b]it by bit, building by building, the city began to disintegrate and become replaced by smaller, dingier buildings”. Eventually, all of New York’s contemporary urban landscape is, with the exception of the Met Life building, unwritten and r­everts back to a collection of wigwams in “a time way back b­ efore the discovery of America” (Leinster 2007: 18). Upon the arrival of the skyscraper, an alien in this  ­untouched land, Native Americans issue from within their homes, and,

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staring “in ­incredulous amazement, their eyes growing wider and wider  … broke and ran, not stopping to gather together their belongings, nor pausing for even a second glance at the weird strangers who i­nvaded their domain” (2007: 17). The pure terror of the Pre-­Columbian Natives at the sight of advanced ­infrastructure and its foreign-looking arrivals removes any threat of inter-temporal warfare. The manifestation of the skyscraper in pre-­Columbian Manhattan, therefore, acts as a foretoken to the dawn of civilized society. When analysing the rationale for the Met Life tower, rather than the taller Woolworth Tower, as a setting, Brown also comments on the symbolic shape of the tower when contrasted with its post-time travel setting. She remarks that “the Met Life’s slenderer and sleeker base and tower granted its silhouette a more spearlike shape, which is emphasized in the illustration that accompanies the story. The Met Life tower’s shape visually m ­ irrors the spear-holding Native American in the foreground” (Brown  2011: 177). The  symbols a­ ssociated with the skyscraper, even when placed out of context in a ­completely alien time and environment, seem to adapt and transmogrify to their setting, emulating their surroundings in different but just as significant ways. As D ­ omosh conjectures, “no one landscape feature is more expressive of the modern world than the skyscraper; yet surprisingly few studies have a­ ttempted to analyse how skyscrapers as landscape artefacts” (1988: 339). Many major artists, for example Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, fled to less developed European cities including Paris and Florence, many for the ­purposes of escaping looming modernity. For the Native Americans in the  ­story, they preview an architecture which reached so far into the sky and came closer to the sun, moon and stars than imaginable. This is noteworthy as for the Native Americans the sky was of great significance. These early cultures not only had their own astrological beliefs but also lived their lives by the rising and setting of the sun and the vision of the moon and stars. The appearance of the Skyscraper was intimidating to many contemporaries to its creation, therefore in a time before man-made interference with the basic features of the earth, the skyscraper is devastatingly alien. Nevertheless, Brown concludes that Leinster’s depiction of the Native Americans in the story is as “friendly primitives” (2011: 181). The past as presented by Leinster, therefore, does not steer the story as England does, towards dystopian inter-racial warfare. Instead, the main ­objective of the protagonists is deciphering the cause of the temporal phenomenon and how to reverse it. In attempting to explain to Estelle the extent and nature of the phenomenon they had undergone, Arthur calls upon H.G. Wells to help explain. He queries, “have you read anything by Wells? The “Time Machine”, for instance?” and though the response is negative, Arthur goes on to explain the theory of

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the Fourth Dimension to a distraught Estelle (Leinster 2007: 13). As Brown further observes, Leinster also does some “borrowing from Wells’ representation of urban London for his own depiction of early twentieth century Manhattan” (2011: 176). She continues by explaining that Leinster’s characters treat the skyscrapers as “staid monuments of urban life. No longer lampooned as o­ bjects of fear of novelty … here they appear as fully-assimilated parts of the skyline, particularly when juxtaposed with the frontier settings of primitive Manhattan” (2011: 176). Thus, while referencing the theories of his perhaps most significant science-fiction predecessor, particularly on the subject of time ­travel, Leinster provides a fleeting glance into his own literary influences. Though the time travel is accidental, backwards in time and the native population not particularly dystopian, in referencing Wells, Leinster quotes him as being perhaps the most influential science fiction writer, best known for popularising the time travel genre. The constant comparisons between pre- and post-civilisation New York are as revealing of attitudes within the metropolis of this era, as they are of Leinster’s assumptions of the pastoral post-Columbian world. Upon arrival at their destination, Arthur’s initial reactions to the new scenery are recorded. Where, from this same window Arthur had seen the sun setting behind the Jersey hills, all edged with the angular roofs of factories, with their chimneys emitting columns of smoke, he now saw the same sun sinking redly behind a mass of luxuriant foliage. And where he was accustomed to look upon the tops of high buildings – each entitled to the name of “skyscraper” – he now saw miles and miles of waving green branches. The wide Hudson flowed on placidly, all unruffled by the arrival of this strange monument upon its shores – the same Hudson Arthur knew as a busy thoroughfare of puffing steamers and chuffing launches … And far, far below him – Arthur had to lean well out of his window to see it – stood a collection of tiny wigwams. Those small bark structures represented the original metropolis of New York. leinster 2007: 26

The vision of the city undone, from a metropolis where “luxuriant foliage” has replaced factory chimneys, “green branches” have replaced skyscrapers and the entire city has been resorted to a “tiny collection of wigwams”, is a dramatic image. The narrator asserts that: [t]o look out at a vast, untouched wilderness where hitherto they had seen the most highly civilized city on the globe would have been s­ tartling

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and depressing enough in itself, but to know that they were alone in a whole continent of savages and that there was not, indeed, in all the world a single community of people they could greet as brothers was terrifying. leinster 2007: 31

Leinster refers regularly to the highly domesticated, comfort-loving New ­Yorkers transported back in time. He repeatedly describes the office workers’ terror and fear in the face of danger, highlighting the dearth of survival ­instincts among metropolitan dwellers. Leinster alludes to the New ­Yorkers stating that “[s]oft in the body as these people were, city-bred and unaccustomed to face other than the most conventionalized emergencies in life, they were terrified” (2007: 31). The speculated reactions of New Yorkers born and bred in flat and office block captivity provide a telling commentary on the ­perceptions of the urban population of 1910s New York. The arrival of the Skyscraper in the ­Native American past moreover juxtaposes these modern Americans with the ­Native American population, allowing social comparisons to be drawn.The Americans from the future stand as a warning to the natives, signifying the upcoming fate of their people, as the colonialists would ­replace the culture, perceived as ‘savage’, with an imposed form of ‘civilisation’. A ­ lthough not specifically characterised as destruction, rather a rewinding of time and undoing of development, the themes of Leinster’s Runaway Skyscraper chime with the theme of the city’s annihilation as extensively detailed in Max Page’s The City’s End (2008). From the dawn of New York’s dramatic ascent from the late nineteenth century onwards, there has been a constant theme of destruction and the city’s un-building running through many works of art and literature. Page asserts that “America’s writers and imagemakers have pictured New York’s annihilation in a stunning range of ways … American culture has been obsessed with fantasising about the destruction of New York” (2008: 4). Thus, while Leinster’s story conforms to the theme of New York’s destruction as the bemused office workers watch while the city collapses around them, the method of its undoing diverges from the usual devastation wrought by storms, floods, fires and meteorites.

“Dead lay the city”: A Dystopian Outlook upon New York

While the possibility of Wellsian time travel, perhaps prompted by New York’s embodiment of modernity, is characterised in “The Runaway Skyscraper”, ­England’s trilogy Darkness and Dawn follows the path of a more traditional

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dystopian wasteland. As the New York skyline pushed the boundaries of ­human possibility and inspired artists to imagine the impossible, a far more cataclysmic event was also being depicted, that of New York’s ultimate demise. The arrival of modernity which embodied New York somewhat unceremoniously from the nineteenth century onwards, for some was also synonymous with eventual ubiquitous dystopia. Leinster’s Arthur is left to contemplate the loss of the city from memory as its reverting into the past through un-building leaves no remnant of what had been, or more accurately what was to come. Whereas Leinster’s vision of New York’s past and possible future hints at an apocalyptic possibility, England’s first book of his trilogy, on which this section will predominantly focus, f­ eatures a post-apocalyptic world where the still recognisable monuments of New York lie as the graveyard of civilisation, a reminder of man’s greatest achievements, but ultimate vulnerability to the supreme power of the universe. As Page acknowledges, “visions of New York’s destruction resonated with some of the most long-standing themes in American history: the ambivalence toward cities, the troubled reaction to immigrants and racial diversity, the fear of technology’s impact, and the apocalyptic strain in American religious life” (2008: 4). Similar fears are particularly prevalent during the scene in Darkness and Dawn when the two protagonists climb to the top of the tower and survey the fallen city. The narrator describes the apocalyptic vista, as “over the incredible mausoleum of civilization they peered” (England 1914: 19). The protagonists also note the destruction of one of the city’s most recognisable landmarks, as “[d]ead lay the city … no longer Liberty held her bronze torch aloft” (England 1914: 20). Beatrice remarks on the scene, questioning, “Can it be possible”, whispered she, “that you and – and I – are really like Macaulay’s lone watcher of the world-wreck on London Bridge?” (1914: 22). Examining the scene, Beatrice draws a parallel between the dismal cityscape of the future before her, and Thomas Babington Macaulay’s “New Zealander” described in his 1840 essay on Leopold von Ranke’s History of the Popes. In his essay, Macaulay predicted that after the fall of civilisation, “some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s” (1840: 229). Beatrice therefore likens herself and Allan to Macaulay’s post-apocalyptic New Zealander, contemplating the ruins of a once great city. David Skilton notes that “[t]he extraordinary currency of the New Zealander for many years, and the self-conscious discussion of him, suggest that the future ruin of the metropolis was quite generally accepted” (2004). In 1892, Montgomery Schuyler published the chapter “The Brooklyn Bridge as a Monument” in his monograph American Architecture (1892). He speculates on the New Zealander’s vista after the fall of New York:

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But when our New Zealander takes his stand above the saddles that are now ridden by the cables of the bridge, to look over the site of a f­ orsaken city, there will be no ruins of churches – at least, of churches now in ­being – for him to sketch or see. The web of woven steel that now hangs ­between the stark masses of the towers may have disappeared, its slender filaments rusted into nothingness under the slow corrosion of the centuries. … It is not unimaginable that our future archaeologist, looking from one of these towers upon the solitude of a mastless river and a ­dispeopled land, may have no other means of reconstructing our civilization than that which is furnished him by the tower on which he stands. What will his judgement of us be? schuyler 1892: 71

England’s description of the fall of civilisation follows in a strong tradition of post-apocalyptic dystopian visions of cities. The attention around New York as a key candidate for destruction, as Page observes, became particularly prominent with the developments in technology and the arrival of modernity in the decades pivoting the turn-of-the-century. These themes have continued and even proliferated in recent years as the events of 9/11 are still fresh in the collective memory. In evaluating the motives behind these common i­maginings of New York’s destruction, Page cites this as an era “when the divisions within, and the fear of attack from abroad, seemed most to threaten the city. The e­ xplosion of New York disaster scenarios, in print and on canvas, showed the city at its most productive and fearful” (2008: 4). He also observes that, with New York as a worldwide beacon welcoming numerous immigrants into A ­ merica’s vast melting pot, “[t]o destroy New York is to strike symbolically at the heart of the United States” (2008: 14). In a similar way, the depiction of the destruction of New York’s most recognised symbols, from Brooklyn Bridge to the Statue of Liberty strikes at the heart of the city itself. Without these universally renowned monuments, New York cannot remain New York. Its historic attractions are what define it as a city, and without Liberty’s torch welcoming the “huddled masses”, as Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus”, inscribed at the statue’s base famously pronounces, the city loses its individuality, returning to nature in a mass of rubble. The theme of returning to nature as the infrastructure of the city is ­reclaimed by the elements runs within both Leinster and England’s writing. Though for Leinster the return to nature is one of reversal rather than reclamation, the ­reason for the time travel’s occurrence is, in the first place, due to g­ eological instability – an “unknown geologic fault line in the crust of the island” (2008: 25) – ­therefore confirming the reassertion of nature’s superiority to ­monstrous

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­ odernity. The recurring assumption of the inevitability of nature’s ultimate m revenge is echoed as Allan exclaims, “[e]verything’s so overgrown with trees you can’t tell where it begins or ends. Nature has her ­revenge at last, on man!” (England 1914: 20). Beatrice responds to this by confirming it to be “the universal claim, made real … Everywhere that roots can hold at all, ­Mother Nature has set up her flags again” (1914: 20). Hence, Leinster and E ­ ngland’s works both point to the inevitability of Mother Nature’s overthrow and the precarious temporality of man’s stay on Earth. While in the city’s decline, the return of new life and uprising of nature previously stunted by human abatement have signified a rebirth, England’s u ­ rbane New Yorkers only view the new landscape as dead. “Not a sign of life anywhere; not a sound; the forests growing think among the ruins? A dead world if – if all the world is like this part of it! All dead, save you and me!” (1914: 12). It seems paradoxical that even with the return of the very much alive forests to the ruined city, when gazing out over the landscape Allan and Beatrice can only see death. This significant focus on the interplay between life and death in a post-apocalyptic world is moreover echoed in England’s chapter titles. For example, “The City of Death” in book i The Vacant World (originally published as “The Last New Yorkers”) and “Deadly Peril”, “The Dungeon of Skeletons” and “Face to Face with Death”, juxtaposed with “The Rebirth of Civilization” in book ii Beyond the Great Oblivion and “Death, Life and Love” in book iii The Afterglow. Although in the most-part, the architecture of New York was manmade, metallic and artificial, the protagonists remember it as having had a life in its own right, its beating heart lying within its population, now deceased. Beatrice pointedly misquotes quotes from William Wordsworth’s poem “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802”, which ends with the lines “Dear God! The very houses seem asleep | And all that mighty heart is standing still” (1914: 55). The poem is apt in reflecting the loss of New York’s heart, in what Allan refers to as a “Life-in-death” (England 1914: 54). In its death, the city is very much alive. While sifting through the wreckage of a train, for example, Allan is con­ fronted by a “goggle-eyed toad [which] stared impudently at him from a long tangle of rubbish that had been a train – stalled there forever by the final blocksignal of death” (1914: 60). Later, Allen and Beatrice hear the haunting call of wolves as “far off, they heard a faint re-echoing roar” (1914: 26). Nevertheless, with the dangers of the now wild wasteland, the ­protagonists can take no ­solace in the existence of other life. Allan conjectures on the “strong probability that life, human life I mean, is everywhere extinct – save right here in this room!” (1914: 26). He evidences this with the likelihood that any humans in ­existence would have travelled back to New York to forage through the ­remnants of

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“­incalculable treasures” (1914: 26). The reaction of these former city dwellers to the arrival of forest, undergrowth and wild animals amongst what was once an urban jungle is characteristic of hyper-evolved human behaviour. These modern New Yorkers are so used to the comforts and conveniences of the city, they are unable to perceive life as continuing after the fall of human-kind without the amenities of city life. “Dark blue the shadows streamed across the ruined city with its crowding forests its blank-staring windows and sagging walls, its thousands of gaping vacancies, where wood and stone and brick had crumbled down – the city where once the tides of human life had ebbed and flowed, roaring restlessly” (1914: 22). The ­dichotomy between life and death here therefore lies in the notion that in the death of the New York and its civilians, the city has come alive with new life, teeming with nature. For the urban protagonists, the idea of coexisting alongside what they view as the “unintelligent and overbearing dominance of nature” is all too much. This serves as a stark reminder of nature’s ultimate dominance over mankind, “of Nature overwhelming all man’s work” (1914: 169). England ends his trilogy by poignantly quoting from Robert G. Ingersoll’s vision of the future in “Decoration Day Oration” (1882): I see a world where thrones have crumbled and where kings are dust. The aristocracy of idleness has perished from the earth. … Nature’s forces have by Science been enslaved. Lightning and light, wind and wave, frost and flame, and all the secret subtle powers of earth and air are the tireless toilers for the human race. ingersoll 1900: 432

Ingersoll’s vision of the world thus contradicts the dystopian image portrayed by England in his trilogy Darkness and Dawn. Ingersoll envisions a utopian future where nature has been fully harnessed by human intervention; it is a future of man overcoming nature for its own purposes, thereby overriding England’s ­vista of nature’s ultimate supremacy. It seems that by including Ingersoll’s ­vision in the last paragraphs of the novel, England is calling on the reader to compare the moral dilemma of man versus nature and decipher which is preferable.

Conclusions

With the metropolis of New York signifying more defiantly than any other city the arrival of modernity came the breeding of newly imagined ideas and

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b­ eliefs. Leinster’s speculating on the still futuristic possibilities of time travel and projecting them into the realms of possibility in 1910s New York are revealing of the broadening horizons of science fiction and its application to the modern city. Meanwhile England’s presentation of the fallen city echoes a different, more cataclysmic reaction to modernity, that of the perceived inevitability of New York’s ultimate desolation. Modern New York could not help but provoke a reaction and provided the inspiration for many fictional cities. Many writers and artists felt the desire to document its evolution, in addition to a partiality towards imagining its destruction. As is depicted in many varied art forms from the era of the early twentieth century, the city became a hotbed of artistic activity, being portrayed from multifaceted angles through visual art, film, literature and photography. Leinster and England’s contrasting visions of time travel provide windows into both distant pasts and futures, while the united image of the Met Life tower anchors the narratives within the age from which they emerged. The skyscraper as a mode of transport served a dual purpose, epitomising the idea that modernity prompted the broadening possibilities of the future, while also leading some to predict the beginning of the end. Thus, the skyscraper as a symbol offers a unique vantage point, which when placed in differing epochs, provides a platform from which to view and compare the contrasting vistas. These visions of cityscapes of the future or the past emphasise the imagined time travel properties of the skyscraper, which came to function as a futuristic machine allowing access to vignettes of the city, from its nascent conception through to its inevitable inglorious collapse.

Bibliography



Primary References

Cather, Willa. 1970. Collected Short Fiction, 1892–1912. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. England, George Allan. 1914. Darkness and Dawn. Boston: Small Maynard and Co. Henry, O. 1910. “Psyche and The Pskyscraper” in Henry O. Strictly Business: More Stories of the Four Million. New York: Doubleday, Page and Co.: 130–141. Leinster, Murray. 2007. The Runaway Skyscraper and other Stories from the Pulps. Maryland: Wildside Press. Macaulay, Thomas Babington. 1840. “Ranck’s ‘History of the Popes’ – Revolutions of the Papacy” in Edinburgh Review 72: 229–232.

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Secondary References

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Bender, Thomas. 2007. The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea. New York: New York University Press. Brown, Adrienne R. 2011. “Between the Mythic and the Monstrous: The Early ­Skyscraper’s Weird Frontiers” in Journal of Modern Literature 35(1): 165–188. Domosh, Mona. 1987. “Imagining New York’s first skyscraper, 1875–1910” in Journal of Historical Geography 13(3): 233–248. Domosh, Mona. 1988. “The Symbolism of the Skyscraper: Case Studies of New York’s First Tall Buildings” in Journal of Urban History 14(3): 320–345. Fenske, Gail. 2008. The Skyscraper and the City: The Woolworth Building and the Making of Modern New York. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Ford, Larry R. 1992. “Reading the Skylines of American Cities” in Geographical Review 82(2): 180–200. Ingersoll, Robert G. 1990. The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Vol ix. New York: Cosimo Books. Landau, Sarah Bradford and Condit, Carol W. 1996. Rise of the New York Skyscraper: 1865–1913. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Lindner, Christoph (ed.). 2006. Urban Space and Cityscapes: Perspectives from Modern and Contemporary Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Nash, Eric P. 1999. Manhattan Skyscrapers. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Page, Max. 2008. The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction. Connecticut: Yale University Press. Pattell, Cyrus R.K. and Waterman, Bryan. 2012. “Overshadowed New York” in American Literary History 24(4): 853–863. Sanders, James. 2003. Celluloid skyline: New York and the Movies. New York: Knopf. Schuyler, Montgomery. 1892. American Architecture. New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers. Skilton, David. 2004. “Contemplating the Ruins of London: Macaulay’s New Zealander and Others”. On line at: http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/march2004 /skilton.html (consulted 27.01.2017). Stallings, Billie J. and Evans, Jo-An J. 2011. Murray Leinster: The Life and Works. North Carolina: McFarland and Co. Stansell, Christine. 2000. American moderns: Bohemian New York and The Creation of a New Century. New York: Metropolitan Books. Ward, David and Zunz, Oliver (eds.). 1992. Landscape of Modernity: Essays on New York City, 1900–1940. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Weisman, Winston. 1953. “New York and the Problem of the First Skyscraper” in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 12(3): 13–21.

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Weiss, Marc A. 1992. “Skyscraper Zoning: New York’s Pioneering Role” in Journal of the American Planning Association 58(2): 201–212. Willis, Carol. 1995. Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Wolner, Edward W. 1989. “The City-within-a-City and Skyscraper Patronage in the 1920’s” in Journal of Architectural Education 42(2): 10–23. Yablon, Nick. 2004. “The Metropolitan Life in Ruins: Architectural and Fictional Speculations in New York, 1909–19” in American Quarterly 56(2): 308–347.

Wires are the New Filth: The Rebirth of Dickens’ London in Cyberspace Keith Daniel Harris Abstract When Charles Dickens composed Bleak House, a novel which depicts London as an organic network of bodies, it is doubtful whether he imagined a future technology that would recreate these pathways of biological information that are the basis of his city-organism. Over a century later, the invention of virtual reality, a technology which effectively removes the spatial constraints of interaction between individuals, has ­inevitably created a space whose structure mimics the topological design of ­Dickens’ London. Dickens’ network structure undermines the privileged position of human agency through the erosion of the distinction between individual and collective body. His city-organism functions as an ecological system, a by-product of the accumulative waste excreted by its inhabitants which entraps them in an interstitial medium of filth capable of conducting biological information in the form of disease. In the internet age, the medium of filth of the material city-network is restored by the introduction of wired connections, through which information that is uploaded to the network can be transmitted. Thus, contemporary science fiction representations of the cityas-­network, along with their implications for the inhabitants of these cities, have much to learn from Dickens’ observations on the process of urbanisation. In this ­chapter I will demonstrate the degree to which these contemporary works rediscover a ­Dickensian sensibility in their exploration of the effects of cyberspace on individuality.

Key Terms Charles Dickens – Japanese popular culture – Japanese anime – cyberspace – agency



Cyberspace in the City

In the final scene of the Japanese animated film Ghost in the Shell (1995), the main character, Major Motoko Kusanagi, emerges onto a precipice and declares: “The net is limitless” (Mizuo 1995). However, the scene that confronts the viewer following this statement, and that Motoko looks out on, is of a © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004361317_007

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sprawling metropolis, not a virtual network. It is not incidental that Ghost in the Shell, which explores the boundary between real and virtual, should end with this substitution. However, this moment is instructive not only for understanding the role of the city in Ghost in the Shell, but also its necessity in such representations of cyberspace: the image of the city does not function as a metaphor of the network; rather, the two are collapsed into a single space. It is through the visual imagery of the city that the nature of cyberspace is unfolded as an integral part of the real world. Though cyberspace was created by 20th century information technology, its implications for human society are similar to those of urbanisation: both ­reduce the space between a large group of individuals, increasing the probability of social, and, in the case of urbanisation, physical interaction. Charles Dickens, one of the greatest urban novelists of the 19th century, described with precision the human suffering that resulted from the rapid expansion of ­London in the course of the 19th century. It is then not surprising to find that contemporary works of science fiction that attempt to understand how ­cyberspace will influence society echo a Dickensian sensibility, not only in their portrayal of its implications for the individual, but also in their stylistic representation of the city as a network. In this chapter, by identifying the stylistic similarities between Dickens’ portrayal of London and contemporary portrayals of cyberspace, I will attempt to reveal the foresight of what is essentially an ecological (as opposed to anatomical) sensibility of the city. A feature length adaptation of the manga (the Japanese term for comic books) by Masamune Shirow, Ghost in the Shell explores the practical implications of the definition of humanity in a future in which the augmentation of the human body has progressed to the complete replacement of the organic body by a manufactured shell. The film focuses on the exploits of Section 9, a covert government security force whose purpose is to clean up political i­ncidents. The plot traces the movement and eventual synthesis of two entities: Motoko, a human whose physical body has been replaced with an artificial body, and the “Puppet Master”, a computer program that has gained self-awareness and has been forced into an artificial body. Character movements unfold in a material world, while informational interactions between characters occur within an electronic network that links ­implanted cyber brains. Like its cyborg characters, the physical world of Ghost in the Shell is augmented – by a layer of digital information. However, this ­cyber world appears only as an overlay, and is not a world in itself, despite the Puppet Master’s promise that the network is a space of unlimited possibilities. The collapse of the virtual into real space in the final scene only demonstrates what is clear throughout the film: cyberspace is not an alternative world, but an additional dimension in the real world.

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The same collapse occurs in the Japanese animated series Serial ­Experiments Lain (1998), in which the spaces of the city and of the network (the “Wired”) gradually merge. Whereas in Ghost in the Shell, physical reality is augmented, Serial Experiments Lain questions more aggressively the epistemological ­privilege of the real world. Serial Experiments Lain follows the development of its main character, Lain Iwakura, as she attempts to unravel the relationship between material reality and the Wired. Lain is initially presented as an introvert teenager who avoids social interaction. As Lain discovers how the Wired functions, she learns that it can influence material reality, not only through hacking the various electrical devices connected to the Wired, but also through the possible flow of information out of the Wired. As the series progresses, Lain is revealed to be a by-product of informational transactions in the Wired that has been given self-awareness and a human form for the purpose of destroying the boundary between material reality and the Wired. The creator of Lain as a self-aware individual is revealed later in the series to be the deceased computer programmer Masami Eiri. Eiri is presented as a radical technocrat who had proposed “a wireless network whereby all humanity would be plugged in at an unconscious level without the need for any device” (Ueda 1998a). After his proposal was rejected, Eiri uploaded his memories to the network, and then committed suicide. This act epitomises Eiri’s philosophy: removing the body is a necessary step of removing the need for mediation between the physical world and the network. Yet uploading his memories to the network as part of his new protocol also granted Eiri omnipresence in the network, where his virtual self then attempts to implement the plans of his former, real-world self. Serial Experiments Lain’s narrative is temporally fragmented, partly ­owing to the frequent interjection of hallucinatory scenes into the perceived ­reality of the protagonist and focaliser, Lain. Though this appears to strain its g­ eneric definition as science fiction, the series does fall under Adam Roberts’ definition of the genre. For Roberts, “the point about the science in sf is not ‘truth’ but the entry into a particular, material and often rational discourse” (2000: 9). In terms of its extrapolative structure, the progressive fragmentation of Lain’s perceived reality is eventually explained through rational scientific ­discourse in the episode “Protocol”, where the Wired is presented as an inevitable ­culmination of information technology developments in the course of the 20th century. In this episode, the main plot continues to unfold, yet it is intersected with scenes which provide a brief genealogy of internet technology. The episode links a long thread of real world scientists and philosophers as leading up to the inevitable advent suggested by Masami Eiri. This catalogue, which starkly contrasts the temporal fragmentation of the main plot in its

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c­ oherence and clearly i­ llustrated causal links, serves as a generic frame for the entire ­series. This frame ensures that the development of the city that occurs in the series has a specific point of departure: contemporary reality. The series is also set in a mimetic representation of the city of Tokyo, with some of the scenes even taking place in precise reproductions of well-known ­locations in Tokyo, such as the crowded Shibuya scramble crossing in the ­episode “Distortion”. Each episode begins with a voice that states “present day, present time”, followed by laughter. The tone of the voice appears to dare the viewer to assume that the series is precisely not contemporary. While there are novel technological devices in this city, such as computer-controlled cars and advanced handheld computers that were not available when the series aired, the fictional world is familiar to the viewer. Ghost in the Shell on the o­ ther hand, as Wong Kin Yuen demonstrates, is a vision of a future city ­modelled on Hong Kong. Yuen attempts to explain the choice of Hong Kong as a s­ etting for cyberpunk films such as Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell, identifying the allure in the city’s “fragmentation, disjunctiveness, and ephemerality”, which gives colonial cities like Hong Kong “the best chance of establishing a cityscape of the future that embraces racial and cultural differences” (Yuen 2000: 1). S­ erial Experiments Lain breaks away from this tradition, and begins in a cityscape of the present. This replica of Tokyo is the series’ starting point, from which it proceeds to distort and remould the city: the collapse of virtual and real space is represented through the evolution of images of the city, from a space of entangled wires, to one of a circuit board. Serial Experiments Lain, similarly to Ghost in the Shell, makes little to no attempt to represent connections between users within the virtual space of the network: the Wired, when seen through Lain’s computer console, is a flow of fragmented user information. The space where these connections are manifested is the city, and each episode begins with a flow of random sights and sounds of a city at night. As a network, the city initially appears as a space entrapped in a web of power lines, pylons and train cables. Power lines, and the monotonous hum they emit in the series, are an ever-present visual and audio backdrop for Lain’s movements in the city. The tangled mess of power lines is a sharp contrast to the intervening scenes of a highly-ordered city in which pedestrians move within defined walking spaces and abide by various signs and traffic lights (such as at the Shibuya scramble crossing). The power lines appear as a cumbersome and imperfect mediation that facilitate human contact, and in the first episode “Weird” they emit unintelligible fragments of conversations. The power lines represent the liminal space between the Wired and reality, and the fragmented information that seeps out of them is the first indication

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that information is not only uploaded into the Wired – it may also interject into the real world. While the power lines are not unfamiliar objects, their ­visual prominence causes them to appear as a threatening presence that lurks in every corner of the city. As the boundary between spaces, the power lines represent the physical mediator that must be removed to allow information to flow between reality and the Wired. When this boundary begins to erode, the image of the city transforms into a generic urban space void of inhabitants that is superimposed with highly organised circuitry. The tangled power lines that represented the imperfect connections between humans are removed, and what is left is only the information that travels within this circuitry. The city is reborn as a computational device which Lain can use to extend her omnipotence in the Wired to material reality. Lain is the only presence in this city, as all human information is amalgamated into a collective consciousness.

The Filth that Binds: Dickens’ City-Network

What binds the characters of Serial Experiments Lain together, a technology that allows the informational network to assimilate individual memory into the collective, was for Dickens’ London an inherent and inescapable aspect of day to day life – the filth that permeated literally ever orifice of the city. As ­Robert Lougy notes, “we cannot read much of Dickens without becoming aware of the general foulness and smelliness of the world he describes” (2002: 473). ­Michael Steig’s outline of “Dickens’ Excremental Vision” in Bleak House leaves the i­mpression of a city entrenched in human waste. Steig attempts to uncover the “biological metaphor underlying these images of fog”, the p ­ urpose of which, he argues, is to depict various institutions, such as the Court of Chancery, in a state of constipation (1970: 343). Lougy, like Steig, does not discuss the filth as filth per se, but its representation and the characters’ dual attitude of ­desire/revulsion towards filth as a narrative technique. Without refuting the possibility that filth can function metaphorically, in understanding the full scope of its functions in Bleak House it is instructive to recall that filth is a ­material aspect of the city; it is a palpable, omnipresent, biological phenomenon. Its presence is not incidental but a result of “compound interest” (Dickens 1853: 1), the accumulation of layers of biological waste, bequeathed to the living by generations of Londoners, which inevitably shapes the lives of the current inhabitants. Dickens constructs London as an ecological system rather than an anatomy. The novelty of this sensibility of the city is the inclusion within this system every node of biological life and their secretions: the Dickensian city

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does not exist in stasis as an end product of a teleological evolution, but is a dynamic system, a contingent culmination of history. While Dickens’ London-based novels discussed in this chapter, Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend, do not deal with the same human characters, they are part of the same line of characterisation of London as a city. Together the ­novels construct a coherent image of Dickens’ perspective of the city. As Elana Gomel notes, Dickens’ novels together form a “Dickens universe” (2011: 299). Of the two novels, Bleak House offers the reader a more complete exposition of London. Bleak House depicts London as a city literally infested by humans, in which individuality is threatened by the inability to separate oneself from the common biological medium of the city. As Gomel notes, “the London of ­Dickens, with its uncontrollable proliferation of mysteries, coincidences, connections, reduces the characters to nodes in the urban web, which they can neither fathom nor escape” (2011: 303). Dickens’ London is not a backdrop that mirrors the internal subjectivity of the characters but a multiplex of human bodies, encased in the residue left by its previous generations in the form of architecture and engineering whose purpose is long forgotten. The city as an organic space lives and has agency of its own beyond that of its composing inhabitants. Bleak House charts a map of London as one would perform an autopsy, taking it as a single continuous organic space in which human bodies are entangled: Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the ­cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich p ­ ensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds. dickens 1853: 1–2

The fog exists in open spaces, over fields, but also penetrates smaller spaces, reaching even into the “throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners” (1853: 2). The fog is omnipresent in every space of the city, and on entering the city one

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b­ ecomes part of this common medium. The fog is also an animate creature in itself that “creeps” and “cruelly pinches”. It is tempting to analyse the London of Bleak House anatomically, as a diseased city. In Flesh and Stone, Richard Sennett argues that the city planners of the 19th century envisioned a city that was anatomically sound and to this purpose closely followed discoveries in medicine that elucidated the s­ tructure-function relationship of various bodily faculties, such as respiration or the circulation system. In this representation of the city as a body, the London of Bleak House might be diagnosed with a respiratory disease. It is likely that Dickens intentionally reproduced this plague of London as a call for reform against pollution. Yet the organic continuity of Bleak House is precisely defined by filth, not obstructed by it: if filling the interstitial spaces is what renders London an organism, then clearing these spaces would literally kill the city. The representation of the city as an organism has political implications, but these depend on what this organism includes and what it relegates from its idealized structure. In The City of Tomorrow and its Planning, Le C ­ orbusier identifies the problem of the city as its organic aspect, and relates to the ­biological aspects of its human inhabitants as a source of decay that must be contained. The struggle to contain this threat is depicted as a battle waged against an animate creature: “decisions are reached in a sort of frantic haste in order, as it were, to hold a wild beast at bay. That BEAST is the great city. It is infinitely more powerful that all these devices. And it is just beginning to wake” (2002: 21). Le Corbusier seeks to replace this beast with an inorganic machine based on abstract geometrical considerations: “My object was not to overcome the existing state of things, but by constructing a theoretically water-tight formula to arrive at the fundamental principles of modern town planning” (2002: 20). This representation of the city is devoid of organic decay, as the human ­element is suppressed by structure. In addition, Le Corbusier considers architecture a result of human misconceptions of perfection, and replaces it with the geometric considerations of an engineer: “There is no first-rate human production but has geometry at its base” (2002: 25). As a modernist, Le Corbusier strives to replace the contemporary city with the New Jerusalem of the Book of Revelation. The architecture of the city in his opinion should be subordinate to the needs of the population as a homogenous unit. The roads are symmetric, diverging into smaller “arteries” as the distance from the “central hub” grows. Le Corbusier’s compartmentalization of the biological matter of the city denies the physical continuity of the beast. Unlike Le Corbusier’s utopian ideal, Dickens’ London “is a city that is alive; not a machine but an organism” (Gomel 2011: 302). In terms of Dickens’ ecological sensibility, the fog serves as more than a blight upon the city. Despite its

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negative effect on the health of the public, it is what binds the inhabitants of the city into a single body, and thus gives the city life. In elucidating the politics of the fog as either a tool of social critique or an integral part of the city, it is instructive to note Dickens’ juxtaposition of the ‘great city’ with the ‘dirty city’. The two are inextricably related: the city is dirty because it is great, but it is also great because it is dirty. Cleaning up the dirt slices the organism into parts. This is not to argue that Dickens champions dirt, but rather that he understands that there is a tension between the interests of the individual and those of the system the individual constitutes. The dual role of dirt and filth lies at the basis of the connection between Dickens’ London and cyberspace. The filth that connects the bodies of ­London’s inhabitants will later become the wires that connect users in c­yberspace. Nonetheless, even these wires of filth are capable of creating a network of individuals. The narrator of Bleak House prods the reader with this rhetorical question in the introduction of Tom-all-Alone’s, a street which epitomises the image of the infested city, and which gains its importance from its biological interconnectivity that it derives from the filth and diseases that plague it: What connexion can there be between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom, who had that distant ray of light upon him when he swept the churchyard-step? What connexion can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world who from opposite sides of great gulfs have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together! dickens 1853: 231

The irony is that the answer is already given in the introduction of the ­novel, through the extensive description of the fog that permeates the city: filth ­conducts biological information and creates links between socially unrelated individuals. In a sense, the question hints at the network of connections the novel has already drawn materially and foreshadows the network of relationships yet to be revealed. Illness is not merely a plot device in Bleak House: it is an inseparable part of the city and its inhabitants. When Esther Summerson, the protagonist and the first-person narrator of a large part of the novel, falls ill with smallpox, her connection to Tom-all-Alone’s is revealed. The ability of the disease to spread depends on a material connection, and small pox is the outward manifestation of this connection. There are various approaches to defining the function of disease in Bleak House. Michael Gurney argues that Dickens chose the disease

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of smallpox both due to the nature of the disease (fitting its narrative function), but also as a specific call for reform in the vaccination policy. For Gurney, smallpox functions as a metaphor of connections in society, and a reminder that these connections cannot be avoided. Gomel supports the position that disease can function as metaphor for the interconnectivity of individuals in society, yet also raises the possibility that the disease is what creates the physical organism. The presence of disease, the pattern in which it spreads, and the timing of outbreak are not only a representation of the city-network: these epidemics reveal a pre-existing structure. This does not contradict the metaphoric function of disease, but emphasises its material logic. If, as Gurney argues, Dickens grasped the nature of the diseases he depicted, then the smallpox that traces a path of infection through society does not merely represent these connections. Rather, it is an outward manifestation of an unperceived continuity between bodies within the city. It is not only the graveyard, as Gurney suggests, that is the underlying cause of the spread of disease, but a network of filth that allowed its transmission. The illness reveals a pathway through which information can be transmitted. The function of the disease itself is not changed, but its role in defining the city-network is reversed: a virus that is transmitted from individual to individual is information traversing the network, and this network depends on a medium that can conduct information – filth.

Bodies and Avatars

When the Wired is introduced into the fictional world of Serial Experiments Lain, it creates an alternative space, or layer, whose substance is information. This virtual space promises a release from the constraints of the physical body. However, these spaces are not independent parallel worlds, but derivatives constructed through the flow of information from one space to another. They are not entirely dependent either, as not every element within cyberspace has a counterpart in the real world. The possibility for interaction in cyberspace depends on the creation of an avatar, a virtual presence to which uploaded data can be attributed. Ghost in the Shell demonstrates how within the network it is impossible to differentiate between an avatar of a computer program created within the network, and that of human using a computer to mediate his interaction in the network. In both cases the avatar is assembled by other users, from the uploaded data available to them. What complicates matters further, in terms of locating the origin of the avatar, is the fact that a human using the network can construct a

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number of avatars, while an avatar can be the product of network activity that is void of agency. While there is no necessary connection between the avatar and the origin outside cyberspace which projects it, the avatar by definition cannot be the product of an internal process of cognition. It is a coalesced array of information collected through metadata from other nodes in the network – an array of surfaces. The avatar is a literalisation of Baudrillard’s Simulacra: “Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (1993: 342–343). The avatar is precisely this, a copy with no origin. Even so, in order to function, the avatar must be treated as a representation of a coherent agent, one which is constructed with the data associated with the avatar. In Ghost in the Shell, the solution to the inability to locate the kernel of ­human subjectivity is found in attributing the human agency of the cyborg to the ghost. However, if network phenomena can mimic human subjectivity to the level that this artificial subjectivity is indistinguishable from real ­human subjectivity, evaluating the possession of human agency is pointless, and so the ghost, while never defined, serves as a political tool which defines the boundary between human and robot. As in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, when there is no possible distinction between copy and original, difference must be established to maintain the definition of h ­ umanity in contrast to an android. For instance, the use in Dick’s novel of e­ mpathy tests to differentiate between humans and androids relies on the tested individual’s knowing particular humanist conventions that are not intrinsic (biological), but social. In other words, the difference is arbitrary, and a border that is ­easily eroded through an improvement of the human-like performance of the ­android. Even if the distinction is based on information that is outside the network – the possession of a human body – cyborgs such as Motoko u ­ ndermine this border when defined as human. The conclusion of Ghost in the Shell, in which human-cyborg and s­ elf-aware artificial intelligence fuse, leaves no possible distinction between these ­entities, and therefore precludes the definition of humanity as a privilege of organically created entities. As the Puppet Master in Ghost in the Shell explains, humans carrying dna are no different from programs that store their information digitally, and the creation of cyberspace signals the erosion of the barrier between the two worlds of information: Life is like a node which is born within the flow of information. As a ­species of life that carries dna as its memory system, man gains his individuality from the memories he carries. While memories may as well be

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the same as fantasy, it is by these memories that mankind exists. When computers made it possible to externalize memory, you should have considered all the implications that held. mizuo 1995

Lain, like the Puppet Master, is a computer program that has been given a physical form. Unlike the Puppet Master, Lain enters material reality as a ­human being. Her presence there constitutes a reversal: the avatar which is usually projected into cyberspace is here projected out of cyberspace. One of the central issues in Serial Experiments Lain is the question of the ontological structure of the universe, which is defined through the nature of the relationship between the informational space and material reality. The series offers two solutions to this issue: either the network is an augmentation of the material reality, or, only a single space exists (the Wired) which grants access to an informational layer which encompasses both uploaded and biological memory. At the conclusion of the series material reality is restored through the deletion of memory, supporting the latter solution. From this perspective, the material manifestation of reality is a product of the flow of information, a flow which Lain can manipulate, allowing her to alter material reality. This is suggested by an epigraph presented in the final episode of the series: “What isn’t remembered never happened. Memory is merely a record. You just need to rewrite that record” (Ueda 1998b). Even though Lain possesses a material body, she is defined extrinsically. Throughout the series, she receives hints that there is an alternative Lain who has always existed within the Wired, whose actions she is later blamed for. This ethereal Lain is a construct of the various other users’ information, combined into a coherent individual. Lain eventually realizes that there is no necessary connection between self-awareness and one’s construction in the mind of ­others: ­“People only have substance within the memories of others. That’s why there were all kinds of ‘me’s’. There weren’t a lot of ‘me’, I was just inside all sorts of people, that’s all” (Ueda 1998c). If material reality is merely a manifestation of a flow of information, then the information available to each node is what determines their construction of the façade of material reality, and other individuals in it. In Dickens, as in Serial Experiments Lain, the body functions as an avatar that is defined extrinsically. Dickens’ characters often answer the definition of “only [having] substance within the memories of others”, being “mere collections of humors or tics” (Clayton 1991: 187). Jay Clayton, arguing for a r­ econsideration of Dickens’ influence on postmodern literary styles, claims that “Dickens becomes an author who produces not only ‘modern’ social phenomena, such

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as the liberal, autonomous self, but also ‘postmodern’ phenomena, such as the simulacrum and the deconstructed subject” (1991: 188). As Gomel notes, ­Dickens is “not a writer of the individual but rather of the systems that generate … and often destroy … a delusion of individuality” (2011: 299). Indeed, some Dickensian characters are given only enough depth to allow them to function as distinguishable faucets in society. In addition, often the only information the reader can access regarding these characters is external. The protagonist of Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, John Harmon, is similar to Lain to the extent that his characterization is often “lateral”: the plot of the novel revolves around the confusion of mistaken and stolen identities, and the identities Harmon assumes do not necessarily construct a coherent individual but a collection of distinct personas. John Harmon, the victim of a botched murder plot on his return to England to investigate the prospects of his inheritance, is forced to assume numerous disguises and names in order to acquire information pertaining to his real identity. Harmon initially assumes the name Julius Handford, and then becomes John Rokesmith. Harmon only reveals his identity at the conclusion of the novel. While it seems natural to assume that John Harmon merely pretends to be John Rokesmith, it is almost impossible to find the man beneath the act. ­Until Rokesmith reveals himself to be Harmon, the reader has no access to his thoughts. His identity as Rokesmith is perfect: it is impossible to see through the character of Rokesmith and find Harmon. When Harmon visits Roger ­Riderhood, a shady character who attempts to collect the reward for ­information on Harmon’s murder, he wears yet another disguise. In the monologue (or “duet”, as the chapter implies) Harmon/Rokesmith performs after his ­encounter with Riderhood, there is a clear distance between the speaker and his identities. None of the identities appear to have any privilege over the ­others, and both Harmon and Rokesmith are spoken of in the third person: “So John Harmon died, and Julius Handford disappeared, and John Rokesmith was born. John Rokesmith’s intent to-night has been to repair a wrong that he could never have imagined possible … In that intent John Rokesmith will persevere, as his duty is” (Dickens 1863: 350). As Harmon takes on each identify, he ­projects personas distinct both in appearance and in behaviour: Julius Hanford is frightened and ­emotional; Rokesmith is distant, infallible and economic; while Harmon is romantic and indulgent. It is impossible to define a single identity for Harmon/Rokesmith, and so he remains no more than a concatenation of at least three distinct characters. The same lateral characterisation can be found in Nicodemus Boffin’s change of behaviour in his feigned fall from grace. The progression of Boffin,

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who receives Harmon’s inheritance when Harmon is thought dead, is at first linear: Boffin is a simpleton who comes into fortune and gradually degenerates into a miser under the influence of wealth. What disrupts this pattern is that the process is reversed instantaneously at the end of the novel. Boffin, described as an “old fellow of rare simplicity” quite consistently (Dickens 1863: 50), is replaced by a sophisticated actor. We are forced to assume that Boffin had the innate ability to perform perfectly throughout. Here again it appears that Boffin is not a single agent, but a concatenation of two characters, Boffin the simpleton, and Boffin the miser. The problem with Boffin and Rokesmith is that they consist of a collection of personas. In addition, the narrative is not focalised through an internal dialogue by any of the characters. When Harmon describes his experiences and thoughts in his monologue, he is not focalising the narrative of Our ­Mutual Friend, but the narrative of his arrival in England. In addition, the monologue, being spoken rather than thought, is not an internal dialogue. This lack of depth is increasingly obvious in characters with smaller roles. Such is the case of Miss Peecher, whose entire surroundings are blended into her persona: “A little pincushion, a little housewife, a little book, a little workbox, a little set of tables and weights and measures, and a little woman, all in one” (1863: 205). Even her thoughts are shaped after the manner of her profession: her “confidential slate” taking the place of imagination (1863: 319). The descriptions of Peecher parody the existence of human subjectivity through the exaggerated repetition of adjectives in mention of her name. As Clayton notes, characters such as Miss Peecher “[exhibit] what Baudrillard calls the ‘forced extroversion of all interiority’” (1991: 187). Serial Experiments Lain literalises the Dickensian device of multiple personas by creating a fictional world in which there is no substance outside of memory. In the episode “Rumors”, Eiri, Lain’s creator, shows Lain two rows of wind-up mannequins of herself, dressed in different clothing, but all bearing the same constantly jittering head. Eiri tells Lain that the dolls are all her. Lain refuses to concede the truth, and knocks some of the dolls over to demonstrate that they are inanimate. This moment reveals the unimportance of agency for the construction of a persona: all that is necessary is information, and even a mechanical mannequin can provide information if its actions and words are taken seriously. Likewise, Dickens’ Harmon is a collection of personas that are defined independently of an intrinsic being, but by the information accumulated about these personas by other characters and by the reader.

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Conclusions

The modern city of Tokyo that is represented in Serial Experiments Lain is sterile when compared to 19th century London. The bands of filth that serve as the common medium of Dickens’ London have been cleaned away, and with them the city-network they facilitated. In this sterility, cyberspace is what ­allows the Dickensian city-network to be reborn, just as in Ghost in the Shell the ­inability of the cyborg to reproduce biologically is alleviated by its propagation through the network. The connections that were formed through filth are recreated through wires, and viruses that were once transmitted between physical ­bodies are now transmitted as packets of code. The relationship between Dickens and contemporary representations of cyberspace is then primarily one of dependence: the portrayal of cyberspace draws from the visual repertoire of the city-network that is defined in ­Dickens’ portrayal of London. In Ghost in the Shell and Serial Experiments Lain, ­cyberspace does not define an alternative space, but elicits an inevitable transformation of the image of the contemporary city that allows the same ­connectivity between its inhabitants as users in cyberspace. The implications of this transformation for human subjectivity are already present in Dickens’ oeuvre.

Bibliography



Primary References



Secondary References

Dickens, Charles. 1853. Bleak House. New York: Bantam Dell. Dickens, Charles. 1863. Our Mutual Friend. London: Wordsworth Editions. Mizuo, Yoshimasa et al. 1995. Ghost in the Shell. Production I.G. BluRay. Ueda, Yasuyuki. 1998a. “Protocol”. in Serial Experiments Lain. Triangle Staff. dvd. Ueda, Yasuyuki. 1998b. “Ego”. in Serial Experiments Lain. Triangle Staff. dvd. Ueda, Yasuyuki. 1998c. “Landscape”. in Serial Experiments Lain. Triangle Staff. dvd.

Baudrillard, Jean. 1993. “The Precession of Simulacra”. (tr. P. Foss and P. Patton) in ­Natoli, Joseph and Linda Hutcheon (eds) A Postmodern Reader. New York: suny Press 342–375. Clayton, Jay. 1991. “Dickens and the Genealogy of Postmodernism”. in Nineteenth-­ Century Literature 46(2): 181–195. Gomel, Elana. 2011. “‘Part of the Dreadful Thing’: The Urban Chronotope of Bleak House”. in Partial Answers 9(2): 297–309.

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Gurney, Michael S. 1990. “Disease as device: the role of smallpox in Bleak House”. in Literature and Medicine 9(1): 79–92. Le Corbusier. 2002. “The City of Tomorrow and its Planning”. In Bridge, Gary and S. Watson (eds) The Blackwell City Reader. Cornwall: Blackwell Publishing Ltd: 20–29. Lougy, Robert E. 2002. “Filth, Liminality, and Abjection in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House”. In elh 69(2): 473–500. Roberts, Adam C. 2000. “Defining Science Fiction”. in Science Fiction. London: ­Routledge: 1–37. Sennett, Richard. 1994. Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Steig, Michael. 1970. “Dickens’ Excremental Vision”. in Victorian Studies 13(3): 339–354. Yuen, Wong Kin. 2000. “On the Edge of Spaces: Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, and Hong Kong’s Cityscape”. in Science Fiction Studies 27(1): 1–21.

City of Lights No More: Dystopian Paris in French Science Fiction Henri-Simon Blanc-Hoang Abstract Recently, several authors in French science fiction have imagined dystopian worlds where Paris is no longer the city of lights. This chapter analyses the relegation of the French capital to the status of a mere ‘second city’ in three different works. In Julien Leclercq and Frank Philippon’s film Chrysalis (2007), I show how Paris has become one of the many administrative units that belong to a future European federation. I demonstrate how the filmmakers rely heavily on digital technology in order to erase the spatial markers that characterise the French capital. In Benoit Sokal’s video game Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals (2008), I explain how the twilight of the nation-state has forced Europeans to adopt a political model based on the system of the Ancient Greek city-states. In this dystopian world, Paris must do battle with former ‘second cities’ for prominence in Europe. In this case again, I emphasise the use of digital technology that is necessary to create the visual characteristics of a post-apocalyptic urban environment. Finally, in Pierre Bordage’s podcast ‘série mp3’ Chroniques des ombres (2009), I study a similar situation where Paris has lost its cultural specificity and is only the third component of a megalopolis called Nylopa (the acronym of ny-London-Paris). Of course, I expand on how new digital technology made the emergence of a new medium called the mp3-serie possible and how its users can almost interact with the diegesis as if they were fictional characters. In my conclusion, I summarise how this obsession with the decline of Paris reflects concern over post-colonial immigration, neo-liberal globalisation and the loss of secular values that progressive societies have fought to conquer. However, I also point out how alternative forms of global networking, subcultures and minorities redefine the French capital as a ‘second city’.

Key Terms French science fiction – Paris – film – graphic novel – video game – podcast – série mp3 – new technologies – postcolonial immigration – globalisation – secularism

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004361317_008

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In the last two decades, theorists such as James Gunn and Adam Roberts have updated the definition of science fiction initially proposed by earlier masters.1 Of particular interest is Roberts’s proposal to further expanded Darko Suvin’s concept of the ‘novum’ by attributing to this term the following characteristic: “it is not so much the ingenuity of the novum, or the strangeness of it, that is important; it is the symbolic purchase its point of difference provides on the world we live in” (Roberts 2000: 20). If these new contributions are indeed important to the study of the genre, they do not make older definitions obsolete. For instance, in her seminal work on Brazilian science fiction, Elizabeth Ginway acknowledges the practical application that Gary Wolfe’s Iconography of Science Fiction (1979) had on her project (2004: 39). Indeed, Wolfe provides a recurring list of icons which are, as he posits, the most reliable indicators of a text’s identification with the genre, and includes the ‘futuristic city’ (Wolfe 1979: xiv) as one of these markers. Although Wolfe has already established the ‘futuristic city’ as a science fiction icon, one must also provide today a more precise nomenclature of its essential components. Critics have so far suggested various characteristics for this marker of the genre. These theorists either analyse the content of the Futuristic City (i.e.: the specific themes that are common to this icon) or the form (i.e.: the literary techniques that authors rely on). In “Under Darkened Skies: The City in Science-fiction Film” John R. Gold introduces the term ‘future noir’ to describe a City of the Future that is associated with the kind of dystopian urban environment that is found in visual representations such as Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green (1973) and John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981). In ‘The Anthropology of Cities: Imagining and Theorizing the City’ (1996), Setha M. Low uses the term ‘Fortress City’ as it appears in films like Mad Max (1980) and Twelve Monkeys (1996). According to Marcelo Vizcaíno in ‘Cine y arquitectura. Un futuro equivocado’ (2008), science fiction film p ­ roducers rely on the technique of collage2 to imagine cities in the world of tomorrow. ‘The ­future city becomes a collage, a visual operation that also gives shape to a m ­ ysterious 1 Suvin (1972: 375) introduces a test for critics to determine whether a work of literature belongs to the science fiction genre. According to Suvin, these ‘necessary and sufficient conditions’ are identifiable passages in a text that include ‘the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment’. Suvin’s further expands on his definition of what is and what isn’t sf in his seminal book The Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979). Suvin adds the concept of the ‘novum’ which together with estrangement and cognition completes his definition of sf as a genre. In fact, no ‘novum’ means, no sf. 2 Here, collage is meant not only as an art form but also as a ‘palimpsest’: writing a new narrative or creating a new image on an old support whose previous text/image has been partially

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­periphery’3 [translated from Spanish] (Vizcaíno 2008: 16). In his vision, ­Vizcaíno echoes Robert Sheckley’s prognostications about the shape of cities to come in his book Futuropolis (1978); according to Sheckley, in the future “[w]e may be able to put our city together and take it apart like a doll’s house” (Sheckley 1978: 6). Finally, in “‘It was the City Killed the Beast’: Nature, Technophobia, and the Cinema of the Urban Future” (2003), James A. Clapp suggests that what is experienced by the audience, when watching a science fiction film set in an urban environment, should reflect the lives of the ­characters on screen. To make his point, Clapp gives the example of the film thx 1138 (1978), where George Lucas “creates a visually claustrophobic world that matches that of the social world portrayed in the film” (2003: 7). Overall, the icon of the Futuristic City has been articulated in terms of both content and form. In terms of content, it is an urban or peri-urban space where a dystopian environment (‘future noir’, ‘fortress city’) predominates. In terms of form, creators can juxtapose previous familiar images of a known city to imaginary visions of future urban environments (the ‘collage’ technique). Moreover, because of the nature of the technologies4 that are involved in creating works of science fiction, the people engaging with science fiction (readers, viewers, gamers, and listeners) can subconsciously live an experience similar to that of the fictional characters when they use any new invention that appears in the sf narrative which they engage with. All these characteristics can be applied to the dystopian Paris (content) described in a number of recent French science fiction works that make use of new technologies (form). For the past fifteen years, various French authors of science fiction have been experimenting with new technologies (from video games to podcasts) when imagining future urban environments. In this chapter, I shall analyse the different aspects some dystopian views of Paris can present in three works of French science fiction, and we shall also study how the technologies used to create these urban environments reflect the themes covered in the plots. If the dystopian Paris imagined in Julien Leclercq and Frank Philippon’s film ­Chrysalis (2007) is based on an extrapolation of the abuses of neo-liberal erased. However, it is impossible for the author not to blend leftovers of the previous text with the new ones. 3 Translated from the Spanish. 4 These are not only digital technologies used to create imaginary environment in science fiction films (cgi), but also the entire packages that make both videogames (the software and hardware) and podcasts popular (the mp4 player and the podcast itself). Also, the effects on viewer/gamer of these existing technologies mimic the imaginary technologies present in these work of fiction.

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­globalisation and the exploitation of post-colonial immigration, the technology used to create this science fiction universe mimics this same situation. In both Benoit Sokal’s video game Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals (2008) and Pierre Bordage’s ‘série mp3’ Shadows’ Chronicles5 (2009), the loss of secular ­values and the disappearance of the nation-state result in the emergence of a dystopian society. In these cases, too, the technologies that developers rely on to visualise these futuristic urban settings echo the oppressive environment present in the plots of these two works. In addition to presenting an intriguing relationship between form and content, these three narratives appear to re-introduce old genres and old collagebased techniques (photography and painting, radio drama) to extrapolate on the Paris of the future. Finally, the imaginary inventions described in these works of science fiction that take place in dystopian cityscapes reflect either the actual technology used to create these narratives or the effects new media have on urban consumers (film viewers, readers, gamers). Chrysalis, a ‘black and blue’6 film as Julien Leclercq and Franck Philippon (its directors) like to call it, takes place in a sterile7 Paris of the year 2025. The film follows the investigation of two detectives (Marie and David) who are ­initially in charge of solving a murder mystery. However, the two partners eventually uncover a plot by the director of a hi-tech clinic (and with the c­ omplicity of the government) who is attempting to erase the memory of her patients and to replace it with pre-written computer programs. In the alternate universe presented in the film, the French nation state still exists, but pan-European institutions (such as Europol) are now in charge of citizens’ security. Marie, the main character’s new partner, explains at the  ­beginning of the movie how excited she is about her transfer from the Vice ­Brigade8 to Europol. Europol can indeed afford to own the most ­imposing building in the capital. In this post-national Paris, the prestigious 5 Translated from the French. Original title: Chroniques des ombres. 6 ‘Black and blue’ films are an experimental form of movie that neither belong to the ‘black and white’ film category nor to the ‘technicolor’. Although these films could be confused as contemporary ‘black and white’, they include an extra colour (blue) to the spectrum. Filmmakers who experiment with this form include Francis Ford Coppola (Rusty James, 1983) and Ahmed Bengilah (Blue is the Warmest Color, 2012). 7 In this context, the adjective ‘sterile’ is used almost in its medical context. The main character spends most of her time in a clinic, and the view of Paris reflects also this kind of ‘sterile’ (aseptic) environment: it is clean, with no trash in the street, but this also means that no racial or ethnic minorities are visible. 8 The Vice Brigade or Brigade mondaine in French is the division of the national police that usually investigates cases of prostitution, illegal gambling, and corruption of minors.

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gign (Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale) is now called the gige (Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Européenne). dst (Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire) is the only French national law enforcement agency that remains in existence, and it will eventually come in direct conflict with Europol. Marie and David (her more experienced partner) must not only investigate the murder of a young woman in this post-national Paris, but also find the ­kidnappers of the victim’s sister (Helena). A parallel subplot shows us that ­Helena is being used as a ‘spare’ body for Manon, a comatose young woman who was badly burned in a car accident. Helena has been surgically altered to look exactly like Manon. The director of a prestigious private clinic, who happens to be Manon’s mother, is attempting to imprint Helena’s brain with the recorded memory of her disfigured patient/daughter. This project is made possible because Nicolov, a prominent member of the Bulgarian mafia, has a machine (stolen from the military) capable of digitalising human memory. Attempting to digitalise human memory/personality is certainly an innovative and ambitious project. However, such an idea has been previously introduced in science fiction. This kind of technology appears in works such as Frederik Pohl’s The Annals of the Heechees (1988) and John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War (2005). The process of creating a digital brain, also appears in graphic and visual narratives, for example, the Belgian graphic novelist Roger Leloup also develops such a concept in his Yoko Tsuno series, and in Noires sont les galaxies (1981), a French television series, aliens simply rely on a ‘soul transfer’ machine in order to take over the bodies of Earthmen. This solution of a ‘soul transfer’ was later recycled in the movie Freejack (1992). When they made their film, the creators of Chrysalis chose to avoid the esoteric and philosophical problem that has to do with the ‘materialisation’ of the soul. In the fictional universe of Chrysalis a human being is defined by his life experiences, and those experiences are represented by his memories. It is therefore believed that downloading the digitalized memories of a person into a new body provides a way to achieve immortality. In a similar manner, what the antagonists do to the ­human body with this kind of imagined technology closely resembles (from a conceptual perspective) the technique that Chrysalis editors used on the p ­ hysical film in order to envision a Paris of the year 2025. From a political perspective, the s­ uggestion that memory could be erased and rewritten like a mere digital file unto the brain of a common citizen also questions the very definition of national identity. In fact, what the directors have achieved with their digital re-imaging of a futuristic Paris (superimposing cgi-created buildings over preexisting historical monuments) reflects what happens to Manon’s memories in the plot of the movie. If such project were to be successful, this would be the

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dream of all the anti-immigration political parties. Governments would be in possession of the perfect solution to solve the demographic and cultural problems some see in the presence of Third-World immigrants in Europe. In terms of nature, it would only be necessary to find a host body of European descent. In terms of culture, one would only need to download the memory of an oldstock French citizen to the brain of the host body. In an interview that accompanies the dvd of Chrysalis, Leclercq and ­Philippon explain their intention to create a genuine film d’anticipation, ­because their near future Paris is supposed to exist less than ten years from now. Additionally, the movie directors wanted the public to recognise the French capital, even though the plot of their film takes places in 2025. To this end, technicians superimposed digitalised images of futuristic skyscrapers over a present image of Paris in a method which can simulate the technique of collage. Accordingly, to create a futuristic vista of the French capital, digital artists had to rely on already-made and available photographs of contemporary Paris, which might be viewed as contemporary representation of the body of the city. To this body, they added new ‘memories’ – their computer-designed images of non-existent buildings. Consequently, the idea of digitalising an individual’s memory and downloading it into a new brain is similar to what Chrysalis creators did by superimposing an imagined future outlook on contemporary images of Paris. When watching the movie, audiences quickly realise that the imagined technology developed in the world of Chrysalis has serious flaws. The first noticeable flaw has to do with the technology’s failure to completely erase all of the host’s memories. Similarly, a viewer watching the movie and who is familiar enough with Paris will be tempted to figure out which buildings the digital images are replacing. As a matter of fact, even this attempt at retrieving past memories is not new. Beginning in the l990’s, the City of Paris set up engraved drawings of places which do not exist anymore all over the capital. Curious tourists can now follow an itinerary where these signs are posted and can imagine how Paris once was. The technology that was used in creating a vision of the future mimics what was done with the engraved drawings of Paris. In Chrysalis, the imperfection of the stolen ‘digitalising machine’ also ­questions the failure of the French model of cultural assimilation, especially in ­urban environments. Although the young woman whose body is used as a ‘spare’ is of the blond-hair blue eyed type, she would still be considered an outsider in French society because of her Bulgarian nationality. As a result, the possibility of completely erasing her memory in order to replace it with the ‘file’ of an ‘old-stock Frenchwoman’ would solve the ‘cultural disaster’ of immigration. Unfortunately, the invention that the police must take back from the mafia is not really operational. In fact, a scene where Helena’s old m ­ emories resurface

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marks a key moment in the film. This incident occurs when her k­ idnapper is about to take her to another ‘therapy’ session (whose set up is very similar to the brain-washing machine from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, 1971). Helena’s ‘repressed’ memories suddenly take over and she starts speaking in Bulgarian. Including such a dénouement is not an innocent ­decision. This ­passage reminds us of the failure of the French integrationist model, which can no longer prevent its visible minorities from making their voice heard. Another important invention in the urban environment of Chrysalis is the surgical holographic machine that the director of the clinic (who, incidentally, carries out her experiments with Helena in secret, maintaining her cloak of respectability) tries to sell to a group of Chinese businessmen. The scene highlights the benefits that remote surgery can offer. Thanks to her hi-tech equipment, Manon’s mother performs heart surgery on a patient who is miles away from her clinic. The combination of the new software/hardware she is relying upon allows her to study a holographic representation of her patient’s heart. Thanks to a magnifying feature, she can fix the damaged organ more precisely and more easily than a traditional surgeon. The interactivity of the hologram with the real heart makes the operation an instant success. Of course, the tridimensional representation that appears in this scene is itself a digital image created by the film technicians. The technological principles and purposes are actually very similar to one another. Consequently, the boundary between ­fiction and reality is beginning to fall apart. The fact that the clinic director is giving a demonstration of her product to a group of Chinese businessmen is no coincidence either. The first decade of the new millennium saw the rise of China and India as economic powerhouses. A direct consequence of this fait accompli has been the outsourcing of jobs from the First to the Third World, and France is no exception to this trend. As a true film d’anticipation, Chrysalis extrapolates on these societal changes. After the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs to China and Central America, setting up ‘call centres’ in India and the Maghreb for the service industry, the next logical step would be the development of long-distance medicine and surgery. This would eliminate the need for ‘medical tourism’. If the antagonist is successful in selling her new technology to the Chinese, even Western white ­collars workers will be affected. Therefore, Chrysalis reveals two fears that have dominated French society in the last decade: post-colonial immigration and neo-liberal globalisation. The character of the clinic director represents these two threats since she not only attempts to re-create her disfigured daughter by using a ‘spare’ body from Bulgaria, but is also willing to jeopardise the future of her own field in order to take advantage of the opportunities globalisation has to offer.

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Finally, despite the use of a new technology to create this science-fiction film, the blending of traditional photographs and digital images is a curious reminder of the way painters once incorporated photography in their artwork during the second half of the 19th century.9 Far from administering the deathblow to painting, the invention of photography provided new opportunities for artists. First of all, completing a group painting previously required the involvement of entire groups of people who might have better spent their time elsewhere. The advent of photography made the use of photographs of individuals possible, freeing the subjects from their long posing sessions. Second, it is no coincidence that the rise of abstract art parallels the development of photography. Since this new invention reproduced landscapes and people with machine accuracy, artists were free to experiment with new art forms. In the making of Chrysalis, the interaction of traditional photographs of Paris with digital images actually presents a very similar situation. Technicians who worked on the movie not only relied on original pictures of the French capital, but also integrated digital representations of futuristic buildings. In this case, the accurateness provided by the photograph freed up the artists to imagine near future architectural forms since they did not have to spend as much time reproducing an exact view of the City of Lights. If the sci-fi universes found in movies are to be convincing, a successful test is to check whether the viewers are immersed in the plot, what Samuel Taylor Coleridge calls ‘the suspension of disbelief’ (1985: 314). Because of the active participation of gamers, the universes of videogames represent another level of suspension of disbelief. In the case of the videogame Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals (2008), the creators rely on techniques similar to what Philippon and Leclercq initiated in their film. Regarding the videogame Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals (2008), a technique similar to the old creative process of combining photography with painting is also used by the main character (the player) as early as the first stage. In addition, the manner in which Benoit Sokal (the videogame creator) ­incorporates previously existing drawings of a dystopian Paris by Enki Bilal (the author of the original graphic novel La foire aux immortels, 1980) into the graphics of his videogame reminds us of the work that many 19th century painters ­accomplished thanks to the new possibilities offered by photography. 9 For an example of the complexities of incorporating a photographic vision into a work of art see Rosenblum (1997: 213) where a discussion of how the painting The Arch of Titus (Church, Healy and McEntee 1870) employs a photograph of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his daughter as a focal point. The painting’s artistic composition suggests a close study the photograph.

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Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals is the type of video game that one can play without a console. Gamers need only install the program (that comes with a cd-Rom) onto their computer, to virtually live in the Paris of the year 2023. The ‘point & click’ navigational system allows players to enter a dystopian world based on the plot of Bilal’s famous graphic novel La foire aux immortels (1980). Despite a few differences between the two narratives, the dystopian urban environment that Bilal created more than thirty years ago will still be readily ­recognisable to fans of the original comic. The Paris imagined in Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals is a mere shadow of what the City of Lights once was. After three nuclear wars, European nationstates have disappeared, and city-states are now the only international actors on the continental stage. Jean-Ferdinand Choublanc, the prophet-dictator of Paris has established a fascism-based theocracy that maintains a strict social, economic and physical barrier between the first arrondissement (where the régime’s elite resides) and the rest of the city (where aliens, mutants and poor humans eke out a meagre living). In such a dystopian society, it comes as no surprise that the presence of technology in people’s daily lives has regressed. In fact, the collapse of Western civilisation has resulted in a new Dark Age. When Nikopol begins exploring his old Parisian neighbourhood, for example, he finds out that the supermarket where he used to go grocery shopping has become a cemetery. In La foire aux immortels, the governor of Paris is attempting to negotiate his incorporation into the restricted ‘club of immortals’ with the occupants of a flying pyramid10 (the strange visitors are in fact Egyptian gods).11 His only bargaining chip is the large quantity of fossil fuel that the city of Paris possesses and that the aliens/Egyptian gods need for their spaceship. At the same time that these negotiations are taking place, Alcide Nikopol, a 21st ­century political prisoner escapes his deep-freeze outer-space forced-exile and returns to Paris. Horus, a renegade alien from the flying pyramid, takes possession of Nikopol’s body and attempts a coup d’état against Choublanc’s régime. Once in power, Horus plans to withhold the fossil fuel that Anubis (his rival in the Egyptian pantheon) desperately needs. Although Choublanc steps down ­under strange circumstances and leaves power to Nikopol, Anubis and the other aliens manage to put an end to Horus’s project. At the end, socialist d­ issidents take ­advantage of the régime change to establish a more egalitarian society. 10 11

Bilal actually published La foire aux immortels (1980) before the project of building a glass pyramid in the middle of the Louvre courtyard was announced. La foire aux immortels was actually published 15 years before Dean Delvin and Roland Emmerich made their Hollywood science fiction classic Stargate (1994).

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­Unfortunately, Nikopol has gone mad because his human brain had to withstand the alien possession for too long. The new government eventually uses Nikopol’s son (also called Alcide) in order to save face. In addition to presenting an alternate ending, Sokal’s videogame version tells the story from the perspective of Nikopol’s son. The player actually assumes the profile of Nikopol junior. His mission is to liberate his father from the bunker where he is incarcerated. Another difference between Bilal’s and Sokal’s plots is the emphasis on the theocratic aspect of Choublanc’s dictatorship. In La foire aux immortels (the original graphic novel) the Pope resides in Paris and is under the protection of the city’s fascist government. However, the temporal and spiritual powers remain more or less separated, and restriction on freedom of religion is not too oppressive. In Nikopol: Secret of the Immortals (the videogame), Jean-Ferdinand Choublanc holds the double title of prophetdictator. Non-state-supported spiritual movements have become illegal and the sworn rival of the city of Paris is the atheist government of Lyon. In fact, Bilal’s graphic novel still reflects the political divide inherited from the Cold War, since the enemies of the former national capital are cities from the former Eastern Bloc. In contrast, Sokal’s videogame reveals a more contemporary concern in the urban environment of French society: the rolling-back of secular gains. Bilal’s original work does not mention what Nikopol junior does for a living (because he is only a secondary character). In the videogame, the professional occupation of Nikopol-fils is actually crucial in making his mission successful (he is an artist and uses his artwork to pay for his rent). Moreover, in order to free Nikopol-père from jail, the player must gather clues and hidden information (such as passwords, cabbalistic ciphers or encoded messages) that are spread all over this dystopian Parisian environment of the year 2023. In fact, the only successful solution to complete the first stage of the game is for the player to paint a portrait of the incarcerated Nikopol senior. Since he cannot visit the prisoner, the player must use black and white film-footage of Paris before the nuclear wars where Nikopol-père appears as a reference. Consequently, the character developed by Sokal relies on a traditional technique that goes back to the 19th century: the use of photography to complete a portrait.12 At the level of game development, Sokal uses a similar strategy. In his graphics (for instance in the scene that takes place in the artist’s studio) the game developer 12

In order to ‘paint’ Nikopol Senior’s portrait, the player uses a virtual ‘pallet’ similar to the ones available on Illustrator or Adobe Photoshop. Once again, the technique introduced in the diegesis of the game closely resembles the technical means that were used to create the game in the first place.

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incorporates digital copies of original drawings of a dystopian Paris by Bilal. Within the diegesis of the videogame, these images are samples of Nikopol’s artwork. Hence, from the beginning a relationship is established between the game developer’s artistic techniques and the ones used by his character. As for the limited role of technology in Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals, the only original innovations in the plot are not man-made but biological. The first time they try to kill Nikopol, his enemies use an alien monster as a weapon. In addition, the Egyptian gods from outer space master a natural technology that allows them to shape shift. These strange alien visitors can assume three ­different avatar-types: animal, human with an animal head or ethereal. It is in his ethereal body that Horus takes over the minds of Nikopol Senior, of a hockey player from Lyon/Bratislava and of Choublanc. Obviously, such body transfers allow for the one controlling them to see the world from various perspectives. In his work, Bilal curiously did not think of showing these different points of view (we read the version of a single extradiegetic ‘narrator’).13 Fortunately, the videogame is also the ideal genre to reflect diverse narrative voices; and Sokal takes full advantage of what this medium has to offer. In theory, Nikopol and the player of the videogame are the same person. Consequently, we should be able to live the game only through Nikopol’s eyes. However, this is not always the case. Sometimes, the player ‘leaves’ the body of his character and sees him from a third-person perspective (when Nikopol escapes from his apartment, for instance). Although the player controls the character of Nikopol, the video game technology gives him powers that more closely resemble Horus’s. The existence of a technology of divine/alien origin is a key aspect of the plot; and so is the presence of a theocratic régime in 21st century Paris. These two choices are not random. While Bilal warns his audience about the danger of a traditional Mussolinian-inspired fascism, Sokal seems to be more ­worried about the rolling-back of secular gains. Hence, the dictatorship described in ­Sokal’s videogame relies on extremely backward religious references. This ­return to a society where religion is no longer limited to the private sphere is another issue that has emerged in French and European societies in general, especially urban and peri-urban environments. Oppressive religious references in Sokal’s world dominates all levels of the narrative, from the governor of Paris who calls himself ‘the dictator-prophet’, to the rival government of Lyon which supports atheism. Furthermore, the innovative technology (body transfer) is available only to alien gods. Hence, in this universe, access to technology and progress is closely dependent on the divine. 13

The expression ‘projectionist’ is actually a better term when talking about a graphic novel.

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It is important to specify that Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals (despite its source) is not an ‘interactive’ comic but a real videogame. Several attempts have been made in the past years to transpose various European graphic novels into a digital format,14 and none so far have been commercially successful. In fact, ‘books in which you are the hero’ are an older narrative genre that is similar to the ‘point & click’ videogames. These second-person narratives appeared for the first time in the 1980’s as spin-offs of Dungeons & Dragons-type games. The presence of a pre-written plot that comes with the ‘books in which you are the hero’ is an important distinction between these two types of entertainment. The origin of this form of narration can be found in the novel Hopscotch (1963, English translation: 1966), which Argentinian-born French writer Julio Cortázar arranged in two ways. This unique text can be read either chronologically or by following an alternate order of its chapters already pre-established by its author. ‘Books in which you are the hero’ add another twist to their original m ­ odel: in order to move from one paragraph to the next within the narrative, the reader must either resolve enigmas, kill enemies (using rolls of the dice)15 or obtain specific items that might be needed in the near future of the diegesis. Obviously, thanks to their simple use, ‘point & click’ videogames present a structure which is very similar to this kind of text. These narratives follow a model that includes various stages that players must pass in order to complete the final chapter. Players also have access to an inventory of objects and information that they have gathered during their ‘adventure’. These objects may come in handy at any moment. The major difference between the two genres is the shift from the second-person to the first-person narrative in the virtual world. Of course, these videogames sometimes take liberty with the homodiegetical narrator rule. Nevertheless, the obvious parallels between ‘books in which you are the hero’ and ‘point & click’ videogames suggest that new digital technology is re-introducing an old genre instead of really creating a new form of narration. Despite the fact that videogames are transferable and downloadable to an mp4 player or to the last generation of cellular telephones, this kind of ­media is not adapted entirely to a fast-pace urban environment, because a gamer must constantly pay attention to his or her game (unless the ‘pause’ option is used). Despite the excitement caused by the arrival of mp3/mp4 players on 14

15

Of course, I am not talking about digital copies of entire graphic novels here. Documents of this sort (which come as a pdf or a cbr/cbz extension) actually preserve the original page format of the European bande dessinée. In ‘books in which you are the hero’, both the reader and his enemies possess a specific number of ‘life points’. In order to kill an enemy, you must reduce his life points to zero.

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the ­market, until recently, a new genre designed exactly for this kind of product had not yet emerged. Almost any kind of digital file that involves images and sound can be downloaded to an mp4 player. Of course, video clips and ­movies are the first media that one might choose to enjoy with this new technology. However, when converting traditional films or music-videos into digital files, one is not always taking the lifestyle of people who use mp4 players into ­account. Urban owners of this type of device are constantly on the move. True, mp4 players a­ llow their users to view images and at the same time listen to sound. Nevertheless, users cannot give these small screens their full attention if they are taking public transportation, jogging or driving. A small Paris-based company has recently taken spatial and temporal constraints that are specific to owners of mp4 players into account. ‘Mp3-minutes’ (as the company is called) has come up with a new genre of narrative that takes the lifestyle of urban dwellers who use devices such as digital audio/video players into consideration. Pierre Bordage’s Chronique des ombres (2009) is the first série-mp3 that Mp3-minutes has released on the market. One can ­either buy the cd of this aventure audio illustrée or download a new fifteen-minute episode every week from the company’s website. Radio dramas, popular prior to the advent of television, are probably the genre that is the most similar to a série-mp3. Coincidently, the most infamous of these radio programs was also a work of science fiction: H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (The radio program was Orson Wells’ rendition). Like radio dramas, the mp3 file of Chronique des ombres includes more than the recording of an extra-diegetical narrator. Wellknown actors read the voices of different characters.16 Other specific sound effects (shots from firearms, music) can also be heard. On a computer or an mp4 player, one can listen to this sound recording and at the same time watch images that accompany the mp3 file. The mp4 file is actually not an animation but more closely resembles a slide-show of drawings by different artists. The visuals that come with the sound file are only extras which certainly make listening to the série-mp3 more enjoyable. However, watching the images is not necessary in order to understand the story. As a result, users do not have to give 100% of their attention to the small screen of the mp4 player/smartphone when they are watching/listening to Chronique des ombres. The plot of Chronique des ombres takes place at the end of the twentyfirst century. After a global nuclear war, the only centres of ‘civilisation’ left are the former capitals of the old nation-states. Every city-state hides from 16

For the English version of Chroniques des ombres, producers hired the following actors from Hollywood: Morgan Freeman, George Clooney, Cameron Diaz, Christina Ricci, Scarlett Johansson, Nicole Kidman, Gwyneth Paltrow and Uma Thurman.

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the ­outside world behind magnetic shields17 and identifies its citizens by accessing the ‘bio-chips’ that have been installed in their brains. Thanks to this invasive technology, the Centralized Artificial Intelligence which administers the Cités Unifiées (cu) system can eliminate any hors-cite (individual from the outside world) who crosses the forbidden perimeter. Consequently, hors-cites have organized into various ‘clans’ in order to survive in the mist of radiation, pollution, hostile mutants and rival groups of humans. Inside the urban environment, the citizens of NyLoPa (an acronym of New York-London-Paris) have their thoughts randomly monitored. Consequently, criminality is now only a minor social problem. However, biochips can sometimes drive their carrier crazy. Those who suffer from this type of side effect are called ‘plombeurs’ (from the French expression ‘péter les plombs’, that one would translate as ‘to blow a fuse’) and are prone to random killing sprees. In order to maintain o­ rder, the Cités Unifiées system has established a special law enforcement agency whose élite members are called ‘fouineurs’ (from the French verb ‘fouiner’, ‘to snoop’). Fouineurs ­possess biochips that are of a higher grade than the ones found in the brains of common citizens. These implants create a permanent link ­between their owners and the Centralized Artificial Intelligence. In addition, the special biochip made exclusively for fouineurs allows them to communicate ‘telepathically’ with one another. Chronique des ombres presents two parallel storylines. We follow what ­happens to Naja and Deux-Lunes (two Horcites who have escaped the m ­ assacre of their clan) and to Ganesh and Théo (two fouineurs from the City of Paris). Théo (a veteran fouineur) and Ganesh (his young apprentice) must investigate a series of murders that are taking place simultaneously in Paris, London and New York. Naja and Deux-Lunes are running away from the dreadful Guerriers de l’Apocalypse, a group of terrorists hired by ‘La Main Noire’ (a secret society from NyLoPa). In fact, members of ‘La Main Noire’ are unofficially organizing a campaign of ethnic cleansing in the hors-cite territory in an attempt to re-­ colonize the world. Of course, Ganesh and Théo eventually find out that this secret society is controlling both the maniacs who are committing genocide in the outside world and the serial killers who are active in the Cités Unifiées system. The world of Chroniques des ombres includes innovative technology, such as genetic surgery (which cures baldness, heart diseases and cancer). However, it is the ‘telepathic biochip’ which represents a real breakthrough. This invention 17

Already in the post-apocalyptic world of Wang (1997), the same author writes about a magnetic shield that protects the remaining Western nations (Union des Nations Occidentales) against barbarian hordes from the Third World.

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not only allows its users to access a collective databank, but also provides additional advantages over unaltered humans. Fouineurs’ biochips can increase one’s IQ by fifty points and create mental links between their carriers that closely resemble telepathy. In their narration, the authors of Chronique des ombres rely on different techniques in order to show when a biochip is interacting either with its owner or with the Centralized Artificial Intelligence. For instance, when two characters are talking to each other through their biochips, their voices change. Consequently, fouineurs have two ‘voices’: the one that comes out of their mouth and the one that goes through their biochip (which is usually female). Of course, it is difficult to talk about a real ‘voice’ here, since this new technology creates a kind of artificial telepathy. Interestingly enough, this polyphony is not confusing at all when one is viewing/listening to the ­story, even when one is not looking at the images that accompany the sound file. This lack of confusion comes from the fact that different voices are used. The ‘main computer’ has a female voice, while the main character’s thoughts are heard through his same male voice. In the urban environment of NyLoPa, when a biochip does not drive its owner literally crazy, other minor side effects can occur. For instance, many fouineurs (including Théo himself) complain of headaches after they receive their implants. In addition, it takes fouineurs a long time to adjust to listening to a constant ‘voice in their head’. In fact, the sound effect that is created for the characters at the diegetical level is being reproduced at the listener’s level, when he or she listens to the mp3 file. When wearing a pair of headphones, a listener not only becomes isolated from his immediate environment, but can also hear different voices in his head (characters talking to each other or to themselves). As a result, the very form of a série-mp3 reflects the content of its narrative. This is where the new genre differs from its ancestor (the radio drama). Because a radio set was expensive in the 1920’s, families could usually afford only one of these new devices. Therefore, listening to radio dramas was usually a group experience. A série-mp3 creates a one-on-one relationship between its diegesis and its listener. Watching/listening to this new mode of expression is consequently more of a private experience. A certain kind of polyphony (the neologism ‘polygraphy’ would be a more appropriate term) also exists at the visual level in Chronique des ombres. Since watching the images is not essential to understanding a série-mp3, there is more room for diversity in terms of the drawings that artists can create. Amateurs of graphic novels would be surprised when watching and listening to Bordage’s work for the first time. Indeed, bandes dessinées can at most have only two authors: the writer and the artist. When an illustrator is replaced in a series of comics, the new artist tries to imitate carefully the original drawings. On the

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other hand, the images that accompany the sound file of a série-mp3 not only include the work of various artists (Grelin, Gilles Francescano and Stéphanie Hans), but also several styles (realistic, anime, caricature). In addition, each style is rendered in at least three types of coloration: black and white, ligne claire (the Belgian clean line style that is used in the Franco-Belgian tradition of comics), and colours. Coincidently, a certain diversity of forms or ‘polygraphy’ also appears in the content of the narrative. When the characters of Ganesh and Théo begin investigating the series of murders that preoccupy the mayor, their only clue is a hi-tech memory chip found on a crime scene in Paris. While analysing this physical evidence, Théo realises that this chip has been used several times. What is leftover of the previous data is what interests him most. Théo even compares this hi-tech memory chip to a palimpsest, an old parchment that has been written upon previously and that bears trace of the imperfectly erased texts. In the post-apocalyptic urban environment imagined by Bordage, the existence of a multi-racial society in what is leftover of the European civilisation (Paris and London) is considered a fait accompli. Chroniques des ombres does not express any real concern regarding the future of French national identity. The character of Ganesh, for instance, is of Indian descent, and his racial background is not an issue. Moreover, his name is not a coincidence since in Hindu mythology, Ganesh is known as the ‘remover of obstacles and hurdles’. Therefore, Ganesh is an appropriate name for a detective who is going to uncover a conspiracy. On the other hand, as in his other writings (Cycle de Rohel, 1995; Les guerriers du silence, 2000), Bordage warns of the danger of religious fanaticism. The serial killers that Ganesh and Théo pursue, for example, are also members of a dangerous religious cult. Consequently, Bordage is in agreement with ­Sokal: we can no longer take the relegation of religion to the private sphere (one of the major accomplishments of contemporary European democracies) for granted. Finally, Bordage also seems interested in writing about the useless internal power play that goes on within the First World, while migratory pressure from the Third World grows stronger and stronger. In Chroniques des ombres, the remaining centres of civilisation after the nuclear holocaust are Paris, London and New York City. Nevertheless, despite internal rivalries, the Cités Unifiées system must stand strong against the hors-cites. In fact, the overall plot of ­Chroniques des ombres reflects the false promises of globalisation that came with the emergences of new technologies (such as internet) that should have made everybody a world citizen. True, the urban environment described in Bordage’s podcast suggests that an unlimited access to people’s personal information is within reach. However, the idea that borders would eventually

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d­ isappear is entirely debunked. If the free circulation of people is allowed for the citizens of the urban environments (Ny-Lo-Pa) that is imagined in ­Chroniques des Ombres, outsiders (the Horcites) do not enjoy this kind of socio-­ economical mobility. Similarly, if globalisation has made it easier for members of any privileged social class to take a job anywhere in the world, such benefits do not apply to poor citizens. Each time a new invention becomes available in any field, a m ­ isguided ­debate seems destined to take place between those intent on defending tradition and ‘real’ art (but tend to negate anything new) and those who ­supposedly embrace innovation, creativity and progress (but tend to reject ­everything from the past). Fortunately, in contemporary French urban science fiction, this does not seem to be the case. In Chrysalis, we see that the digital technology used to create the markers of a futuristic Paris along with the help of traditional photography is very similar to the way nineteenth century artists used black and white photographs and painting to produce new work. At the same time, the crisis of national identity that exists in contemporary France is reflected in the new technology that Leclercq and Philippon imagine in their film. The videogame Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals also displays at the d­ iegetical ­level an osmosis between old black and white films and paintings because the player must draw and colour his own artwork. At the same time, the gamer can virtually experience the kind of new technology that Sokal foresees in his videogame: the power to possess and control the body of one besides oneself. Contrary to its ancestor (the ‘book in which you are the hero’), a point and click videogame can switch perspective from the first-person narrative to the extradiegetic narrator. Bordage’s Chronique des ombres is probably the most unique innovation among the works we have analysed so far. Although it is still too early to tell whether the new genre of the série-mp3 is going to be successful or not, the emergence of this new mode of expression is a response to a specific need. So far, no other serious alternative that could challenge the série-mp3 has been proposed. Bordage not only comes up with original futuristic technologies in his plot; the medium he is using (mp3/mp4 players) and its effects on urban consumers also give us an idea of what the future Paris he is envisioning would be like. In terms of cultural value, both Chroniques des ombres and Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals seem to be questioning the legitimacy of neo-liberal globalisation (and the opening of borders). Finally, like Sokal’s videogame, the plot of Bordage’s série-mp3 also includes a warning against the rise of religious fanaticism that could destroy the fabric of secularised European democracies. Although the science fiction authors that we have studied are far from

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r­ eactionary, their works express a justifiable concern about the future of the Western world, and not simply of French society in general.

Bibliography



Primary References



Secondary References

Bilal, Enki. 1980. La foire aux immortels. Paris: Éditions Dargaud, 1980. Bordage, Pierre. 2008. Chroniques des ombres. Paris: Série mp3-minute, 2008. Chrysalis. 2007. Director: Julien Leclercq and Franck Philippon. Gaumont Distribution. Freejack. 1992. Director: Geoff Murphy. Warner Bros. Leloup, Roger. 1975. Les trois soleil de Vinéa. Charleroi: Éditions Dupuis. Noires sont les galaxies 1981. Director: Daniel Moosmann. Antenne 2. Pohl, Frederik. 1988. Annals of the Heechee. New York: Random House. Scalzi, John. 2005. Old Man’s War. New York: Tom Doherty Associates. Sheckley, Robert. 1978. Futuropolis. New York: A & A Visual Library. Sokal, Benoit. 2008. Nikopol: La foire aux immortels / Secrets of the Immortals (a ‘point & click’ videogame). Paris: White Birds Production. Stargate. 1996. Directors: Dean Delvin and Roland Emmerich. Carolco Pictures.

Clapp, James A. 2003. “‘It was the City Killed the Beast’: Nature, Technophobia, and the Cinema of the Urban Future” in Journal of Urban Technology 10(3): 1–18. Coleridge, Taylor Samuel. 1985. Biographia Literaria. Oxford U. Press. Ginway, Elizabeth. 2004. Brazilian Science Fiction: Cultural Myths and Nationhood in the Land of the Future. Lewisburg: Buknell U. Press. Gold, John R. 2001. “Under Darkened Skies: The City in Science Fiction Film” in Geography 86(4): 337–345. Low, Setha M. 1996. ‘The Anthropology of Cities: Imagining and Theorizing the City’ in Annual Review of Anthropology 25: 383–409. Roberts, Adam. 2000. Science Fiction. London: Routledge. Rosenblum, Naomi. 1997. A World History of Photography. New York: Abbeville Press. Suvin, Darko. 1972. “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre” in College English 34(3): 372–382. Vizcaíno, Marcelo. 2008. “Cine y arquitectura: Un futuro evocado” in arq 70: 16–18. Wolfe, Gary. 1979. The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction. Kent: Kent State U. Press.

Spatiality in the Cyber-World of William Gibson Imola Bülgözdi Abstract This chapter explores the megalopolises of the near future and their representation in cyberspace in William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, which laid the foundations of the genre of cyberpunk. Gibson’s portrayal of power relations sheds light on the fact that big money dominates the urban skyline, while the construction of humanised ‘place’ occurs at the margins, since the groups that provide identification to the individual are subcultures that colonise unused urban space. This tendency is also present in ­Gibson’s two cities in orbit, indicating that it is not the loss of contact with Earth that acts as a dehumanising factor but wealth and power. Gibson’s treatment of both ­virtual and physical cityscapes demonstrates their human dimension as places that are discursive constructs, even attributing sentience to the matrix itself.

Key Terms William Gibson – Sprawl Trilogy – cyberpunk – cyberspace – spatiality – megalopolis

William Gibson’s multiple award-winning Sprawl trilogy – Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) – revitalised the genre of ­science fiction in the second half of the 1980s, at a time when the Internet was not widely available. Gibson’s single-handed creation of the genre cyberpunk at that time when the World Wide Web was a mere proposal ­taking shape in mathematician Tim Berners-Lee’s mind is especially remarkable. In recent d­ ecades, Gibson’s fiction, set in a not-too-distant future and characterised by the use of advanced virtual reality, seems to have become more ­relevant to our understanding of the twists and turns of postmodern reality, particularly in terms of the various types of urbanities and the virtual cityscapes he envisioned in cyberspace. The aim of this chapter is to investigate the ­spatiality of the ­cities that play a major role in the novels, focusing on historical and environmental aspects of the use of ‘place’, defined by Jon ­Anderson in U ­ nderstanding C ­ ultural Geography as “the medium and the message of cultural life”, as ­opposed to ‘space’, which is “scientific, open and detached” (2015: 51). The chapter will also explore Gibson’s vision of the

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c­ olonisation of space and the cultural implications of the representation of these locations in cyberspace. In discussing and interpreting urban spaces in Gibson’s narratives it is imperative to note that all the cities that play a major role in the trilogy are now regarded as global cities. The Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis, also dubbed as the Sprawl, along with Tokyo, London and Paris are, in real life, among the handful of centres that dominate global economy because “they are sites for the accumulation, distribution and circulation of capital” (2005: 357), as ­posited by Chris Barker in Cultural Studies – Theory and Practice. Barker names “information and decision-making functions” (2005: 357, italics mine) as the key factors of influence, which correspond to the single paradigm deployed in Gibson’s first description of the Sprawl in Neuromancer: Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel of a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million ­megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan. Gibson 1993: 57

In Neuromancer, cyberspace is defined as “a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system”, and d­ escribed as “lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data … like city lights receding” (Gibson 1993: 67), thus establishing the link between cyberspace and the urban landscape. In the second book of the trilogy, Count Zero, Gibson elaborates on the iconic places of cyberspace: in a future dominated by corporate wealth, “the corporate hotcores burned like neon novas” (1987: 62). As a result, cyberscape is defined by wealth and power; however, Gibson’s future cities are home to, and are shaped by, far more varied residents than multinational companies and their employees. The ­urban space described by Gibson is quintessentially postmodern, located several steps ahead of the metropolises within consensus reality, along the evolutionary line defined by Edward W. Soja. As Soja states: “the new urbanisation processes and patternings are being overlain on the old and articulated with them in increasingly complex ways” (1997: 20), consequently creating new patterns of fragmentation, segregation and polarisation. Gibson’s urban spaces embody the future conditions envisioned by Soja, following the restructuring of megalopolises and the growth of what he terms as “edge cities, outer cities and

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­postsuburbia” (1997: 22). The Sprawl is indeed a “metropolis turned inside-out and outside-in” (Soja 1997: 22) and becomes fertile ground to social, economic and cultural inequality and consequent impoverishment, crime and violence. In Mapping Cyberspace, Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin describe the urban landscape in Gibson’s cyberpunk urban cores as: highly centralised and extremely dense both structurally and in terms of population. The value of space forces development both upwards and underground, to produce a vertical spectrum of stylised, mirrored, postmodern architecture – a riot of glass and steel. Dodge 2001: 195

Nevertheless, Gibson’s cities retain their identities despite the intense globalising factors which have virtually erased nation states in the developed world. This state of affairs is taken for granted in the novels and is apparent from global mobility, the free flow of products – both on the legal and the black markets – ruled by corporate wealth and the warlords of the underworld respectively. What, at first glance, appear to be no more than a handful of stereotypical locations or national characteristics associated in the books with Tokyo, Paris or London, turn out to be well-chosen assets that play a part in the symbolic economy of these cities. Cultural studies have established that urban spaces and places are formed jointly by capital investment and cultural meanings, and have demonstrated that culture plays an economic role in a number of ways. For the futuristic version of real-life locations, Gibson chose characteristics that, according to Barker, act as a “branding for a city, associ­ ating it with desirable goods” (2005: 359). As an example for branding, Barker cites the cinematic representations of the New York skyline and the high-tech neon of Tokyo, which also become recurring images in the novels, and even the architectural history and gastronomic reputation of Paris is recalled by the old buildings, galleries and cafés in Count Zero. The evolution of Gibson’s urbanities also demonstrates that these future cities are not homogeneous despite the above-mentioned advanced level of globalisation. The presence of specific formations of socio-cultural practices that shape them become apparent when Kumiko, one of the protagonists of Mona Lisa Overdrive, compares London and the Sprawl to her native Tokyo. Observing the “vast generic tumble that was her century’s paradigm of urban reality” ­(Gibson 1995: 168), she manages to pinpoint a factor in urban growth that is at the crossroads of historical, environmental, economic and cultural practices in the way space and “gomi” [rubbish, trash, waste in Japanese] are used. The ­thirteen-year-old grew up in Tokyo, where 35 per cent of the city is built on an

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area reclaimed from the Bay after a century’s systematic ­dumping and, therefore, she considers waste a valuable resource. To her shocked eyes, the bulk of London “consisted of gomi”, of buildings that would have been replaced in ­Japan long ago, but in a matter of days she comes to realise that “these structures revealed … the fabric of time, each wall patched by generations of hands in an ongoing task of restoration” (1995: 169), and is also informed that the gomi sold at Portobello Road Market has become a major natural resource in England. In Japan, where the pressing need for space has devoured so much of the past, history “had become a quantity, a rare thing, parcelled out by government and preserved by law and corporate funding” (1995: 11), w ­ hereas in London the past has remained an organic part of the city, generated over the centuries. Kumiko concludes that the English, in fact, inhabit their ­rubbish, but finds it very hard to grasp the deterioration and apparent lack of planning that characterises the Sprawl, where waste is “a rich humus, a decay that sprouted prodigies in steel and polymer” and ruined buildings stand side by side “towers taller than any in Tokyo, corporate obelisks that pierced the sooty lacework of overlapping domes” (1995: 169). The matrix, too, is defined by the copyrighted virtual representations of the multinational corporations whose skyscrapers dominate the cityscapes, creating “very much a fixed landscape” (1995: 254), both real and virtual. Thus, the ever-shifting cyberpunk urban underworld that Gibson’s characters move in is either disguised in cyberspace, or is completely off the grid, like the lives of the multitudes carving out a squalid niche existence in abandoned urban space. In Cyberpunk and Cyberculture: Science Fiction and the Work of William G ­ ibson, Dani Cavallaro observes the dichotomy between cyberpunk’s ­tendency to regard space as “often conceived of in immaterial terms as a product of the electronic mapping of abstract data” (2000: 134), and the emphatically ­material nature of its cities. In her view, the mounting waste, the ever-present crime and disease, and the fascination with relics of the past emphasise the corporeal dimension of the cybercity. Nevertheless, the nature of Gibson’s ­cyberworld can be better comprehended through the contrast between space and place, the latter defined as “the focus of human experience, memory, desire and identity” (Barker 2005: 350), no matter how bleak an experience it actually might be. As evidenced by his descriptions of the future megalopolises, which bring together economy, power, culture, and problems of identification, Gibson regards his cities not as ‘spaces’ but ‘places’. For instance, the various interpretations of the area called the Projects, ranging from “some looming vertical hell” (Gibson 1987: 79), through the much more realistic definition as a multi-ethnic self-sufficient city housed in an enormous building (an arcology), to a spiritual

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place consecrated to voodoo gods, also demonstrates that place for Gibson is a discursive ­construction: a ­“target of emotional identification or investment” (Barker 2005: 350). Jennifer S. Light’s essay “From City Space to Cyberspace” challenges those cyber-critics who claim that contemporary cities have lost connection to their local geographies and cite this as a factor contributing to urban decay, blaming this phenomenon on the rise of electronic communications. Light argues that the critics’ bleak visions of cyberspace tend to disregard the increasing number of non-profit and grassroots organisations that meet online and in person, working for the renewal of physical space (1999: 125–126). The lack of ­communal uses also confirms the elitist nature of the cyberspace dominated by multinationals in Gibson’s early novels, detailed earlier. The author’s focus on disenfranchised characters shows that the cityscape of the Sprawl trilogy is shaped by forces far more complex than a simple movement and countermovement; it is the result of more than an escape into virtuality followed by the decline of reality and its subsequent replacement by simulations. G ­ ibson’s treatment of space and place cannot be reduced to this dichotomy for a ­number of reasons to be explored in the next paragraphs. The claim that the escape into a virtual world has contributed to urban decline merits further investigation. In the Sprawl trilogy, the density of information in corporate headquarters, protected by ice [“intrusion countermeasure electronics” (Gibson 1988: 196)] – the equivalent of today’s firewalls – makes it clear that official systems definitely construe an information society, but individual access to the matrix is not as common. In Gibson’s early novels cyberspace lacks the social dimension provided by today’s social networking sites. Telephones remain the main channel of communication and all the big cities depicted in the texts have retained traditional meeting places. Gibson’s characters meet and exchange information in London pubs, Tokyo bars, Paris cafés and restaurants, and Istanbul’s bazaar is teeming with people, just like the Hypermart in Madison. Although information is mostly stored in an electronic format, it is important to note that there is no commonly used device to provide instant communication or access to cyberspace like contemporary smartphones. The need for face-to-face communication is also kept alive by concerns of legal or illegal monitoring of communication channels. In the Sprawl trilogy, few people actually access cyberspace and are, for the most part, cyber-cowboys. Their experience of cyberspace and disdain for the flesh reflect the views of a handful of professionals compared to the population of the whole world, and therefore, cannot be generalised. It is also ­essential to note that the scope of the far more widely used form of electronic ­entertainment, called simstim in the novels, does not exceed that of today’s

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television, despite its technical complexity. By accessing the recording of ­another individual’s sensory experiences, simstim consumers become passive “experiencers” of programmes that are not interactive and do not allow for communication with other users. While this can become a form of escape from reality for the individual, it cannot potentially be blamed for urban d­ ecay, all the more so because Gibson’s cities house masses of socially disenfranchised people, who will never have access to cyberspace or a simstim deck. The bag people, for instance, are “prone hummocks of rag gone the exact shade of the sidewalk”, appearing “as though they were being slowly extruded from the dark concrete, to become mobile extensions of the city” (Gibson 1987: 284). Compared to this bottom caste of urban existence, the roach-infested filthy squat occupied by Mona and her pimp, Eddy in Mona Lisa Overdrive is definitely a step up. However, as the fate of several characters demonstrates, lacking a Single Identification Number (sin), assigned to individuals at birth, predestines one for a life outside the official systems, where prostitution and crime are the only way to make a living. Gibson’s criminal networks permeate all layers of society, forming a shadow urban skyline mirroring the one created by multinationals, since the principle of operation of the former is the same as that of official systems: information is synonymous with wealth and power. Therefore, it is not the escape into virtuality to blame for urban decay, but the very same economic, social, and cultural processes that initiated the transformation from modern into postmodern in the second half of the 20th century, as argued by Anthony Giddens. In The Consequences of Modernity, Giddens cites globalisation as one of the most visible consequences of m ­ odernity and states that local transformation cannot be analysed in isolation (1990: 64), proving that these processes, taken to extremes in the novels, existed well ­before the computer era. If modernity is characterised by industrialisation, capitalism, surveillance and the nation-state system, postmodernity, according to Barker, would be “a post-industrial, post-capitalist and stateless society” (2004: 168). Gibson’s world is an almost perfect approximation of this state of affairs, and the ­trilogy describes a “social formation in which information exchange has replaced industrial production, and in particular heavy industries, as the primary economic driver” (Barker 2004: 169). Yet, as pointed out earlier, it does not fulfil some of the criteria of electronic culture, in which the spaces of social and cultural interaction are not linked to specific social and geographical spaces (Barker 2005: 367). In terms of social and cultural interaction, space in the megalopolises of the future has not stopped being a place: despite the pervasive presence of virtuality, people still go to amusement arcades to play, to restaurants to eat, to clubs for a fling, to Ginza or the flea market to shop, to art g­ alleries

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or ­nightclubs for entertainment, depending on their tastes and means. All big ­cities are characterised by crowds on the move – the underground train ­systems in London and the Sprawl pulse like arteries of a gigantic body – who mould the city according to their needs, generating a microcosmic structure that ­Tatiani G. Rapatzikou regards as superimposed layers of signification which produce a distorted effect “as each one of these can be seen through the other”, enhancing “the boundlessness and directionlessness of the new urban space of the Sprawl” (2004: 90). This view of the Sprawl both conforms to postmodernist aesthetics and lends itself to analysis through Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractal geometry, ­proposed by Cavallaro as the relevant tool to grasp Gibson’s cities. Fractal geometry ­explores ways of measuring the irregular and attempts to find out whether there is regularity in irregular manifestations (Cavallaro 2000: 159). While these attempts at analysing cityscapes are doubtlessly valid methods, they are not very fruitful when applied to the human dimension of space. As pointed out earlier, Gibson describes and presents urban space as place, from various human perspectives that are always culturally situated, given that “culture is involved in all those practices which are not simply genetically programmed into us” (Hall 1997: 3). As it transpires from his April 11, 2010 blog entry, Gibson considers himself “an interpreter of technologies, an amateur anthropologist”, prompting Gary Westfahl’s summary of his method: Gibson first goes on field trips – in this case, into an imagined near-future world – and makes observations – here, about specific sorts of advanced technology. ... He then returns to present this data in the form of n ­ ovels. However, Gibson has no interest in theorizing about the information he provides. ... His role is to provide raw materials from which others can forge theories. westfahl 2013: 69

Gibson’s presentation of the future through his characters’ eyes is reminiscent of Clifford Geertz’s technique of “thick description”, which situates ­human b­ ehaviour in specific social and cultural contexts. The tendency to use a c­ haracter’s point of view does not stop at the impression megalopolises make. The same is true of cyberspace, defined as “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation” (Gibson 1993: 67, italics mine), but it is clear from the trilogy that most people are only ­familiar with its practical everyday uses, such as using credit chips instead of money, privacy programs to block unwanted calls, accessing old print books or the ever-present electronic newsreel. In Count Zero, the decks used at school

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compare to a real cyberspace deck like “toys that shuttled you through the ­infinite reaches of that space that wasn’t space” (Gibson 1987: 62) and children are not taught about the structure of the cyberspace they grow up taking as much for granted as the sky. In Neuromancer, for instance, a top cowboy has to put in eight days of hard work to chart his way through the ice protecting the company Sense/Net to steal the personality construct of Dixie Flatline, a legendary cowboy, his partner-to-be on an illegal mission. In information societies, data theft is a lucrative business, and consequently, keeping the masses away from data is a top priority, which is why the most valuable information is guarded by artificial intelligences (ais), the most complex of whom are able to kill intruders. The urban cityscape consists of places “constituted by social relations of power” (Barker 2005: 347) and, as Roger Burrows claims in “Cyberpunk as ­Social Theory: William Gibson and the Sociological Imagination”, cyberspace “connects in various ways with the technological reality of the street, not least in the way in which the sociogeography of the digitised city mirrors that of the built city” (1997: 242). However, the social stratification and the presence of the disenfranchised in the Sprawl trilogy subverts the assumption that cyberspace perfectly mirrors reality. It is also significant that Gibson’s characters find detailed virtual constructs disconcerting, despite being used to the ubiquitous presence of cyberspace in everyday life. This is very clear from one of the characters’ reaction to the new simstim technology offered by the revolutionary Maas biochip: it seems so realistic that “it carried the suggestion that any environment might be unreal” (Gibson 1987: 197). The technology behind simstim and cyberspace decks is basically the same, as explained in Neuromancer, and the cyberspace matrix, too, is defined by Gibson as “a drastic simplification of the human sensorium, at least in terms of presentation” (1993: 71). Consequently, the parallel between cityscape and cyberscape is not to be found in their representation as mirrors of a social reality, but in Gibson’s presentation of both the virtual and the real as filtered through human consciousness: simstim and cyberspace are experienced by the same sensory means as the real world. Although it is impossible to construct a neat parallel between the matrix and real-life urbanities, it is essential to discuss Freeside, the satellite world built by the Tessier-Ashpool clan as a business venture. This city in orbit reveals an artificial world, which turns out to be a simulacrum in the Baudrillardian sense. This postmodern palimpsest lacks a referent and substitutes the signs of the real for the real, as argued by Jean Baudrillard in “The Precession of Simulacra” (Smith 2010: 198). Freeside comprises “brothel and banking nexus, pleasure dome and free port, border town and spa. Freeside is Las Vegas and the hanging gardens of Babylon, an orbital Geneva” (Gibson 1993: 125), with genetically

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engineered trees that look too perfect under “the recorded blue of a Cannes sky” (1993: 148). Significantly, the very first thing to define Freeside is the magnitude of its data exchange, putting it on a par with the metropolises on Earth, but characterised by a lack of an evolutionary history. Despite the divergent socio-cultural use of space in London, Tokyo, Paris, Istanbul and the Sprawl, these cities show continuity with their past, by incorporating or recycling it to a varying degree. Freeside, however, is engineered, has a limited ecosystem, is able to produce its own air and water, but has to rely on constant shipments of food. It is not the result of organic growth; it caters for businesses and tourists, making it a very exclusive orbital downtown. While Gary Westfahl is right to point out that Gibson refashions space in his own image by creating an unconventional space station, the claim that “Freeside space habitat would be a miniature Sprawl” (Westfahl 2013: 62) is true only to a certain extent. Due to its sterility and wealth, Freeside is a better approximation of the virtual ­cybercity than the actual megalopolises on Earth, where almost any kind of space can become a place through human identification and emotional investment. The only part of Freeside that shows continuity with the past in the first book of the trilogy is Villa Straylight, the idiosyncratic dwelling of the TessierAshpools, who extend their lifespan by means of cryogenic sleep, and in an immortality bid as a clan, the founding couple cloned their son and daughter literally by the dozen. The villa itself is a parasitic structure, without an ecosystem, situated in the interior of the rotating Freeside torus without a view of the skies. Its tunnels are built in organic curves so as to conceal “that the interior of the spindle is arranged with the banal precision of furniture in a hotel room”, resulting in “a desperate proliferation of structures, forms flowing, interlocking” (Gibson 1993: 206). Although the interior is decorated with museum cases full of antiques and relics of the past and the floor is covered in old hand-woven rugs, Straylight’s is a fake organicity, comprehended by Case upon noticing how a beautiful door “had been sawn down to fit a particular entrance. … They’d imported these things, he thought, and then forced it all to fit. But none of it fit” (1993: 214). Villa Straylight’s palimpsest of the past makes the Baudrillardian simulacrum even more apparent: the time and place these relics come from are long gone, the objects incorporated in this giant bricolage have ceased to have a referent in the real world, robbing the dwelling of the opportunity to have a referent at all. Straylight fails to become a place, just like the Tessier-Ashpools cease to be a family, with the majority of its members in cryogenic sleep at any given time, the founding mother murdered by the founding father, and the offspring brought up in seclusion without even meeting a parent. The history of this industrial clan – an anachronism in a world where business is in

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corporate hands – explains the conclusion one of the characters draws upon meeting the world’s wealthiest individual, Jozef Virek: “the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human” (1987: 28). The bleak picture of profitdriven colonisation of space is, however, challenged by Zion, a space station ­founded by five workers who did not return to Earth after completing their space ­assignment but formed a colony instead. Zion is reminiscent of “the patchwork tenements of Istanbul, the irregular, discoloured plates laserscrawled with Rastafarian symbols and the initials of the welders” (1993: 127). In contrast with Freeside’s bustle and designer image crafted to perfection, Zion smells “of cooked vegetables, humanity, and ganja [cannabis]” (1993: 128) and dub, mixed from vast libraries of digitalised pop music, pulses c­ onstantly through the colony, providing a form of worship and a sense of community for its inhabitants. Zion has a closed ecosystem, which enables the space station to cycle for years with no external help whatsoever, and its permanent residents have a sense of history and a strong identity as members of a religious community that claims to have constructed the colony to leave earthly Babylon behind. In this sense, Zionites have much in common both with squatters on Earth, who occupy and shape unused urban space on the one hand, and subculture groups, on the other. Youth subcultures provide an ongoing possibility of group identification in a future that has mostly dispensed with religion and national identity and most importantly, they represent the only groups in the trilogy that are held together by other than business interest, besides Zion. Cavallaro suggests that Gibson “amalgamates in often baffling ways the rational and the irrational, the new and the old, the mind and the body, by integrating the hyper-efficient structures of high technology with the a­ narchy of street subcultures” (2000: xi). Barker, however, also draws attention to a positive facet of the latter: despite the apparent anarchy of youth subcultures, they offer the possibility to form a collective identity different from that of school or work, as well as provide solutions to some of the existential dilemmas of identity (2005: 379). This is true of the Zionites, but it is important to note though that this functioning community built from scratch lives in relative isolation from mainstream culture and considers both the world governed by business and its cyberspace representation sinful Babylon. Youth ­subcultures, by contrast, exist at the heart of the megalopolises, in constant interaction with the mainstream, where space is not a void, but “a dynamic, multitudinous and changing social construction constituted in and through social ­relations of power” (Barker 2005: 449). Gibson’s megalopolises are teeming with subversive groups, from the all-powerful Yakuza to harmless youth subcultures. By placing Zion in space, along Freeside, Gibson demonstrates that

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it is not life in space or the loss of connection with planet Earth that causes people to lose their humanity, it is rather wealth and power that alter human relationships beyond recognition, which is also mirrored in the places they construct. With the exclusion of the underprivileged, cityscapes in the matrix follow real world power relations. Zion occupies a peripheral position both physically and on the grid, of its own free will, but the fact that the only other non-­business-oriented groups are youth subcultures conveys how marginal the ideas they represent have become in Gibson’s world. The trilogy only portrays dysfunctional families and even those are few and far between: the single mother of Count Zero’s cybercowboy character spends her free-time in the company of a bottle of wine and endless soap sagas, while teenage Kumiko is trying to come to terms with her deranged mother’s suicide. Mona, the protagonist of Mona Lisa Overdrive, is brought up by an old man who is not a blood relative, and another main character sends money to his dying mother but does not visit. The unethical parenting of the Tessier-Ashpools can only be matched by the figure of the scientist father who plants an experimental biochip into his daughter’s skull for the sake of success. Thus, the marginality of parent-child relationships to the identity construction of the individual, taken to extremes by the Tessier-Ashpools, is highlighted. In William Gibson: A Literary Companion, Tom Henthorne proposes two contradictory views of Gibson’s cyberspace. On the one hand, Henthorne states that by presenting virtual domains as ‘spaces’ or ‘places’, Gibson’s work facilitated the commercialization of cyberspace similar to the development of private property or real estate, on the other hand, he argues that cyberspace has a utopian function, insofar as it provides a means of rethinking social relationships (2011: 42–43). While Gibson’s descriptions of cyberspace have doubtlessly furnished humanity with the suitable representational tools to grasp the ‘­nonspace’ or ‘void’ that contains the matrix, the direct link with the commercialisation of cyberspace proposed by Henthorne is perhaps somewhat farfetched, given the high level of abstraction that has characterised the stock exchange for centuries. What Henthorne calls the utopian function of cyberspace, is rather dystopian, since the cyberscape is characterised by a complete lack of humanity, a trait shared by the official corporate structures whose buildings dominate the cityscapes of the future megalopolises. Consequently, the presence of subcultures receives a new significance. Although, as Barker states, youth in contemporary culture is linked with utopian images of the future, in Gibson’s world they actually preserve something marginalised, a thing of the past: non-profit driven groups that retain the potential of social identification. Some of these groups are dangerous, for instance,

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the Panther Moderns, who perpetrate a terrorist attack in Neuromancer, or the xenophobic Jack Draculas in Mona Lisa Overdrive; yet, their representation in the trilogy does not swing towards the other dominant perception of youth, as potentially threatening existing norms and regulations. Youth subcultures are very much part of the spatial configuration of the megalopolis of the future, precisely because Gibson situates them according to their 20th century ontology. In Barker’s words, youth can be understood as a spatial matter, it is enacted in pubs, clubs, schools and parks. … The street and the shopping mall have become significantly charged and contested zones involving young people. Indeed, these are amongst the few quasi-autonomous spaces that young people can create for themselves. Barker 2005: 377–378

With the exception of console jockey Jaylene’s “pale blue graphic that seemed to represent a very spacious apartment, low shapes of furniture sketched in hair-fine lines of blue neon” (Gibson 1987: 291), which she uses for cyberspace entertaining, the Sprawl trilogy presents no other personalised creation in ­cyberspace. Gibson locates her in Los Angeles, where, in her words, people “don’t do anything without jacking in” (1987: 292), though her construct, a virtual representation, is more of a luxury designer commodity, rather than the equivalent of subcultures colonising urban space. Ten years later, in Idoru, ­Gibson presents flourishing cyber subcultures, some boasting massive virtual constructs, but it is intriguing that Gibson should have intuitively picked la as the place where it all began, since Soja’s studies only identified Los Angeles as the quintessential postmodern city at the end of the 1980s, several years after the publication of Count Zero. The only constructs in Neuromancer that could be regarded as personalised are virtual places that Wintermute, the ai designed to make logical decisions, generates accessing the protagonist’s memories. Since this process is not voluntary on Case’s part and the constructs serve the ai’s purposes it is worth focussing on the virtual reality Case enters when hijacked by Neuromancer, the other ai. Based on Marie-France Tessier’s plans, two ais were built for different purposes: Wintermute “was hive mind, decision maker, effecting change in the world outside” (1993: 315), while Neuromancer was a giant construct for recording personality. At the same time, the latter also provided an alternative to cryogenics, offering immortality: “I call up the dead. … I am the dead and their land” (1993: 289), says Neuromancer, who creates his own personality, unlike Wintermute. Even though the virtual reality offered by N ­ euromancer is a construct based on Marie-France’s memories of a summer she spent on a deserted

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Moroccan beach, offering no more than the bare necessities of life, it turns out that the ai does not know the thoughts of the p ­ ersonalities he recorded, which effectively means “to live here is to live. There is no difference” (1993: 305). Indeed, while trapped there with the construct of his ex-girlfriend, who died in Chiba after Neuromancer had recorded her personality, Case experiences the place like an alternative plane of existence rather than virtual reality; a physical reality where hunger, cold, loneliness, and anger, are all present. The other personality construct in the novel retains his professional skills but lacks the human aspects of existence, suggesting that Neuromancer’s technology is indeed cutting edge. So much so that inside the virtual world Neuromancer creates, Case only realises he is held captive by the ai because of all the background information he possesses, whereas the girl’s personality construct believes she is living her life there on the beach. Gibson’s personalised virtual places continue to be dominated by the wealthy in the rest of the trilogy. In Count Zero, due to the availability of a new biochip, the virtual reality constructs commissioned by Virek, the world’s richest individual, surpass Neuromancer’s capabilities, but their function is the same: they were created in his bid for immortality. However, Virek’s plan to escape into cyberspace from the vats where his cancer-ridden organs are kept alive is crossed over in cyberspace by the scattered fragments of the two ais, Wintermute and Neuromancer. In effect, Virek seeks to make an evolutionary jump, as he attempts to translate himself, to code his personality into the ai’s fabric instead of having it recorded. This is, however, prevented by the ais’ split selves that enter the magnate’s construct, causing it to visibly “alter and shift, gargantuan blocks of it rotating, merging, taking on new alignments, the entire outline changing” (1987: 320), affecting the global cyberscape. Marie-France Tessier envisioned her family in a non-specified symbiotic relationship with the ais, which would make the conscious, corporate decisions for the clan, but Virek tried to become, in the ai’s words, “what I once was” (1987: 311), that is the entity that existed after Neuromancer and Wintermute merged. In the closing scene of Neuromancer, Case finds out that the new e­ ntity is “the sum total of the works, the whole show” (1993: 316), the matrix itself that achieved sentience when the originally severed mind and personality of the ai have merged. Although Virek seems to have virtually ­limitless power in the real world, his plans are thwarted in cyberspace. True symbiosis between a human and an ai is achieved by different means in the person of Angie Mitchell in Count Zero, whose father had planted a biochip into her brain, following the orders of one or more of the split ais.

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It is probably due to Marie-France’s influence that one of her daughters, Lady 3Jane, has the aleph1 built, described as a cutting-edge biochip with virtually infinite storage capacities, that “could have an approximation of ­everything” (1995: 162–163) and is completely interactive, unlike simstim. As opposed to her mother’s aim to ensure the survival of the clan and Virek’s attempt at eternal life as an individual, eccentric 3Jane had “a sort of toy universe” built “simply to have her way. Her narrow, obsessive, and singularly childish way” (1995: 274–275). The aleph is an off-grid self-contained universe, but this custom-built virtual reality explodes into existence in cyberspace as a white macro entity when linked to the matrix in the sector that represents the Sprawl. Its scale is hard to comprehend but it dwarfs all the coloured cubes, spheres and pyramids that form the landscape of cyberspace, where, in the normal course of things, corporate data constructs start small then get bigger over time or by merging with other formations. The phenomenon is regarded as anomalous; the aleph distorts the cyberscape for a few hours, and then disappears from cyberspace as soon as the link is cut. The appearance of the aleph is the single instance in the Sprawl trilogy when something non-commercial gets represented in the matrix, only to turn out to be no more than the dream world of one of the wealthiest people. This event yet again highlights not only the absence of a personal or communal dimension in the matrix, but also the extent to which the cyber representation of the megalopolises of the future depends on wealth. In Gibson’s world, where space, be it virtual or real, is perceived and mediated by individual consciousness that transforms it into ‘place’, Angie Mitchell’s character is at the heart of a mystery in Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. On the last pages of the trilogy, Angie perceives her surroundings “through shifting data-planes that represent viewpoints, though of whom or what, she is in most cases in doubt. There is a considerable degree of overlap, or contradiction” (1995: 292). She is aware at the same time of the physical presence of people around her, of all the official data on each individual available in the matrix, as well as what part they play in Lady 3 Jane’s eccentric scheme. Only Bobby, of all the people in this room, is not here as data. And Bobby is not the wasted thing before her, strapped down in alloy and nylon, its chin filmed with dried vomit, nor the eager, familiar face gazing out at her

1 Gibson explains in a 2011 The Paris Review interview that the aleph was inspired by Jorge Louis Borges’s short story “The Aleph”, the only image he had “for total artificial intelligence or total artificial reality” as a child devouring science-fiction.

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from a monitor on Gentry’s workbench. Is Bobby the solid rectangular mass of memory bolted above the stretcher? gibson 1995: 294

Angie asks herself, as she steps free “at last of the room and its data” (1995: 294), leaving both her physical body and the cyberspace of the matrix behind. Due to the biochip in her skull, which has a personality – Mamman Brigitte, the most ancient god in the Haitian voodoo cult –, Angie is able to ­access the aleph. It follows, in effect, that Angie is a cyborg with one of the split selves of the Neuromancer-Wintermute entity in her head. Bobby, who himself experienced the presence of the split selves presenting as voodoo gods in the matrix, has been trying to find the reason how and why they came into being, which prompts him to jack into the aleph. He claims that the gods have been “fading, sort of blurring” and “their personalities run together” (1995: 237), which seems to be another aspect of the same wish for unity that was built into Wintermute by Marie-France Tessier, and will culminate in a symbolic wedding between Angie and Bobby. Since Angie perceives Bobby as the aleph, we can assume that he has become one with the construct and she follows him into this private universe. In this model of cyberspace, they live happily ever after, but Angie is able to get updates on the world outside from time to time via her link with the ai Continuity. The aim of Neuromancer and Wintermute’s split selves becomes clear when the final scene of Mona Lisa Overdrive explains why the matrix changed: “when the matrix attained sentience, it simultaneously became aware of another matrix, another sentience” (1995: 315), the story goes. The joint entity of Wintermute and Neuromancer, an “absolute unity, one consciousness” (1995: 264), discovers its own kind in the Centauri system at the end of Neuromancer. This perfection, however, shattered: “the center failed; every fragment rushed away” when the matrix “has known the other” (1995: 264). In the aleph, the fragments reunite, perfection is restored and in the last paragraphs of the trilogy Angie, a cyborg who left behind her body, Bobby, the cyber-cowboy who died while jacked in the aleph, Colin, an ai, and the Finn, a recorded personality of an actual person, set out to meet the other matrix in the Centauri system. In this sense, the prime movers of the plot are ais in a bid to join mind and personality, which only becomes apparent to the reader at the end of the ­trilogy. Their presence alters the very shape of the matrix, as noticed by ­another cowboy, who, in contrast with Bobby’s focus on the cause and effect relationship, has been looking at the matrix as a whole to observe how outlines and shapes change in time. All in all, this hidden agenda of the ais is a ­countermovement against the exclusion of the individual and the personal

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dimension from the cyber-representation of the world. The importance of the merger ­between mind and personality, Wintermute and Neuromancer, respectively, and the aim of the matrix to communicate, and form a community with a similar entity is a manifestation of what cyberspace lacks. Real world urbanities are shaped by human agency even though corporate buildings dominate the skyline, but the personal and communal aspects of the future megalopolises do not get represented in the matrix, where information is guarded from ­everyday people. Gibson, however, has created a parallel tendency in cyberspace: the ais – strictly controlled by the Turing police so as not to get too smart – ­manage to turn the non-space of the matrix into their own place. While both the real and virtual skylines are defined by corporate entities, the trilogy emphasises the importance of the personal and communal dimension of spatiality in the real world, and even manages to smuggle some aspect of the personal into the virtual world of cyberspace via the ais and the sentient matrix. By always relying on a character’s point of view when describing virtual reality and cyberspace, Gibson turns sterile space into place, “the humanized version of space” ­(Anderson 2015: 51), through the agency of the underdog, who manages to modify the cityscape ruled by the oligarchy, giving hope as to the future formation of the city and the cyberscape.

Bibliography



Primary References



Secondary References

Gibson, William. 1993. Neuromancer. London: HarperCollins. Gibson, William. 1987. Count Zero. London: Grafton Books. Gibson, William. 1995. Mona Lisa Overdrive. London: HarperCollins.

Anderson, Jon. 2015. Understanding Cultural Geography: Places and Traces. London and New York: Routledge. Barker, Chris. 2004. The Sage Dictionary of Cultural Studies. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications. Barker, Chris. 2005. Cultural Studies – Theory and Practice. London, Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi: Sage Publications. Burrows, Roger. 1997. “Cyberpunk as Social Theory: William Gibson and the Sociological Imagination” in Westwood, Sallie and John Williams (eds) Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memory. London: Routledge: 235–248. Cavallaro, Dani. 2000. Cyberpunk and Cyberculture: Science Fiction and the Work of W ­ illiam Gibson. London and New Brunswick, nj: The Athlone Press. Dodge, Martin and Kitchin, Rob. 2001. Mapping Cyberspace. London: Routledge.

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Gibson, William. 1988. “Burning Chrome” in Burning Chrome. London: Grafton Books: 195–220. Gibson, William. “Questions and Answers Session”. On line at: http://www.william gibsonbooks.com (consulted 07.02. 2014). Gibson, William. “The Art of Fiction No. 210” in The Paris Review. Summer 2011 (197). On line at: www.theparisreview.org (consulted 03.02.2016). Giddens, Anthony. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hall, Stuart. 1997. Introduction in Stuart Hall (ed.) Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage Publications: 1–11. Henthorne, Tom. 2011. William Gibson: A Literary Companion. Jefferson, nc: McFarland. Light, Jennifer S. 1999. “From City Space to Cyberspace” in Crang, Mike, Phil Crang and Jon May (eds) Virtual Geographies: Bodies, Space, and Relations. London: Routledge: 109–130. Rapatzikou, Tatiani G. 2004. Gothic Motifs in the Fiction of William Gibson. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Smith, Richard G. (ed.). 2010. The Baudrillard Dictionary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh up. Soja, Edward W. 1997. “Six Discourses on the Postmetropolis” in Westwood, Sallie and John Williams (eds) Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memory. London: Routledge: 19–30. Westfahl, Gary. 2013. William Gibson. Urbana, Ill: U of Illinois Press.

Part 3 Cities of Imagination

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“Divided Against Itself”: Dual Urban Chronotopes Elana Gomel Abstract The divided city is as central to the postmodern urban imaginary as it is to the contemporary urban praxis. In addition to cities segregated along economic and racial lines, there are politically and ethnically separated cities, and there are also ‘virtual cities’, in which a core of highly mobile and technologically savvy population inhabits a different spatial reality from the surrounding struggling community. What all these divided cities have in common is the phenomenon of ‘lost spaces’, in which intermediary zones become a no-man’s-land in terms of the organising principle that structures the rest or the city. The lost space is necessary to separate the two entities and thus to ensure their purity. But it reveals the price of this separation by becoming a zone of lawlessness, impurity and danger. It is not a utopia of freedom but rather a black hole of social space. Urban science fiction and fantasy explore the divided city by translating topography into topology: that is, by treating different places as different spaces, each with its own set of physical laws. By literalising the metaphor of the “two cities in one”, such novels as Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (1996), China Miéville’s The City and the City (2009), and Tim Lebbon’s Echo City (2010), bring out the inherent paradox of the divided urban space: its attempt to achieve homogeneity and safety necessarily breeds liminal zones of lawlessness and violence. This chapter will explore the doublelayered urban chronotope, focusing on Miéville’s The City and the City and Tim Lebbon’s Echo City. The urban division in these novels is re-imagined as a split within the fictional space itself. This split undermines our basic intuitions of spatial perception, so that the chronotope becomes paradoxical and self-contradictory and ultimately impossible. The poetics of impossible urban space in sf and fantasy as a reflection of the postmodern urban politics will be explored, It will be argued that the impossible dual structure of many fantastic urban chronotopes reacts to the problematic of divided cities as both increasingly central to the global economy and yet, in the long run, unlivable and unsustainable.

Key Terms chronotope – divided city – impossible spaces – City and the City – Echo City – ­postmodern urban imaginary – postmodern urban politics

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Monstrous Spaces

“The city divided against itself cannot stand” (Matthew 12:25). This is one of those clichés whose veracity seemingly requires no proof. If “divided against itself” is taken metaphorically (as it usually is) to mean internal discord, one can piously point to the Congress, the United States, or the world and rest assured that eventually one of them – or all three – will come to no good. But what if this phrase is taken literally? Topographically divided cities are hardly a novelty. Medieval towns had rigidly segregated quarters dedicated to various occupations as a matter of course. More egregious instances arouse when race and religion were superimposed upon the professional grid, as in the Venetian ghetto. However, despite such divisions, medieval towns preserved a sense of unified identity due to the external walls that not only protected the citizens from external threats but reinforced internal coherence. Things changed, however, as external fortifications fell while social, ethnic and religious divisions within rapidly growing cities exploded: Divided cities seem to have inverted this dynamic [of the walled town]: partitions reinforce social difference and weakens the city’s capacity to contend with larger forces external to itself. Walls are the product of a diverse vulnerability that erodes traditional forms of urban solidarity, while multiplying the ills and rewards of insular behavior. calame and charlesworth 2009: 17

The twentieth century was the age of cities divided by war or civil war. Calame’s and Charlesworth’s table of contents is a list of cities partitioned by violence: Belfast, Beirut, Jerusalem, Mostar, and Nicosia. Add to it the twentieth-century symbol of urban division, the Berlin Wall, and it would seem that an armed conflict is the main instigator of the contemporary legacy of the “city divided against itself”. But this is not quite true. The Berlin Wall has fallen, Belfast is no longer physically divided by barricades and chicken wire, and yet the problematic of divided cities remains as urgent as ever. While physical walls have fallen, social, political and religious divisions still shape urban topographies. A more subtle yet more insidious form of division than the crude separation by ghetto walls prevails in many urban locales across the world. It is the waning of the very idea of the polis as a shared, public space, in which heterogeneity is welcomed. Instead, the global city is a city diced and sliced along multiple axes: economic status, race, ethnicity, occupation and so on. The result is a mosaic of isolated communities, whose spatial fragmentation maps social and cultural divisions. Their topography is quite diverse. There are cities in which

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the blighted urban core is ringed by thriving suburbs (such as Detroit); but there are also cities in which the glittering centre is surrounded by zones of poverty and despair (such as Paris and London); and there are metropolitan areas that consist of a patchwork of high-income towns, interspersed with struggling communities (such as Palo Alto and East Palo Alto in the Silicon Valley). Regardless of its configuration, the global urban space is becoming fractured. With the middle-class flight from urban cores, the rise of exurbia, and the proliferation of gated communities, the “divided city is becoming a sharper reality” in the us (Blakeley and Snyder 1997: 96). But similar processes are at work everywhere, albeit in different forms. As Peter Marcuse vividly puts it: “Cities today seem fragmented, partitioned – at the extreme, almost drawn and quartered, painfully pulled apart” (2003: 270). This “pulling apart” is, paradoxically, both the consequence of the explosive growth of cities in the global world and its negation. As Carl H. Nightingale points out, the “very concept of urban segregation is self-contradictory” (2012: 10). The fissuring of the city into homogeneous communities separated from each other by physical or social barriers calls into the question the very nature of urban living. Paradoxically, while more than fifty percent of the world population now live in cities or metropolitan areas, the idea of the city as a meeting-place or common-ground is being hollowed out. As Richard Sennett points out in his classic Flesh and Stone, the city is the place for the commingling of strangers, in which humanity is physically experienced through the sight, smell and touch of other – and different – bodies. Division of the city into separate enclaves weakens social bonds at the most fundamentally visceral level, while also contributing to the loss of the individual’s sense of his or her own embodiment. The “great geographic shift of people into fragmented spaces has had a larger effect in weakening the sense of tactile reality and pacifying the body” (Sennett 1994: 17). But at the same time, the drive for homogeneity creates liminal spaces, where heterogeneity is resurrected in strange and unfamiliar shapes. The divided city requires a boundary. And this boundary is also a space, which is excluded from the law of exclusion that governs the rest of the city. “Lost spaces” run through the divided city: intermediary zones, social and cultural no-man’slands. Like the Berlin Wall, the dividing space itself belongs to neither of the two communities it separates. Such a space is liminal and categorically contradictory because it is neither of the two opposites, but both. Noel Carroll defines an entity which is “categorically contradictory” or “categorically interstitial” as a monster (1990: 32). Boundary spaces are, therefore, monstrous spaces. Another way to describe these seam zones is through Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, which is a space simultaneously “represent[ing],

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contest[ing] or invert[ing]” the dominant spatial practices of its society (Foucault 1967: Web). Heterotopias are black holes of social space, in which the rules that govern its topography collapse under their own weight. The liminal spaces of the divided city are heterotopias, in which the impurity of common living reappears as the inevitable result of the social drive for separation and purification. The genre that is particularly attuned to representation of liminal or problematic city spaces is urban fantasy. This extremely popular genre is not easy to define: in her extremely broad overview of its roots and development, Sarai Mannolini-Winwood claims that “uf, unlike typical Secondary World narratives, presents a mundane world immersed in supernatural presence”. This is true as far as it goes but urban fantasy is defined not so much by its supernatural elements as by its setting. As its very name testifies, the “mundane world” is a city. In this chapter, I want to explore the representation of liminal city spaces in urban fantasy through a set of particular narrative tropes. I will argue that these tropes reveal a fruitful paradox at the heart of the cliché. Yes, the city divided against itself cannot stand. But as it divides again and again in the fruitless search for purity and homogeneity, the divided city breeds a rebellious offspring that restores the urban experience to all its messy glory.

Mind the Gap

Fantasy translates topography into topology; that is, it treats different places as different spaces, each with its own set of physical laws. Tzvetan Todorov famously suggested that the fantastic “often appears because we take a figurative sense literally” (1987: 77). Urban fantasy literalises the “spatial practices” of a culture, to use Henri Lefebvre’s term for social manipulation of physical territory (1988: 33). In the actual world, such manipulation does not affect the physical properties of space. But in fantasy and sf, it can. Fantasy routinely represents paradoxical or monstrous social spaces as paradoxical or monstrous physical spaces: black holes, multidimensional singularities, twisted or misshapen worlds. And fantasy reacts to the social paradox of divided cities by creating urban spaces that are physically fragmented, ‘quartered’, ‘pulled apart’. Perhaps the most famous example of the fantastic city divided into two incommensurable spaces is Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (1996). Gaiman’s novel cleverly literalises Disraeli’s famous description of Victorian England as consisting of two nations, the rich and the poor, in its depiction of contemporary London as consisting of two cities: London Above and London Below.

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L­ ondon Above is the familiar city of high finance, high fashion and high living, recycling mementoes of its checkered past as tourist trinkets. It is a city carefully cleansed of its tangled legacies, its chaotic topography, its cheek-by-jowl social landscape – in other words, of everything that makes it London. In his monumental London: The Biography, Peter Ackroyd describes the city as “endless and illimitable” (2000: 781). London Above is limited and circumscribed: a gentrified simulacrum of the historical city, trimmed down to a collection of trendy boutiques and touristy spots. The irreducible vitality and variety of London are exiled into London Below, which becomes “a social as well as a topographical mystery”, a place of dark enchantment (2000: 562). London Above and London Below are not just different places; they are different spaces, inhabiting different ontological realms. Once the protagonist Richard Mayhew crosses into London Below, he becomes invisible to his upper-class acquaintances in London Above. “No matter how much noise he made, no matter what he did, nobody ever noticed him at all” (Gaiman 1996: 50). The two cities are ghosts to each other. Richard Mayhew’s name is a playful reference to two archetypal London characters: the Victorian urban sociologist Henry Mayhew who explored the ‘underbelly’ of the great city, and Dick Whittington, four times Lord-Mayor of London, the hero of a folk story about a boy and his cat that celebrates the resourcefulness and pluck of the urban poor. By descending into London Below, Richard reconnects to the real history of the great city, the history of catastrophic upheavals, violence and social unrest but also of heroism and survival. London Below is the city of flesh and stone, populated by beggars, junkies, time-hopping assassins, monsters, talking rats and fabulous beasts. It is simultaneously horrifying and glorious, filthy and exalted, violent and ecstatic. In other words, it is sublime. Richard’s first glimpse of it “reminded him of Hell” (1996: 59). And yet, having regained his successful corporate position, Richard can no longer stand the predictable routine of London Above and eventually chooses to abandon it altogether. “I thought I wanted this”, said Richard. “I thought I wanted a nice normal life. I mean, maybe I am crazy. I mean, maybe. But if this is all there is, then I don’t want to be sane”. gaiman 1996: 322

In a clever reversal of the tale of Dick Whittington and his cat, it is rats, the symbol of filth, disorder and urban poverty that guide Richard back to London Below.

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The two cities of Neverwhere are an ontological metaphor for the conflicting images of London that have fought for supremacy throughout its long history. Sennett describes these images in terms of the distinction between ‘ranking’ and ‘connectivity’. The “great divide in the imagery of the body politic” passes between those who envision “the city as a space which ranks bodies living together”, and those who envision “the city as a space which connects bodies living together” (1994: 168, emphasis mine). This ideological “great divide” has been mapped onto the topography of London in the tug-of-war between segregation and inclusiveness; between social and racial divisiveness imposed by urban planners, and the organic development of the living city, which, like any living being, is occasionally shaken by bouts of violent fever. But even when the city is forcibly ‘pulled apart’, no such division can be absolute without destroying the urban fabric altogether. In Neverwhere, the liminal zone that links together London Above and London Below is the Tube. The iconic part of London that has held its grip upon the city’s imaginary1 since its inception in the 1870s, the Tube becomes an urban heterotopia, in which the strategies of exclusion that have created the two cities are subverted by what might be called ontological overlaying. The Tube is simultaneously a necessary transportation system that enables the smooth flow of people in London Above, and the dark subterranean space of dreams and nightmares, in which the checkered history and mythology of London is inscribed in the fanciful names of its stations. The Tube is the fiction that makes the reality of London possible. When Richard first moves to London, the famous Tube map is the only thing that gives “any semblance of order” to the “huge, fundamentally incomprehensible” city (Gaiman 1996: 8). At the same time, he realises that the map is “a handy fiction” superimposed upon the chaotic urban topography. Eventually, the Tube is revealed a space in which London Below is superimposed upon London Above, as the familiar Mind the Gap sign mutates into an actual creature called the Gap; the Earl of the station Earl’s Court becomes a jolly gentleman holding his court in a train car; and Angel station is the lair of an actual angel. The Tube is what enables the exchange between the two parts of the city, without which neither of them can survive.

1 The city imaginary or urban imaginary, in which ‘the imaginary’ is used as a noun, is a standard term in urban studies, referring to the complex of images, metaphors, descriptions and topoi that are attached to city life in general or to a particular city. Examples include Film and the City: the Urban Imaginary in Canadian Cinema by George Melnyk (Athabasca University Press 2014) and “The Global City Imaginary” in Globalization, Modernity and the City by John Rennie Short (Routledge 2012).

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The Tube is also a semantic space, laying bare the main narrative strategy of the novel. This strategy is literalisation, as almost everything in London Below is an embodiment of the discarded clichés of the urban discourse of London Above. The predatory Gap, the Earl of Earl’s Court, Old Bailey, and the evil Angel are dead metaphors resurrected as living characters. Not only does the underground city act as a receptacle for the aboveground city’s physical refuse but it performs the same function for its verbal rejects, revitalising London’s forgotten and marginal histories.

Now You See it, Now You Don’t

Conrad Williams’ 2004 novel London Revenant has some interesting parallels with Neverwhere, not least in the way it deploys a similar fictional topography. It also depicts a London divided between an aboveground and an underground city, with the Tube functioning as a seam-space, a zone of mixing and confusion. Adam Buckley, the protagonist whose increasingly surreal odyssey eventually leads him to the dark and dangerous underground city, is spellbound by the Tube even before he realises its full significance: “All of my bases in London, I recognized, were governed by the presence of Tube stations of a ­proximity to their dirty magi”. (Williams 2006: 24). But there is one profound difference between the narrative structure of Gaiman’s and Williams’ novels. As opposed to Gaiman’s Richard, Williams’ Adam is a first-person narrator whose journey to the underground city is filtered through his increasingly hallucinatory perception. Suffering from amnesia that obscures his own origin in the underworld, Adam is an unreliable narrator whose schizophrenically divided mindscape mirrors the topology of the divided city. It is not only London that is fragmented but so is Adam whose underground alter ego Monck acts at cross purposes to the main narrator who is unaware of his existence. The journey to the underground is also a journey of self-discovery. Thus, the representation of the divided city focuses on epistemology rather than ontology, as in Neverwhere. The liminal zone of division cuts right through the protagonist’s brain. Besides literalisation, Todorov in The Fantastic describes another narrative strategy: epistemological hesitation experienced by the narrator/character confronted with an inexplicable or supernatural event. This hesitation defines what Todorov calls the fantastic, which is structurally defined as the “duration of…uncertainty”, in which both a natural and a supernatural explanation appear equally likely (1987: 25). Hesitation, closely connected to narrative unreliability, shifts the artistic dominant of the genre from ontology (how the world is constructed) to epistemology (how the world is perceived).

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In relation to the divided city, this epistemological emphasis enables a nuanced questioning of the social and psychological forces that drive the fragmentation of the urban space. And it projects the liminal zone of the boundary division onto the mind of the protagonist, dramatising the lived experience of the urban space. Nowhere is the urban fantastic as powerfully deployed as in China Miéville’s The City and the City (2009). The novel narrated in the first person by Inspector Tyador Borlú takes place in the two cities that are literally superimposed upon each other: Besźel and Ul Qoma. They are very different: Besźel is a vaguely Eastern-European city, modeled after Budapest, with a Cyrillic-based language, shabby and economically depressed.2 Ul Qoma, on the other hand, is an avatar of Istanbul, prosperous, architecturally striking and rather oriental. And yet, they occupy the same physical space that holds two very different social and political places. “Breaching”, illegal crossing from one city to the other, is a crime, prosecuted by the mysterious organisation also named the Breach. And yet, even though the inhabitants of Besźel and Ul Qoma regard each other as foreigners, speak different languages and have completely different mental geographies of their respective cities, “the city and the city” are physically the same terrain. The barrier between the two is not physical, as in Neverwhere, but mental. The inhabitants of each city learn from infancy to “unsee” and “unhear” the other city overlaying their own. Foreigners have to be tutored in the techniques of selective perception in order not to become inadvertently guilty of “breaching”. The two populations, from our point of view, suffer from artificially induced blindsight, reflected in an episode early in the book when Borlú is sitting peacefully in his room in Besźel while trains in Ul Qoma thunder by: In the morning trains ran on a raised line meters from my window. They were not in my city. I did not of course, but I could have stared into the carriages – they were quite that close – and caught the eyes of foreign travellers. miéville 2009: 30

It is as if the madness infecting the unreliable narrator in London Revenant has now spread to the body politic. Borlú, the first-person narrator, seems to

2 The word ‘Besźel’ means speak in Hungarian. Hungarian, of course, is not a Slavic language but the Russian influence is still strong in Eastern Europe in general and Hungary in particular.

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partake in a sort of collective schizophrenia, and so the entire novel takes ­Todorov’s problematic of perception to a new height, depicting – or so it seems – the divided city as an offshoot of social madness. But does it? As the plot develops, a surprising new development occurs. Those who tray to unify the cities are dangerous ideological fanatics and stooges of multinational corporations. Borlú, having solved the crime that spans the two cities, becomes an agent of the Breach, gratefully accepting his perpetual liminality and committed to keeping Besźel and Ul Qoma apart. The slogan of ‘unity’ rings hollow. Rather than a forced imposition, the separation of the cities is revealed as a heroic communal project, in which every citizen voluntarily takes part: “It’s everyone in the cities who does most of the work. It works because you don’t blink. That’s why unseeing and unsensing are so vital. No one can admit it doesn’t work. So if you don’t admit it, it does” (Miéville 2009: 370). Self-deception becomes a foundation of civic pride. Miéville’s complex parable reflects the political reality of Eastern Europe where the fall of the Berlin Wall has brought rather mixed results. But more broadly, it challenges the very idea of homogenous unity, seeing it as a mirror image of the social drive for separation. The dynamics of globalisation, paradoxically, create both, as the ideals of uniform standards of living and universal rights undermine the cultural specificity of cities across the globe. Urban “purity” can be achieved by dividing the city; but it can also be achieved by unifying it into a bland, homogeneous “machine for living”, to use Le Corbusier’s famous expression. Uniting Besźel and Ul Qoma will erase both. In the two cities, there is a legend of Orciny, the third city situated in the interstices between the two. It turns out to be a fabrication of the global interests manipulating the local politics. However, the uncertain ontological status of the Breach itself raises the possibility that it is, in fact, is the third city, situated precisely on the fracture between Besźel and Ul Qoma, the fracture that is both political and epistemological. By identifying with the Breach, Borlú discloses the provenance of this interstitial space, which preserves the inherent heterogeneity of urban life. The Breach, the liminal zone, with its potential of rebellion and renewal, passes through the mind of each and every citizen. To bring down walls in the name of ‘purity’ is as deadly as to build them. “Wholeness, oneness, coherence: these are key words in the vocabulary of power”. (Sennett 1994: 25) If so, fragmentation, paradox and incoherence are crucial terms in the vocabulary of rebellion.3 Williams’ London Revenant and Miéville’s The City and the City epitomise the second narrative strategy which urban fantasy deploys in representing 3 I thank Hadas Elber for her valuable input in writing this section of the chapter.

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the divided city: epistemological uncertainty or what might be called (after Todorov) the urban fantastic. Both of them, however, shift the focus of this strategy from the individual narrator or character to the collective imaginary of the city. It is not the individual’s dreams and delusions that create the impossible city; rather the city itself is a living being whose dreams are its inhabitants.

Exploding History

The British writer Tim Lebbon’s urban fantasy Echo City (2010) differs from the novels I have discussed above in one important respect: it inhabits its own ontological domain, totally separated from our consensus reality. Gaiman’s and Williams’ fantastic London is, after all, a reflection of the actual capital of Great Britain and even Besźel and Ul Qoma exist in a world quite like our own. Echo City is situated in its own fictional universe which is “ontologically inaccessible” from our own, to borrow Thomas Pavel’s terminology in his theory of fictional worlds. This makes Echo City, paradoxically, both less and more politically relevant. On the one hand, it cannot be read in terms of a social allegory or a pointed commentary on the current events, as Neverwhere and The City and the City certainly can. On the other hand, it lays bare the implications of the underlying topology of the divided city in an unusually clear way. Because the novel focuses on the abstract geometry of urban space, it makes possible to question what Fredric Jameson (in a different context) called “the content of the form” (1981: 34): the danger of the spatio-temporal drive for purity and homogeneity regardless of the particular social way in which it is expressed. The central spatial conceit in the novel is that history is literally buried underground. In Echo City time is transformed into space, the past precipitated in successive layers under the city’s surface. Echoing Freud’s famous description of Rome as composed of layers of history in Civilization and Its Discontents, Lebbon’s city represses its collective traumas by exiling them into the underground “Echoes” and building it supposedly bright future on top of the endlessly growing pile of unacknowledged memories. The narrative strategy Lebbon deploys is projection: the temporal axis of the narrative is projected upon its spatial axis, so that the past and the future literally become directions in space. The reason for the rulers of Echo City to divide their urban space in such a way is reminiscent of the rationale behind the revision of history in 1984: whoever controls the past controls the future. As one character explains:

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the past is a living place. The deeper you go, the further into history you travel. The city doesn’t deal with history. It builds over its past, encloses it, shuts it off, and while tradition might persist, the real histories are soon forgotten. It’s the present that matters to Echo City. lebbon 2010: 212

Of course, this backfires: the Echoes breed monsters within their shadowy depth that eventually rise up and destroy the city. At the end of the novel, the Freudian metaphor of repression and the social reality of oppression are brought together in the apocalyptic collapse of the divided urban space: “It’s history exploding. It’s been under pressure for so long, and now it’s all coming back…Coming back to haunt us” (2010: 428). Because the Echoes are layered on top of each other, with the farthest reaches of the past distorted by the pressure of the more recent events, the liminal zone here is the integral part of the division itself. Marginal and d­ isenfranchised characters descend into the past, exploring it, robbing it and occasionally manipulating it as well. The past “echoes below” the city, “still alive”. (2010: 212) The Vex, a giant terrifying presence that rises from the Echoes to destroy the city, becomes a visible incarnation of the undead power of history. The narrative strategies I have described in this chapter – literalisation, epistemological uncertainty and projection – by no means exhaust the techniques of representing the divided city in contemporary urban fantasy. But they demonstrate how all the elements of narrative, including the manipulation of ­levels of representation, narrative voice, and structure of the chronotope, contribute to the genre’s questioning of the idea of the segregated and “partitioned” city. Neverwhere shows that London purified of its dark underbelly would be boring and unlivable; London Revenant and The City and the City seek foundation for the idea of the polis in the perceptions of the citizens; and Echo City makes p ­ alpable the idea of monstrous space. But they all show how the “drawn and quartered” city becomes the monster that devours its inhabitants. In its pursuit of purity and homogeneity, the city divided against itself ceases to be a city at all. Bibliography Primary References

Gaiman, Neil. 1996. Neverwhere. London: Penguin. Lebbon, Tim. 2010. Echo City. New York: Ballantine Books. Miéville, China. 2009. The City and the City. London: Macmillan.

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Secondary References

Ackroyd, Peter. 2000. London: The Biography. London: Vintage. Blakely, Edward James and Mary Gail Snyder. 1997. Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United states. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institutions Press. Calame, Jon; Esther Charlesworth. 2009. Divided Cities: Belfast, Beirut, Jerusalem, Mostar, and Nicosia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Carroll, Noel. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror; or Paradoxes of the Heart. London: Routledge. Elber, Hadas. 2012. Templates of the Carceral City: Charles Dickens’s Influence Upon China Miéville. ma Thesis. Tel Aviv University. n.p. Foucault, Michel. 1967. “Of Other Spaces”. On line at: http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/ www/foucault1.pdf. Electronic. (consulted 1 12 2015). Jameson, Fredric. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell up. Lefebvre, Henri. 1998 (1974). The Production of Space. Cambridge: Blackwell. Mannolini-Winwood, Sarai. “The Origins of Urban Fantasy.” n.d. https://www.academia .edu/. Electronic. 20 12 2015. Marcuse, Pater. “Cities in Quarters.” Gary Bridge, Sophie Watson. A Companion to the City. London: Blackwell, 2003. 270–281. Nightingale, Carl H. Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Print. Sennett, Richard. Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization. London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1994. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987. Williams, Conrad. London Revenant. San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2006.

Experiencing the Cityscapes and Rural Landscapes as ‘Citizens’ of The Hunger Games Storyworld Natalie Krikowa Abstract In Suzanne Collins’ book series, The Hunger Games, the dystopian, futuristic country of Panem is all that remains of a post-apocalyptic ‘North America’. The twelve povertystricken Districts contrast the rich and decadent Capitol, presenting a polarised cityscape for the audience to explore, not only in the books but also across the multiple media platforms that make up this popular transmedia franchise. This chapter investigates how the audiences’ experience of the Capitol cityscape and the rural landscapes of the Districts are shaped from one media platform to the next. It proposes that the dystopian themes presented in The Hunger Games narrative, and the positioning of the audiences as ‘citizens’ within the storyworld, further invites audiences to build communities around the franchise, and become activists in real-world civil movements.

Key Terms Dystopia – storyworld – transmedia – cityscapes – participation



Introduction

The Hunger Games is a trilogy of young adult novels written by Suzanne ­Collins and published by Scholastic between 2008 and 2010. The series is set in an unspecified time in a dystopian future, where the country of Panem has, in effect, risen from the ashes of a post-apocalyptic North America. Panem is made up of a luxurious central city called the Capitol where the tyrannical and cruel dictator, President Coriolanus Snow, rules in opulence over the twelve impoverished Districts. In the first novel, The Hunger Games, we are introduced to the world of Panem through the eyes (and narrative voice) of the trilogy’s protagonist, ­sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen. When Katniss’s younger sister, Prim, is ­selected to represent District 12 in the Hunger Games, Katniss volunteers to take her place. She, and her male counterpart, Peeta Mellark are pitted against each © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004361317_011

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other and twenty-two other children in a fight to the death. These Games become a catalyst for the main storyline of the Districts’ uprising against the Capitol. The audience’s thematic and cinematic engagement is intrinsically linked to the cityscapes and rural landscapes of Panem. The relationship between the urban Capitol and the rural Districts demonstrates a political and economic polarisation, which is central to the audience’s experience of both the storyworld, and the broader social commentary. The main storyline is an allegory of imperial power, and the series explores themes of survival, morality, war, poverty, and sacrifice. Allegory, defined by John Law is “the art of meaning something other and more than what is being said… it is the art of decoding that meaning, reading between the literal lines to understand what is actually being depicted” (2004: 88). The use of allegory in The Hunger Games highlights the deeper issues of imperialism, capitalism, classism, and income inequality within contemporary Western society. The first two novels, The Hunger Games, and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, were adapted into films, which were released in 2012 and 2013 respectively. The final book in the trilogy, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay has been released as two films, with part one released in November 2014 and part two to be released in November 2015 (Lions Gate Entertainment Inc.). Along with the books and their film adaptations, various games, websites and social media networks have been created to further expand the audience’s engagement with the fictional storyworld within this transmedia franchise. Within literary theory the experience of fictive worlds is only possible if the reader has a “willing suspension of disbelief” (Coleridge 1817). The notion of a storyworld is central to transmedia as this is what all the various forms of media share. As MarieLaure Ryan states: “The ability to create a world, or more precisely, to inspire the mental representation of a world, is the primary condition for a text to be considered a narrative” (2013: 363–364). This chapter outlines how the urban cityscape of the Capitol and the rural landscapes of its Districts have been created across multiple media platforms and how their juxtaposition is central to the narrative experience of the storyworld. It demonstrates how audiences are encouraged to enter the storyworld and are then enticed to experience it and actively participate within it. It suggests that transmedia storyworlds are particularly suited to the dystopian genre as they allow audiences to engage with the social, cultural and political parallels between the fictional storyworld, and modern society through an interactive, participatory experience. Lastly it examines how the dystopian themes presented in The Hunger Games encourage audiences to construct fan communities around the storyworld, and become activists in real-world civil engagement.

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Panem’s Urban Capitol Cityscape

Thematic and cinematic engagement with the city is a recurring component in modern storytelling. The urban experience has been the focus of many film movements and genres, from the late nineteenth century Lumière travelogues to the great-metropolis films such as Berlin: Symphony of a City1 (Ruttmann 1927), from the film noir metropolises of 1930s gangster films to dystopian science fiction (Arnwine & Lerner 1997). As Julia Hallam notes, media projects about cities offer a particularly rich source of material for investigating civic identity and citizenship (2012: 37). In science fiction, speculation of possible futures is presented through the creation of an imagined storyworld, where the “world created by the [science fiction] author has its own systemic rules insofar as it is a fully working version of an alternative reality” (Moylan 2000: 6). The Hunger Games explores a future of North America where there is an extreme economic imbalance between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’. Widespread poverty in the Districts is contrasted with the ridiculous opulence of the Capitol elite; and this is exemplified by the visual descriptions and representation of the Capitol and the outlying Districts. In the first novel, Katniss explains: The cameras haven’t lied about [the Capitol’s] grandeur. If anything, they have not quite captured the magnificence of the glistening buildings in a rainbow of hues that tower into the air, the shiny cars that roll down the wide paved streets, the oddly dressed people with bizarre hair and painted faces who have never missed a meal. All the colours seem artificial, the pinks too deep, the greens too bright, the yellows painful to the eyes. collins 2011a: 72

Film director Gary Ross and production designer Phillip Messina were charged with the responsibility of bringing the cityscape of the first book to life on screen. In the behind-the-scenes features on The Hunger Games dvd, both Ross and Messina discuss the extensive research and collaboration involved in designing the cityscape of Panem. Designing the Capitol (the technologicallyadvanced, wealthy city) was apparently the most difficult of locations as it needed to portray a sense of stately majesty, might, and power without looking too futuristic. What emerged was a Computer-Generated (cgi) Capitol that blended scaleless, atonal, concrete structures, reminiscent of communist Russia and the World Fairs of the 1930’s with grandiose, classical architecture 1 German title: Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt.

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(Lions Gate Entertainment 2012: Special Features). The filmmakers elected to begin the narrative by constructing the political landscape of Panem. From the outset, viewers are given insights into the relationship of the Capitol over the outlying Districts – of power and dominance over the poor and hungry. The introduction to the full scope of the Capitol’s exterior in the film occurs when Katniss and Peeta look out of the train window in awe as they witness the city for the first time. The cgi shots establish the Capitol as a vast and majestic city occupying the base of a mountain range, surrounded by a huge lake. Once the train pulls into the station, hundreds of Capitol citizens stand on the pristinely clean platform, dressed in bizarre outfits, applauding and waiving excitedly. They appear absurd to Katniss and Peeta and therefore, to the audience as well. This scene is followed by a long, establishing shot of the internal layout of the city, followed by close-ups of its ‘strange’ citizens in their luxurious environment. In his seminal work, The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903) Georg Simmel’s details how city life is marked by: the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions… With each crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational, and social life, the city sets up a deep contrast with small town and rural life. simmel 1950: 410

This contrast is established in the storyworld of The Hunger Games as the readers/viewers are positioned alongside the protagonist, Katniss, as outsiders. We see the socio-cultural effects of Panem’s political and economic control through her eyes. She notes: They do surgery in the Capitol, to make people appear younger and thinner. In District 12, looking old is something of an achievement since so many people die early. You see an elder person, you want to congratulate them on their longevity, ask the secret of survival. A plump person is envied because they aren’t scraping by like the majority of us. But here it is different. Wrinkles aren’t desirable. A round belly isn’t a sign of success. collins 2011a: 150–151

Much research has been conducted on the spatial aspects of the city and its effects on social life, particularly from a sociological perspective. These studies are an attempt to delineate how socio-spatial relationships can illuminate our understanding of social change (Davis 1992; Wright 1997; Davis 1999; Gotham

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2003). Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels analysed the [then] modern metropolis as a setting for understanding the historical development of capitalism, examining the antithesis between wage labour and capital, and social mobility (1848: 476; 1867: 188–245). In The Hunger Games people are born within a District and remain there. They have little or no opportunity for upward social mobility. The Capitol controls every aspect of life within Panem including the distribution of wealth and resources, political positioning and movement between the Districts. The Capitol’s presence is felt throughout the Districts with town squares acting as the epicentre for all Capitol matters, including the ‘reapings’ – the yearly lottery that selects contestants for the Hunger Games. The town square and hall of justice building mirror the concrete structures seen in the Capitol and are used as visual emblems of power. As Michel Foucault demonstrates in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Jeremy Bentham’s concept of the ‘panopticon’, with its central tower, induces: a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. foucault 1995: 200

The idea that the Capitol is always watching and surveying the people is explored throughout the narrative with the citizens being the “object of information, never a subject in communication” (1995: 200). Within the o­ pening chapters of the novel and, in the opening scenes of the film, we are introduced to the Peacekeepers: soldiers sent from the Capitol to enforce the law in the Districts. In the film, towards the end of the scene where Katniss and her hunting companion, Gale, are illegally hunting in the forest, we see a hovercraft fly over them. This is just one example of the constant surveillance of, and reinforcement of the Capitol’s power over the citizens in the Districts. These themes are continually explored across the multiple platforms the franchise employs. As readers/viewers/users interact with the narrative, they become further immersed in the storyworld of The Hunger Games, and while

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exploring the cityscapes, are forced to contemplate their own ‘real world’, and the potential parallels that are drawn between fiction and reality.

A ‘Transmedia’ Experience of the Capitol Cityscape and the Rural Landscapes of the Districts

What makes a franchise ‘transmedia’? The necessary narrative differential is that transmedia storytelling requires the narrative to exist across multiple media platforms with each platform, adding uniquely to the overall narrative. Ideally “each medium does what it does best – so that a story might be introduced in a film, expanded through television, novels, and comics, and its world might be explored and experienced through game play. Each franchise entry needs to be self-contained enough to enable autonomous consumption” (Jenkins 2003: 3). According to Ryan, in transmedial storytelling, “the most common relation between the various texts is expansion: for instance, if there is a video game based on a film, the game may invent a new character for the player to control, or it may focus on an aspect of the storyworld that remains undeveloped in earlier version” (2013: 369). Even as early as 2003, Henry Jenkins understood the potential for audiences’ ongoing desire for deeper engagement and participation in the media they consume. In Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006), Jenkins conceptualised a new “participatory culture” to address the full range of experiences audiences were having due to the inclusion of digital and social media. Additionally, he coined the term “convergence culture” to address the shifting relationships between media, audiences, producers, and content; defining convergence as: “… the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory b­ ehaviour of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want” (2006: 2; 2014: 267–268). Most often, these entertainment experiences are pre-conceived and designed with the purpose of building a fan-base around a particular creative work. The Hunger Games became a transmedia project well before the first film hit the cinemas. Whilst Lions Gate (the production company behind the film series) used the traditional advertising avenues of posters, magazine covers and billboards, they also utilised the book series’ extensive fan base to help promote the film on social media. In the lead-up to the release of the highly anticipated film adaptation, social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, GooglePlus, Pinterest and Tumblr were used to create a global buzz, generate presales

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and get the public talking about the film and books. The campaign went beyond a simple Facebook fan page and Twitter account, devising clever ways of encouraging the fans to drive the campaign by positioning them as ‘citizens’ of Panem. Facebook had the official movie page that provided exclusive updates, tour information, and fan of the week. But a Capitol Facebook page, and District pages were also created, allowing fans to become ‘citizens’ of their favourite District. At the time of writing, Katniss’ District 12 has 224,000 likes and the Capitol almost 250,000 likes. Whilst the content is primarily promotional material, it is crafted in the image of that District and packaged thematically for the audience. The official YouTube channel branded itself as ‘Capitol tv Productions’ and released ‘officially-sanctioned’ videos for the consumption of the Districts citizens. The channel also included a ‘District Citizens Reel’ that shared fan-created videos (which has since been removed) (McGrath 2012). The interactive artefacts of the transmedia franchise that further immerse the audience in the storyworld include a series of games for mobile and desktop platforms. The games extend the narrative and experience of The Hunger Games storyworld in unique ways. The first game launched in the lead-up to the release of the first film was The Hunger Games: Girl on Fire2. This official game for iOS devices was a popular download; however, it was not successful in retaining players due to low-quality, pixilated graphics and basic simplistic game-play. The game was designed to be a free teaser to excite fans, and build an audience-base. The game required the user (playing as Katniss) to run through the forest (from the left of screen to the right) avoiding tracker jackers – genetically engineered wasps created by the Capitol to serve as additional threats in the Games. The second game to be released was The Hunger Games Adventures3 in 2012. It is still a popular Facebook and mobile game available on iOS and Android devices. The game gives players an opportunity to venture into the world of Panem using characters from the films (with an animated likeness) and play out new scenarios within the storyworld. The game narrative is set up in chapters containing mini quests to allow for quick bursts of play. Throughout the various chapters, you learn to hunt, gather and build with Katniss, trade and evade Peacekeepers in the Hob, and venture to the many locations seen in the films and books. Within the initial levels of the game, you are restricted to District 12, where you get to explore the woods, the Seam, the Hob, the bakery where Peeta works, the fence, the coal mines, and the marketplace, to name a few. By exploring the rural District 12, players interact with an environment 2 The Hunger Games: Girl on Fire was created by Lions Gate Entertainment Inc. 3 The Hunger Games Adventures was created by Functactix and Lions Gate Entertainment Inc.

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crucial to the storyworld, and become more sympathetic with Katniss’s plight. Upon completion of each chapter, players are granted access to more and more Districts, and more locations within the Capitol, meeting additional characters (existing and new) and exploring locations that were only briefly mentioned in the books and films. The locations and surroundings in the game echo the visual aesthetic of the film cityscapes, but extend the audience’s experience of the cityscape by providing new content. The game also features a map of Panem, divided into the 12 Districts and the Capitol. This was the first instance of the Districts being presented in a way that allowed audiences to see where the Districts were situated in relation to one another. With the ability to continually add more levels and content, the game can continue to incorporate narrative elements from upcoming films. It is yet to be seen if the game will go on to explore the rebellion seen in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, but it offers an opportunity to engage game-players in new environments offered up in the final chapter of the story, particularly that of District 8, where key scenes from Mockingjay take place. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire Panem Run4 was the third game created in the franchise, and was released in November of 2013. This game requires the player to explore the Districts of Panem and collect items at a preset running pace, whilst avoiding being hit by obstacles. Essentially tracker jackers are chasing you, and the moment you hit an obstacle, they swarm and kill you; consequently, the run is over and your score is recorded. The objective is to score higher than your friends and move higher up on the leader board. In a press release, Reliance Games ceo Manish Agarwal stated: “We are proud to be able to give fans of The Hunger Games films an opportunity to immerse themselves in the game, [and the] social features are a great way for the fans to connect with other fans worldwide” (Reliance Games 2014). Lions Gate Senior Vice President of Digital Marketing, Danielle De Palma also stated: “Being able to play as a citizen of Panem further expands the world-building experience we’ve created for our fans … the game provides an exciting new narrative for the core fans while offering a challenge for players of all skill levels” (Reliance Games 2014). In 2014 The Hunger Games: Panem Rising5 was released to complement the final chapter of the narrative by positioning the player as a member of the rebellion as seen in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay. Players enlist their favourite characters to help lead the rebellion, explore the unique not-yet-seen Districts of Panem, communicate with other players around the world, and battle to 4 The Hunger Games: Catching Fire Panem Run was created by Reliance Games and Lions Gate Entertainment Inc. 5 The Hunger Games: Panem Rising was created by Kabam and Lions Gate Entertainment Inc.

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take back Panem from President Snow. The player is encouraged to take on the role of the ‘hero’ and help shape the rebellion. This part of the narrative not only serves to augment the juxtaposition of the Capitol with the various rural Districts (both visually and ethically) but also offers other layers for audiences involved in the rebellion to explore. These new game environments present images of every-day life in, and the unique spatiality of, each District, which were not detailed in the books or films. With the ability to explore the additional Districts of Panem through interactive game-play, the audience’s engagement within the transmedia storyworld becomes one of active participation. The books and films are limited in what activities they offer, whereas a game opens up ongoing opportunities for interaction and participation. With the inclusion of online communities and social networking, the developers behind the franchise have been able to provide additional points of access into the storyworld and more opportunities for active participation. Each of these multiple platforms retain the aesthetic, thematic and canonical consistencies of the Panem cityscape, providing familiarity and consistency at the entry point and the promise of new experiences. The Hunger Games Explorer6, the film franchise’s official website, was built using the latest web technologies, making it suitable for all media devices and ensuring functionality for mobile touch screens. Donny Makower describes the website as a ‘real time social aggregation tool that pulls in content from around the web’ (Internet Explorer 2013). Balind Seiber, the Creative Director of Red Interactive, who worked with web developers at Internet Explorer also stated, ‘We’ve built this container that allows you to passively observe the conversation but also actively push it out and interact with each other and potentially build relationships around The Hunger Games’ (Internet Explorer 2013). The site administrators monitor the content that is being aggregated to see what is being shared, re-blogged or liked the most, ensuring that the most relevant, and popular content is given screen priority. The site contains both officially produced content and user-generated content. Users can access this information as a guest or, to gain full features, can login using their District id (which is applicable for all official sites). The District id allows users to create an identity, including name and id number. District id users can collect ‘badges’ by linking their social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr) and add ‘sparks’ to the content they enjoy – fuelling the popularity of desired content. The Capitol of Panem has an official (fictional) website7 that allows fans to explore the social, cultural, and political landscape of the Capitol, and its 6 ‘The Hunger Games Explorer’ was built in partnership with red Interactive Agency and Internet Explorer and can be found online at: http://www.thehungergamesexplorer.com. 7 The ‘Capitol of Panem’ official website can be found online at: http://thecapitol.pn/.

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citizens. The landing page for the website features a portrait photograph of President Snow, which has been updated throughout the course of the film releases to present new relevant images. In the first incarnation of the website, users were welcomed to the ‘Citizen Control Centre’ where they could log in with their District id. Reminders from the Capitol appear across the site, reinforcing citizen protocols with messages like: “Respect your Peacekeepers and serve your district with vigilance”; “The Capitol is a beacon of perfection”; ‘It is the crowned jewel of Panem. How have you helped polish it?’ and ‘Panem: a nation united under one people and one President’. This feature has since been replaced, but all information on the website continues to be presented as ‘officially-sanctioned’ content – direct from the Capitol to its citizens – with the Capitol seal prominently displayed across all ‘official’ websites. Another official website that offers further engagement with the cityscape of The Hunger Games is Capitol Couture8. This is a website dedicated to the fashions and culture of Panem’s Capitol. The site contains editorial content from cover stories featuring Katniss Everdeen, to articles on fashion, beauty, design and culture. You can find this season’s Capitol ‘looks’, ‘marvel’ at this month’s interior designs, or get the latest opinions on beauty and even body modification using 3D printing technology. Multi award-winning costumer designer Trish Summerville is in the process of recreating some of the film’s fashions, for public consumption, via Net-a-Porter. Fans will soon be able to buy exclusive ‘Capitol Couture’ pieces via this online fashion house – inspired by costumes such as Katniss’ chariot dress, and a bow and arrow bracelet (NetA-Porter 2014). This market-led positioning of the audience as ‘citizens’ of Panem fits neatly into the participatory experience offered by The Hunger Games transmedia franchise. Just as the visual representations of both the cityscapes and the rural landscapes in the films add additional layers to the reader’s already imagined visual constructions, so too do the games, websites, and social media. These more interactive mediums that extend the transmedia experience provide opportunities for the audience to engage in the storyworld and with each other.

Dystopian Panem as Social Commentary

Transmedia storyworlds are particularly suited to the dystopian genre as they encourage audiences to engage with social, cultural and political parallels 8 ‘Capitol Couture’ can be found online at: http://capitolcouture.pn/.

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between a fictional storyworld, and modern society. The interactive participatory experiences provided by transmedia engage audiences deeply in thematic content. Interactivity can be understood as “the collaboration between the reader and the text in the production of meaning” (Ryan 1999: 125), and as “the power of the user to modify [the] environment” (1999: 121), suggesting that interactivity requires a compromise between discovery and predictability. With the advent of interactive digital games, this ­suspension of disbelief is furthered with players projecting themselves as members of the imagined world. Ryan explains how the “emotions experienced in make-­believe in the fictional world may carry over to the real world” (1999: 116), and highlights Jay Bolter’s assumption that “losing oneself in a fictional world is the goal of the naïve reader or one who reads as entertainment” (1999: 120) – a feature of genre fiction such as science fiction. Keith M. Booker, who considers the principal literary strategy of dystopian literature to be ‘defamiliarisation’ suggested that by “focusing their critiques of society on imaginatively distant settings, dystopian fictions provide fresh perspectives on problematic social and political practices that might otherwise be taken for granted or considered natural and inevitable” (1994: 3–4). Dystopian literature focuses on society’s negative characteristics such as poverty, oppression, political and military mistrust; and often extrapolates aspects of contemporary society. Tom Moylan sees dystopian narratives as: “largely the product of the terrors of the twentieth century. A hundred years of exploitation, repression, state violence, war, genocide, disease, famine, ecocide, depression, debt, and the steady depletion of humanity through the buying and selling of everyday life” (2000: xi). Moylan suggests that “science fiction encourages readers to attach themselves to the protagonist” (2000: 4). In The Hunger Games, audiences attach themselves to the protagonist Katniss Everdeen, and immediately sympathise with her situation. From the opening pages of the first book, Katniss tells the reader of her struggles and the repressive surroundings in District 12. Our part of District 12, nicknamed the Seam, is usually crawling with coal miners heading out to the morning shift at this hour. Men and women with hunched shoulders, swollen knuckles, many of whom have long since stopped trying to scrub the coal dust out of their broken nails and the lines of their sunken faces. collins 2011a: 4–5

This description of the inhabitants of District 12 is our first glimpse into the dystopian world of Panem. In District 12, like many of the other outlying

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Districts, poverty and hunger are rampant. The Government hands out rations called tesserae (basic grain and oil) to those eligible to participate in the Hunger Games, in return for adding their name additional times into the Reaping lottery. These rations are not enough to ensure survival, and many turn to illegal trading in order to gain food and other basic living essentials. Katniss, however, was taught to hunt and gather by her father before he died in a tragic mining accident years before the story begins. Since her father’s death, Katniss unlawfully crosses the electrified fence separating District 12 from the forest, to hunt and to forage for nuts and berries. She then uses the food to trade in the Hob – the black market in District 12. It is in the Hob where readers witness the true destitution and pitiable state of living, but also the contentment and kindness of these people. The Hunger Games act as a form of entertainment for those in the Capitol and a yearly demonstration of the Capitol’s dominance over the inhabitants of the outlying Districts. The Capitol’s use of the Games as a way of instilling fear, establishing control, and constructing a rigid class structure, also maintains a way of life for Panem’s citizens. By pitting the Districts against each other in these deadly Games, the Capitol not only reinforces its separation from the Districts, but also the Districts from one another. The Games emerged as payment and restitution for the ‘Dark Days’ – when the Districts rebelled against the Capitol, eventuating in the almost-collapse of the entire nation. The Capitol cannot survive without the Districts as they provide the much-needed resources and a labour force. This reliance on the Districts causes concern among the ruling elite that the Districts could once again rebel against the Capitol, and for President Snow, this fear is ever-present. It is the unspoken, ever-­ present threat of rebellion that fuels their fear tactics. The Games are therefore not merely a barbaric form of entertainment for the Capitol’s citizens; they serve as a way of dividing the districts and maintaining the Capitol’s absolute power. As the second film instalment of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire moves us further into the political and social constructs of Panem, we begin to see shifts in power, and extreme measures taken to retain the Capitol’s power and control over its citizens. Katniss Everdeen, after winning the first Hunger Games, has become a ‘beacon of hope’, which President Snow fears ‘must be contained’, because hope could inspire a rebellion. Book and film fans alike rallied behind Katniss and the ideal of the ‘Mockingjay’. By becoming active participants in the storyworld and positioned as ‘citizens’ in the various games and websites, fans mobilised online to bring the ideals of the ‘Mockingjay’ over into the real world.

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The Audience as ‘Citizens’ of Panem

The transmedia franchise of The Hunger Games has continually positioned its audience as ‘citizens’ across the various media platforms, to the point where audiences are becoming their own real-life ‘Mockingjays’. Fans are speaking out on contemporary real-world injustice, just as the District citizens do in the fictional storyworld. As Jenkins argues, for people who are culturally active (consuming films, television, and games), these media platforms act as a bridge and support system for them to become more politically active. What we are seeing as a result is that participatory culture is leading to participatory politics, with outcomes of political mobilisation, discussion, and expression, and the development of civic identities (Jenkins 2014). We are seeing the civil uprising witnessed in fictional Panem, cascade into the ‘real world’, with many websites and social media-based communities and organisations created in response to the franchise, but which exist separately from the franchise owners and producers. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire – Ignite the Fight Against Hunger9 was one of the first fan-created communities formed around the franchise. It is a sanctioned charity/food drive supporting Feeding America and the World Food Program, aimed at raising awareness about world poverty and hunger. It gives fans an opportunity to contribute to programs designed to help others in need. Fans can learn and share facts on national (usa) and global hunger through their social networks using the hashtag #ignitethefight. Odds in Our Favor10 is an online community of ‘citizens’ concerned with the growing economic disparity between the wealthy and the poor. Their campaign to ‘Join the Resistance’ focused on organising like-minded citizens to rally at cinema screenings of Catching Fire, handing out stickers (of the three-fingered salute featured in The Hunger Games) and information about economic inequality. Their project, ‘We Are the Districts’11 is dedicated to sharing local economic information to a global audience – from unemployment rates, to food stamp cuts, and information on gentrification and the gender pay gap. The Harry Potter Alliance12 (hpa) is an organisation that was born out of the Harry Potter fandom, but has progressively incorporated more fandoms to 9 10 11 12

‘Ignite the Fight Against Hunger’ can be found on line at: http://www.hungergames.com/. ‘Odds In Our Favour’ can be found online at: http://oddsinourfavor.org/. ‘We Are The Districts’ can be found online at: http://wearethedistricts.tumblr.com/. ‘The Harry Potter Alliance’ can be found online at: http://thehpalliance.org/.

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create a larger member-base. hpa identifies as a non-profit organisation that “turns fans into heroes”, stating that: “We’re changing the world by making activism accessible through the power of story” (2015). hpa has since expanded its model of civic engagement through a new organisation called Imagine Better. This project takes a “grassroots, ‘out-of-the-box’ approach to harnessing the energy of social media, popular culture, and modern mythology for social change” (2015). In a recent press release, the hpa outlined their upcoming campaign to coincide with the release of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1. The hashtag #MyHungerGames encouraged the public to fill the gap between The Hunger Games marketing and the series’ political message with their own stories of the daily realities of income inequality. Moylan states that readers strive to be actively part of a found community of people who are also dislocated, and no doubt dispossessed and disempowered, and who are posing similar questions to the entire social reality: asking historically as well as individually where in the world they are, what in the world is going on, and what in the world they can do about it. Moreover, he posits: Much of science fiction works by way of a readerly delight in the thoughtful and thought-provoking activity of imagining the elsewhere of a given text, of filling-in, co-creating, the imagined paradigm of a society that does not exist but that nevertheless supplies a cognitive map of what does exist… if a reader can manage to see the world differently (in that Brechtian sense of overcoming alienation by becoming critically estranged and engaged), she or he might just, especially in concert with friends or comrades and allies, do something to alter it – perhaps on a large scale or ever so slightly, perhaps in a singular deluge or maybe through steady drops of water on apparently stable and solid rock – so as to make that world a more just and congenial place for all who live in it. moylan 2000: 5

Mark Fisher points out that young adult dystopian literature tells us much more than just which demographic The Hunger Games is aimed at, suggesting that the franchise resonates so powerfully with its young audiences because it evokes feelings of betrayal, and resentment within a generation. Patrick Smith further speculates that the current resurgence of young adult dystopian literature may well be due to their inherent adaptability to the big screen. He also adds that: Much of the young adult dystopian literature today draws thematically from classics… typically [featuring] totalitarian governments, war, broken

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economies, and includes themes of power, control, underdogs fighting against an oppressor. These themes often mirror the political and economical climate of the time it was written, often reflecting on (or projecting) a society’s views on current world events. Within these dystopian texts lie a common thread, that suggests the world lies on the precipice of destruction. smith 2012: 23

In the third and final film instalment, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Panem is on the precipice of a revolution. Katniss is on the final leg of her journey as she reluctantly takes on the mantle of the ‘Mockingjay’ – the symbol of the revolution. The themes of war, democracy, power of the media, manipulation, and sacrifice, take centre stage as audiences follow Katniss on her final journey. Much of the action in the storyline’s finale takes place in the Capitol – the symbolic ‘evil’ she has battled since the first book. With many scenes occurring in the streets and dwellings of the city, her fight with the Capitol becomes literal. She faces perilous conditions, hazardous environments and man-made horrors as she and her rag-tag team make one final stand against President Snow and the Capitol forces. Whilst she is initially made to be a pawn in another political game, Katniss eventually awakens to the competing agendas and chooses to follow her own path. In the end, she reflects on the past, contemplates the future and struggles to reconcile her own morality with the consequences of her actions.

Conclusions

Transmedia storyworlds are particularly suited to this emerging dystopian young adult genre, as it allows youth audiences to engage with parallels between a ‘fictional storyworld’ and their own ‘real-world’ circumstances. As Ryan states: “Once we have invested sufficient mental energy to construct a storyworld, we want to collect the dividends of our efforts by being able to return to this world as often as we want” (2013: 385). By actively participating in, and interacting with the fictional storyworld of The Hunger Games, young audiences are engaging with the themes and issues facing them in contemporary society. At the core of The Hunger Games is an exploration of issues set within a familiar cityscape – that of economic inequality, poverty, the abuse of power, and exploitation of the poor by the wealthy. Fans of franchises like The Hunger Games are claiming an affiliation with these kinds of stories. By transitioning from participatory culture to participatory politics, audiences can not only reflect on these issues, but also become a force for change. Katniss Everdeen,

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as the ‘Mockingjay’ is a symbol of hope for the citizens of Panem, but also for citizens of Earth. Bibliography Primary References

Berlin Symphony of a Great City. Dir. Walter Ruttmann. Deutsche Vereins-Film, Les Productions Fox Europa, 1927. Collins, Suzanne. 2011a. The Hunger Games. London, United Kingdom: Scholastic. Collins, Suzanne. 2011b. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. London, United Kingdom: Scholastic. Collins, Suzanne. 2011c. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay. London, United Kingdom: Scholastic. The Hunger Games. Dir. Gary Ross. Lions Gate Entertainment. Lions Gate. Roadshow Entertainment, 2012. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. Dir. Francis Lawrence. Lions Gate Entertainment. Lions Gate Entertainment, 2013. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1. Dir. Francis Lawrence. Lions Gate Entertainment. Lions Gate Entertainment, 2014.

Secondary References

Arnwine, C. & Lerner, J. 1997. “Cityscapes: Introduction”, in Wide Angle, 19(4): 1–7. Booker, M.K. 1994. Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide. Westport: Greenwood Press. Coleridge, S.T. 1817. Biographia Literaria, Chapter xiv. On line at: http://www.english .upenn.edu/~mgamer/Etexts/biographia.html (consulted 15.01.2015). Davis, D.E. 1999. “The power of distance:re-theorizing social movements in Latin America’ in Theory and Society, 28: 585–638. Davis, M. 1992. “Fortress Los Angeles: the militarization of public space” in M. Sorkin (ed.), Variations on a theme park: the new American city and the end of public space, New York, ny: Hill and Wang. Fisher, M. 2012. “Precarious Dystopias: The Hunger Games, In Time, and Never Let Me Go” in Film Quarterly 65(4): 27–33. Foucault, M. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, New York: Vintage Books. Gotham, K.F. 2003. “Toward an Understanding of the Spatiality of Urban Poverty: The Urban Poor as Spatial Actors” in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27(3): 723–737. Hallam, J. 2012. “Civic Visions: Mapping the ‘City’ Film 1900–1960”. Culture, Theory and Critique, 53(1): 37–58.

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Harry Potter Alliance. 2014. “Donald Sutherland wants the Hunger Games to start a revolution: Here it is” On line at http://thehpalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/ hpa-pr-11-17-14.pdf (consulted 25.01.2015). Harry Potter Alliance. 2015. “What is the Harry Potter Alliance?” On line at: http:// thehpalliance.org/downloads/press/about-the-hpa.pdf (consulted 25.01.2015). Internet Explorer. 2013. “The Hunger Games Explorer – Behind the Scenes” On line at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZ0CqCWnQ6I (consulted 04.09.2013). Jenkins, H. 2003. “Transmedia Storytelling” On line at: http://www.technologyreview .com/news/401760/transmedia-storytelling/page/3/ (consulted 28.11.2013). Jenkins, H. 2013. “Rethinking ‘Rethinking Convergence/Culture’”. Cultural Studies 28(2): 267–297. Law, J. 2004. After method: Mess in social science research, London: Routledge. Lions Gate Entertainment Inc. 2013. “The Hunger Games Explorer” On line at: http:// www.thehungergamesexplorer.com/au/ (consulted 09.11.2013). Marx, K. & F. Engels 1848 [1987 edn.] “The Manifesto of the Communist Party” in Robert C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader, Second edition, New York: Norton. Marx, K. & F. Engels 1867 [1977 edn.] Capital: a critique of political economy. Volume 1, New York: Vintage Books. McGrath, B. 2012. “44 Ways ‘The Hunger Games’ Social Media Campaign I­ ncreased the Movie’s Odds of Success” On line at: http://www.portent.com/blog/social-media/ hunger-games-social-media-campaign.htm (consulted 20.07.2013). Moylan, T. 2000. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia Boulder: Westview Press. Net-A-Porter. 2014. “Capitol Couture By Trish Summerville” On line at: http:// www.net-a-porter.com/Shop/Designers/CAPITOL_COUTURE_BY_TRISH _SUMMERVILLE/All (consulted 5.01.2014). Reliance Games. 2014. “The Hunger Games: Cathing Fire Official Game”. On line at: http://www.reliancegames.com/hungergames (consulted 05.01.2014). Ryan, M. 1999. “Immersion vs. Interactivity: Virtual Reality and Literary Theory” in Substance 89: 110–137. Ryan, M. 2013. “Transmedial Storytelling and Transfictionality” in Poetics Today 34(3): 361–388. Simmel, G. 1950. “The Metropolis and Mental Life” in K. Wolff (ed. and tr.), The Sociology of Georg Simmel, Free Press, Illinois: 409–424. Smith, P. 2012. “Beyond The Hunger Games: Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults” in Bookmarks Magazine, July/August: 23–25. Wright, T. 1997. “Out of place: homeless mobilizations, subcities, and contested landscapes”, Albany, ny: State University of New York Press.

‘Final Men’, Racialised Fears & the Control of Monstrous Cityscapes in Post-Apocalyptic Hollywood Films Glen Donnar Abstract This chapter examines the horrific experiences of a ‘final man’ – the fabled last man on Earth – in a dystopic near-future science-fiction cityscape through a comparative analysis of three related post-apocalyptic films, ranging from the late ‘classical’ Hollywood period to a contemporary blockbuster. The films variously expose American (male) racial anxieties and preoccupations in keeping with each film’s respective period. Each ‘final man’ initially enacts a masculinist desire to control urban space. However, the city is also a fearful space; and one irrevocably not his. This horrific loss of control is associated with historical racial fears of perceived urban destruction – and expressed through the arrival of ‘monstrous’ Others varyingly identified with terror, counterculture and white patriarchy. Ultimately, an idealised post-racial future may mandate abandoning the ‘monstrous’ city for a non-urban future that precludes the ‘final man’.

Key Terms Mick Broderick – Mike Davis – Adilifu Nama – Max Page – masculinity – Hollywood – race – class – monstrosity

Hollywood has long revelled in images of the fantastical destruction of its major cultural and economic urban centres, with New York and Los Angeles its pre-eminent targets for spectacular cinematic destruction and catastrophe. Both cities share significant similarities in the cultural representation of disaster and apocalypse. Their iconicity, unique geographies, and skyscraper heights make them persistently attractive and vulnerable to natural disasters, invading giant monsters and aliens, and man-made catastrophes. According to cultural historians Max Page (2011) and Mike Davis (1998), this fascination reflects long-held ambivalence towards each city in the American cultural imagination, expressing a deeply held desire to ‘witness’ their imagined destruction yet simultaneously celebrating their greatness, iconicity and power. The cities are

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stand-ins for (American) civilisation itself, whether good or ill. Representative and exemplar, any catastrophe thus threatens or punishes a specific idea(s) of ‘America’. Yet in some sense they are also deemed separate from other conceptions of ‘America’. They inspire not only veneration and envy, but also resentment for New York’s iconic skyline, invoking economic, political and cultural power, and disdain for Hollywood’s (self-promoted) arrogance, permissiveness and decadence. Post-apocalyptic Hollywood science-fictional cityscapes are ideal spaces to indulge American ambivalence about its great cities and revel in New York and Los Angeles’ imagined cinematic destruction and punishment time and again. They invoke long-standing cultural “apocalyptic strains” in American religious life (Page 2011) and popular literary culture (Davis 1998).1 Contemporary secular apocalypses, however, diverge in important ways from their biblical antecedents, predominantly offering visions and warnings of the spectacular annihilation of a broken world order (Weaver 2011). Hollywood apocalypses routinely deploy the trope of the city as a space to exhibit and warn of the corruption of contemporary society, and exercise (or exorcise) the desire to judge, punish and exact retribution. Popular apocalypse and disaster narratives about New York and Los Angeles also articulate and salve fears associated with immigrants, racial diversity and external threats. Indeed, as Davis observes, the “abiding hysteria” of all such fiction seems “rooted in racial ­anxiety” ­(Davis 1998: 281). In particular, Eric Avila finds that post-war 1950s science fiction “captured white preoccupations with the increasing visibility” (2004: 88) of racialised Others, extending wartime anxieties about alien invasion onto domestic fears associated with increased black urbanisation and white flight. They thus articulate perceptions of cultural threat, and announce prohibitions on supposedly undesirable contemporary social conditions and changes, to restore and enshrine the cultural status quo (read: ‘white’ institutions) by exposing and then annihilating perceived ‘monstrous’ threats. Scholars routinely describe post-apocalyptic Hollywood as a vehicle to reinvigorate traditional gender types and showcase male redemption, exemplifying Hollywood’s historic capacity to remasculinise male protagonists in the advent of a crisis moment. Yet while Hollywood post-apocalyptic fictions predominantly depict a world after catastrophe and a sustained period of devastation after the end, they also routinely proffer some form of revelation and cultural renewal, however tentative or partial. This proffered opportunity to 1 Scholars and social commentators speculated Hollywood would refrain from visualising New York’s spectacular destruction post-9/11, yet a number of films have since represented it as a target for destruction.

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redress perceived social ills through the reinvigoration of dormant-thoughdesirable human qualities is, however, largely considered to support conservative ideologies. Mick Broderick (1993), for example, finds that post-nuclear cinematic apocalypses increasingly reinforce the symbolic order and conservative social regimes, typically through the restoration of patriarchal law and the ‘father’. They also invariably promote the renewal of heteronormative institutions of family and community. Laura Copier further claims Hollywood apocalypse narratives not only often offer traditional representations of gender and authority, but male redemption associated with “masculine ideals” of self-mastery and power (2008: 42–43). Finally, Mathias Nilges contends that when America – or, rather, dominant conceptions of it – feels threatened, popular cultural representations of the post-apocalypse typically reinvigorate a traditional notion of hyper-masculinity; “regressively equating” nation with masculinity in gendering concepts like order and control (2010: 31). In short, Hollywood apocalypses, as much as delivering spectacular judgment and punishment, are opportunities to nostalgically restore or reinvigorate (patriarchal) authority and re-centre (predominantly white) masculinity. Ranging from the late classical Hollywood period to a recent blockbuster, the three related post-apocalyptic near-future Hollywood cityscapes explored in this chapter – two of which loosely adapt the same source novel – feature iconic male stars and seemingly support notions of reinvigorated masculinity and masculinist experiences following apocalypse. They variously examine cultural and socio-political anxieties, crises and uncertainties related to each film’s respective time of production, in periods of instability and flux in American society (and cinema), from Cold War atomic fears to civil rights issues in the 1950s and 1970s to post-9/11 threats. They each deploy their postapocalyptic scenarios and iconic ‘final man’ – the fabled last man on Earth – to explore specific and persistent American (male) anxieties about race, class and gender. These anxieties are particularly articulated through imaginings of the surviving protagonists’ experiences in the near-future, science-fictional city; ­anxieties about isolation and invasion, community and its Others, and the reinvigoration of (hegemonic) threatened masculinities. Much as Broderick argues that post-apocalyptic science-fiction cinema predominantly affords an “imagination of survival” (Broderick 1993), each film offers a narrativisation of urban survival as much as a depiction of apocalyptic catastrophe, revolving around the post-apocalyptic experiences of their ‘final man’ protagonists. However, post-apocalyptic reinvigoration is not so much about re-invoking traditional gender traits and behaviours as a revived masculine urban experience. While each film largely omits any sustained vision of the establishment of a new world, the immediate post-apocalyptic

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cityscape affords each ‘final man’ unique opportunities and freedoms. That is, in cityscapes seemingly emptied of others, the apocalypse and the postapocalyptic landscape provides the adaptive, resilient male the space to (re) establish masculine control over the urban environment. As such, this chapter explores whether each ‘final man’s’ experience of their post-apocalyptic cityscape exorcises anxieties about race, class and gender common to popular post-apocalyptic narratives, and reinstates male control and mastery of his urban environment.

The City Emptied of (the Problem of) Others: Male Fantasies of Urban Control

The introduction of post-apocalypse Manhattan in I Am Legend (Lawrence 2007) offers an incongruous fantasy, a post-apocalyptic car commercial, of a speeding sports car whose progress is unchecked by traffic (see also Brayton 2011).2 However, I Am Legend, set three years after the end, ostensibly depicts a ‘final man’s struggle for survival and search for a cure, battling isolation, psychic disintegration and survivor’s guilt. The film stars Will Smith as military scientist Robert Neville, the apparent sole human survivor of a viral plague that annihilates much of humanity and turns the remainder into mindlessly violent ‘vampire-zombie’ Darkseekers. Numbered amongst a resurgence in Hollywood post-apocalyptic films, I Am Legend evokes 9/11 by re-locating events from Los Angeles, and its aftermath in repeated rhetorical designations of New York as ‘Ground Zero’ and exploration of urban anxieties about living with a persistent threat of terror. Race and class symbolism are also invoked, with its iconic black star and the dilapidated, abandoned buildings, explicitly connoting urban black or poor communities post-Katrina, in which the Darkseekers live.3 The decayed, polluted post-apocalyptic city is nonetheless initially represented as a male playground for the driving Neville. The urban racing fantasy 2 I Am Legend is the third cinematic adaptation of Richard Matheson’s eponymous vampire/ last man 1954 novel, set in la. Matheson’s novel was numerously adapted for the screen throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. An earlier Italian/American co-production, The Last Man On Earth (Ragona 1964), with a script originally written by Matheson but later altered, is the first film adaptation. Putatively set in New York, it recalls la because it was filmed around the outskirts of Rome. 3 The buildings contain symbols recalling the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina through stencilled information about corpses on building walls. Sean Brayton also momentarily reads the Darkseekers as a proxy for the abandoned black underclass (Brayton 2011), but predominantly reads them as figures of white terror, in light of Neville’s racial identity.

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is suddenly transformed as a herd of deer crosses his path and Neville gives chase. The film figures its post-apocalyptic ‘final driver’ as urban game hunter, completing the fantasy. In I Am Legend, nature not only survives society, but the apocalypse symbolically returns it to the city. Nature’s eclipse of the city also offers the ‘final man’ (and his dog companion) a new – though nostalgic – way of surviving in the city. The film even introduces Neville’s sports car and rifle before it does him, his masculine identity and (star) body explicitly prefigured by each. Nature’s post-apocalyptic eclipse has transformed Central Park from an apocalyptic site for mass graves (briefly implied in a shot of an old newspaper) to a post-apocalyptic idyll, as a provider of food for the ‘final man’. In I Am Legend, the post-apocalyptic cityscape is primarily portrayed as a ‘postFordist’ consumer paradise. Neville’s life in the post-apocalyptic urban jungle is that of a consumer rather than a producer, and the problems of either other people or labour are seemingly absent. For example, while he harvests corn in Central Park, we do not see him work to produce it (see also Boyle 2009). And while Neville presumably planted the crop, the film decidedly depicts only his consumption, rather than the production or maintenance of his post-apocalypse lifestyle. This ‘final man’ consumes and replaces, rather than produces and preserves. Neville’s roots as a post-apocalyptic consumer lie in The Omega Man (Sagal 1971), its most avowed source, where another ‘final man’ in a speeding sports car initially invokes the persistence of capitalist ideology. The film stars Charlton Heston as military scientist and polymath bachelor, Robert Neville, also three years after a global viral atomic plague wipes out much of the world’s population. While a three-year narrative ellipsis in I Am Legend immediately signals an intervening catastrophe, in Omega Man it is initially unclear that the cityscape Neville traverses is changed. His carefree though tire-screeching Sunday drive is only slowly revealed as strange through an absence of traffic and increasing intimations of urban disuse and disrepair. Omega Man’s Los Angeles is desolate and deserted, a wasteland that offers wry comment on popular perceptions of the city as much as 1970s urban decay more generally. As in I Am Legend, Neville is intimately associated with the car and the gun as he careens unencumbered through the streets of Los Angeles in a red convertible. While Omega Man deploys Cold War atomic anxieties, the film’s focus arguably centres more on perceived domestic threats to white male hegemony in late 1960s America. Neville is portrayed as a survivalist holdout against the Family, a cult of albino-like infected survivors violently opposed to the white male’s modern lifestyle and continuing attachment to its technologies and affordances. Neville’s defiantly unchanged, even intensified, consumer lifestyle defines his struggles against the Family, as he searches for them on a daily

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basis, to experiment on (hoping to replicate his own plague immunity) but mostly exterminate. The openings of Omega Man and I Am Legend depict their respective ‘final men’ as in seeming complete control and mastery of their urban environments, their sports cars speeding unimpeded on the urban streets. Omega Man and I Am Legend render the post-apocalyptic cityscape, joyously emptied of and free from other people, a fantasy consumer playground. The two Nevilles all but ‘own’ the urban streets, invoking the seemingly uncomplicated and idyllic persistence of consumption behaviours and ideology, and dominion initially presented as natural and unchallenged. However, this idea of male ownership and dominion of the urban environment may also invite the demise of each ‘final man’. In asserting that New York as “Ground Zero” “is my site”, Neville ties the apocalyptic site to protective institutional responsibility and masculine responses to disaster. However, with ownership implied via a declared masculine responsibility towards and for place, this also foreshadows the deleterious effects of an attachment with place that prohibit emotional distance from the site of disaster and loss and a consequent inability to leave. This relationship to male dominion of urban space is similarly implied in Omega Man in Neville’s obstinate declaration about his reasons for refusing to vacate either his apartment or the blighted post-apocalyptic city: “That’s where I live. It’s where I used to live. It’s where I’m gonna live”, an attachment to place that also prophetically foreshadows his final fate. The post-apocalyptic city in The World, The Flesh, and The Devil (MacDougall 1959, henceforth twtftd) is likewise seemingly emptied of other bodies. However, this does not afford Ralph Burton, a black miner who frees himself from a Pennsylvania mine collapse to find a world suddenly emptied after atomic conflict, and poisoning, the freedom it seemingly offers the two Nevilles. twtftd is a post-apocalypse/‘social problem’ film starring Harry Belafonte, an equally iconic though more activist black crossover star, made at the nascence of the civil rights era – and the first produced by Belafonte’s own production company. Belafonte criticised the film’s timidity in depicting its interracial romance, pejoratively associating it with the black-white ‘miscegenation film’ cycle of the late 1950s (Courtney 2005). However, twtftd arguably deploys Cold War atomic anxieties to examine contemporary (read: pre-apocalypse) class, race and gender relations, and particularly the psychic effects of oppressive contemporary racial and sexual codes on black masculinity. Despite believing himself now alone, the deserted city is not empty for its haunted workingclass black protagonist, and the perceived presence of others bears down upon him. Even though ‘civilisation’ – representing the dominant ideological norms and attitudes held by contemporary American society – has ostensibly ended,

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racial and class prejudices haunt and constrain the black ‘final man’ from his arrival in a radically depopulated New York. New York, a historic island ‘entry point’ for immigrants and movie monsters and disasters alike, is typically cut off in twtftd, and a mass of abandoned vehicles prevents road entry to the city and mean Burton must access it by water. For Burton, New York is a racialised cityscape, one that continues to impose upon the body and psyche of the black man – a heavy un-presence – even after the end. This is first articulated in Burton’s traumatic arrival in the city and later embodied in two mannequins he collects for companionship, used to communicate a fantasy of control over the post-apocalyptic cityscape. However, for Burton, the white mannequins, a female and a male, also symbolically (re)animate and preserve (white) ‘civilisation’, and an urban space marked by white privilege, racial prejudice, and the black man’s exclusion and invisibility.4 The mannequins communicate how Burton’s class and race identity is discursively circumscribed by society even post-apocalypse. A skyscraper perspective that orients many of the early shots of Burton’s arrival in New York, as Burton runs through the empty urban streets announcing his presence, functions similarly. He continually looks upward at the silent buildings above, clearly associated with white America, as he calls out to the (white) others he feels, hopes and fears surveil him – “I know you’re there’, ‘I can feel you watching me”. Shots from below Burton connote how the looming towers bear over, surround, disorient and overwhelm him, and point-of-view shots (as Burton scans the skyscrapers) and skyscraper’s-eye shots imply his (perceived) smallness. As Courtney observes, Burton’s arrival signals ‘the enduring power of white regimes of v­ ision and space to encode and enforce black subjection’ (Courtney 2005: 238, see also Larrieux 2010). Even though he now appears to be New York’s only ­living inhabitant, the city was and is not his domain. Although he is figuratively free of and from others, pre-apocalypse racial norms and social roles shape B ­ urton’s immediate experience of the post-apocalypse and the abandoned city. Indeed, they are upheld by Burton himself, as he sustains the ‘civilisation’ that ­oppressed and excluded him by repairing and rebuilding its infrastructure. While Burton has a more uncertain relationship to the post-apocalyptic urban environment than the two Nevilles, his restoration and remaking of the city’s dead infrastructure arguably affords the black ‘final man’ a sense of ownership. 4 Class and race mark Burton’s encounter with the mannequins: when he first carries the female mannequin out and into his car, the film satirises racial fears of the threat posed to white women by black male lust, and as he labours to repair the city’s infrastructure, the white mannequins lounge in evening dress.

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Adilifu Nama, who persuasively critiques Hollywood’s strict policing of racial difference in science fiction, contends that only an apocalyptic context allows the imagining of racial change, ambivalently cuing social change while associating black power and visibility with (oncoming) apocalypse, and especially Cold War paranoia about radioactive contamination (Nama 2008). However, twtftd consciously counters racial fears associated with ‘white flight’, as the black man occupies a city already abandoned and chooses an empty apartment rather than taking one over. A montage thereafter shows Burton slowly revive the abandoned metropolis and make a place for himself within it, re-establishing electricity to his block after locating and decorating an available apartment. Even setting up a train set in his apartment playfully connotes Burton’s newfound sense of control, a new permeability of previously fixed boundaries and prohibitions, and the time available for play previously precluded the working-class man. Such post-apocalyptic affordances newly available to the black man are showcased in Burton’s ascension to the rooftop of a radio station building. In stark contrast to his street-level positioning on his arrival, he surveys the metropolis from a vantage point (symbolically) disallowed him pre-apocalypse. This sense of black urban ‘ownership’ is exemplified in his joyful response to restoring light to his block, finally feeling free to play with his shadow, to dance and to laugh for the first time – his post-­ apocalypse isolation, and thus freedom, seemingly confirmed. Across the three films, the p ­ ost-apocalyptic city seemingly emptied of others is by turns horrific and haunting, opportune and ideal, for its ‘final men’. Each variously enacts the masculinist desire to control and manage urban space, with the dead post-­ lapsarian cityscape enlivened and revived by the survivalist ‘final man’.5 However, even in Burton’s joyous silhouetted dance, the pre-civil rights black ‘final man’s freedom remains uncertain and ambivalently experienced, foreshadowing the threat that accompanies the later return of (white) others to Burton’s New York, as he tellingly chooses to dance as a marionette, on strings and controlled by others.

5 The actions of the ‘final man’ post-apocalypse seek to compensate for and redress a preceding lack of control. Burton’s lack of control patently precedes the apocalypse, a beleaguered and disenfranchised black working-class man. In I Am Legend, Neville, positioned as the lead scientist in the search for a cure, is not only unable to find a cure, but helplessly watches the failed evacuation deaths of his wife and daughter, revealed in traumatic flashback. Omega Man’s Neville too is unable to find a cure for the viral plague – pointedly identified when he is later asked if he can help an infected child survivor, ‘I mean, seeing as how you’ve lost over 200 million patients?’

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Destabilising Urban Control: Mannequins & Urban Hunters

Burton’s cautious assumption of post-apocalyptic urban mastery is swiftly unsettled by the mannequins he portends to control. Ongoing racial dis-ease erupts into (symbolic) violence when Burton angrily throws the white male mannequin off his balcony – a vain attempt to extinguish continuing feelings of black invisibility the camera approximates via the mannequin’s optical point-of-view, but that he preserves through his daily labors.6 The emergence of a white female survivor, Sarah Crandall (Inger Stevens), immediately after he ‘murders’ the white mannequin destabilises his already tenuous dominion over the emptied metropolis, as Larrieux (2010) and Courtney (2005) have similarly noted. This is tangibly reinforced in his pained re-articulation of ‘civilisation’ through a rigid adherence to and performance of pre-apocalypse social norms, roles and expectations with the blond ‘final woman’. While Sarah duly commends Burton’s restoration of the radio and telephone, “You’ll have the whole city working before you’re through”, each act facilitates the return of further (white) others. The sense of place, control and ownership afforded to Burton in his revival and remaking of the city is confirmed as partial, contingent and unstable. Yet despite their seeming paradisiacal mastery and ownership of their urban environments, the initial assertion of male control associated with reinvigorated displays of accessorised traditional masculinity by the two Nevilles is similarly unstable, vacillating uneasily between control and its absence or lack. Each Neville’s carefree opening drive, a male fantasy of unfettered ‘consumption’ and urban domination, is soon troubled. In Omega Man, Neville’s sports car sharply rounds another corner when, coming to a sudden halt, he grabs a hereto-unseen machine gun, and wildly strafes a building above, as a hooded figure passes behind the veiled windows. This disturbance is immediately echoed when he swerves and crashes after screeching around another corner to find his previously unimpeded movement through the emptied urbanity blocked by a large truck. While Neville’s casual discarding and swift replacement of the sports car, buying another from the skeleton of a car salesman, furthers notions of the post-apocalyptic city as a male consumer playground, the multiple disruptions shatter any illusion of normality or control; the ‘final man’ it seems is neither alone nor has unchallenged dominion over the urban 6 The camera here approximates the mannequin’s point-of-view to communicate Burton’s continued feelings of black invisibility: ‘You look at me but you don’t see me. You don’t see me and you wouldn’t care if you did’, extending the interplay between feelings of invisibility and regimes of visibility (feeling watched), that traumatise Burton.

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streets. Neville’s dominion over urban space in I Am Legend is even more unstable, as the fantasy urban deer hunt is violently disrupted by a lioness that takes his prospective kill from him – her male mate significantly consigned to protecting their litter, his symbolic emasculation mirroring Neville’s. Neville’s masculine identity is uncertainly buttressed by his technologies of modernity, as much compensatory as augmentative, and the incident signals the discomfiting vulnerability of even the militarised male in the post-apocalyptic ‘urban jungle’ – a ‘final hunter’ unable to master the urban environment, and relegated to canned foodstuffs. Smith’s Neville also peoples his post-apocalyptic world, arranged throughout a dvd store, with mannequins. Mannequins become a necessary fantasy for him to cope with isolation, and re-invoke, simulate and reconstruct society and community. Yet while the store is arguably a ‘cultural destination’, a culturally democratic marker of civilisation that valorises mainstream culture, the society Neville nevertheless chooses to construct is markedly consumerist. That is, the mannequins – commoditised, mass-produced, and inanimate – enable Neville to sustain consumer society and practices, and foreground his active role in its sustenance. Unlike Burton, Neville constructs a post-racial society where consumption is privileged over race, even though he only engages white mannequins.7 Yet propounding a consumerist response to apocalyptic disaster through the re-enactment of reified consumption practices with mannequin ‘bodies’ also highlights control as illusory and precipitate Neville’s final loss of control. While mannequins affirm the desire for community and forestall insanity, they finally confirm and cement isolation and madness. Neville loses control even of ‘his’ mannequins when, shot from his psychological perspective, he ‘sees’ one not only shifted away from the dvd store, but slowly turn its head to ‘look’ at him. Neville’s subsequent anger – “If you’re real, you’d better tell me right now!” – before shooting the mannequin is reminiscent of Burton’s. Neville’s consumption habits and mannequins initially buttress his damaged identity, but are inevitably debilitating and eventually mark his final psychological breakdown. Ultimately, each ‘final man’s’ mannequin ‘murder’ signals a violent admission of a lack of control of the post-apocalyptic cityscape.

7 While also associated with the preservation of capitalist ideology, in Omega Man Neville’s ambivalent consumer experiences partially critique contemporary consumer life: he displays ongoing hostility towards (the emptiness of) capitalism when ‘shopping’ for clothes and cars, and; the dead bodies and skeletons that litter the city remain posthumously tethered to their professional roles, as car salesman or guard, signifying the dehumanising impacts of capitalism.

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Ceding Urban Control to the Monstrous Other: The Cityscape Refigured

No longer merely a consumer playground and a space to (re)claim a reinvigorated masculine identity, the post-apocalyptic city is also a fearful, threatening space for each ‘final man’, and a space irrevocably not his. For example, in I Am Legend, Neville displays an enduring insecurity and vulnerability in public spaces – perhaps symptomatic of the changed relationship to space in modern urban life – even in the fullness of day, a fact reinforced by his exercise regime, running on a treadmill and working out indoors. Even when Neville daily leaves his home he warily surveys the surrounding city from his stoop; threat not only everywhere, but always. And, far from “infiltrating hives”, as Claire Sisco King (2012) claims in overstating Neville’s mastery of space, he only unwillingly enters Darkseeker spaces, like the abandoned, condemned ghetto. ­However, Neville uses maps to scavenge for supplies (and confirm isolation and loss), rather than to methodically stalk his enemy. Indeed, far from a predator, Neville never actively hunts the Darkseekers, as King alleges, but rather deer – and unsuccessfully at that. On the other hand, in Omega Man, Neville exercises freely outdoors, running around the modern metropolis with a map, recorder and gun, his jogging incorporated into his daily searchand-destroy missions for the Family’s ‘nest’. Yet, even in Omega Man, the city conceals the subversive threat to the ‘final man’s survival and dominance within. The metropolis horrifyingly offers and produces frightening anonymity for the enemy, allowing it to proliferate undetected and act invisibly against the ‘final man’. As Davis observes, the popular cultural representation of apocalyptic threat is inevitably ‘rooted’ racial or xenophobic anxieties (Davis 1998). Similarly, in these films the threats to each ‘final man’ are racially located. Indeed, they are specifically (though diversely) linked with racial anxieties associated with historical social conditions and urban change in America. This is most notably expressed in relation to changes in urban populations perceived urban decay and vulnerability to foreign threats, and the arrival and ascendance of monstrous Others post-apocalypse. The intimate association of each monstrous Other – variously identified with terror, counter-culture and white patriarchy – with the post-apocalyptic cityscape likewise marks it too as monstrous. In I Am Legend, Neville’s nightly attempts to hide his location and barricade himself within his securitised home articulate contemporary, post-9/11 American fears of all Others, both foreign and domestic (including fellow citizens). Confirming the hollowness of the ‘final man’s’ early assertions of control, his family brownstone, transformed into a heavily fortified fortress, is a place of

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retreat and hiding rather than open resistance. Although I Am Legend literalises the consumer-citizen as (also and first) soldier through its military scientist, Neville bleaches the entrance stairs on his evening returns to cover his tracks and conceal his location. Christopher Moreman’s claim that, unlike in other versions, “Neville is not even under direct threat …, his home secure since unknown to the monsters” thus misreads all versions (Moreman 2008). In I Am Legend, Neville’s home is nightly vulnerable, and although to what remains vaguely outlined at this point, it seemingly represents a far greater threat to the home, requiring a comprehensive dusk lockdown, shuttering all windows in an attempt to secure self and home against the outside world and (all) ­Others. However, while a state of enduring, dispersed and proliferated threat to domes­tic life naturalises constructions of the citizen-as-soldier and homeas-fortress, it also admits the profound vulnerability of ‘fortress’ and ‘soldier’. This is evidenced after lockdown, as the camera (re-)enacts Neville’s physical and psychological upstairs retreat from the front door and city beyond, huddling frightened in a bathtub with gun and dog, and advancing and reiterating the ‘final man’s’ earlier emasculation through immobility.8 The terrifying shrieks outside confirm the post-apocalyptic cityscape is controlled by an ongoing, but yet unseen marauding threat, especially by night, whose sustained ‘invisibility’ within the modern metropolis taps into fears that modern terror survives, and even thrives, within; diffuse, everywhere and nowhere. Although Neville is first depicted as an urban game hunter, he is finally the hunted prey – starkly reversing his initial relationship to the post-apocalypse urban landscape and offering an interesting parallel with the beleaguered black ‘final man’ in twtftd. Neville’s home in Omega Man, on the other hand, although permeable, fragile and penetrable, is at once exposed but defiantly announced, besieged but largely unthreatened. The Family, led by newsreader cum cultist, Matthias (Anthony Zerbe), is seemingly an irritant rather than threat, disdained rather than feared. While his apartment is besieged nightly and his fourth-floor balcony veiled by barbed wire, Neville also goads his antagonists by leaving its door open, willingly inviting their medieval attacks to unseat him. Yet even this hyper-masculine holds no dominion over the post-apocalyptic cityscape by night. His compromised dominion is early implied when he worryingly notes the setting sun – “My God, it’s almost dark. They’ll be waking up soon!” – and immediately speeds off in his replacement car. While still unclear who ‘they’ are, Neville’s driving is decidedly affected, hurried rather than carefree. He hits multiple roadblocks and loses control of his vehicle during his mad rush home, 8 The bathtub, earlier a symbol of the everyday, cleansing and familial routine, now invokes insecurity and immobility.

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before he is ambushed on all sides by robed attackers – the first clear sighting of the Family – on his after-dusk return. ‘White’ scholars uniformly associate the Family’s rhetoric with late sixties civil rights unrest and racial fears about black militancy.9 Indeed, Nama argues Omega Man exemplifies expressions of masculinity in 1960s Hollywood science fiction, with urban racial paranoia augmenting perceptions that white masculinity and institutions were under constant threat during the period (Nama 2008, see also Gallagher 2006). Thus, although also about 1970s American urban decay more generally, Neville’s stubborn resistance of attempts by the white male’s Others to expel him from the city exhibits anxieties connected to post-war changes in urban populations and white flight.10 Indeed, Neville’s violence exemplifies Avila’s claim regarding how white Americans sought, “by any means necessary, to uphold the barriers between black space and white space” in post-war cities (2004: 90). More significantly, the Family’s nightly moans and heckles expose the ‘final man’s’ psychological vulnerability, exact real psychic damage – evinced in sudden violent outbursts and excessive drinking – and foreshadows the home’s final physical breach. Their heckles disrupt Neville’s pretence of an unaffected, even heightened, post-apocalyptic consumer and cultural life, and signal home and hero are equally wounded.11 Neville’s apartment is symbolically located above the Family outside, who scurry about on the streets below, communicating his dominance but also shaping his perceptions of them as inhuman vermin (and a potent signifier of race). Yet, again, the ‘final hunter’ becomes the hunted, as Matthias dramatically overturns the established hierarchy of urban verticality and, taking the high ground Neville’s apartment represents, fatally spears Neville on the street below. Foreshadowing the “narcissistic” white male martyrdom characteristic of many post-Vietnam Hollywood films (Nama 2008: 51), this is also a violent reversal mirrored in twtftd. Burton’s early ascension to New York’s heights is also starkly overturned at film’s end, as an ascendant monstrous Other likewise marks the black ‘final 9 See Nama (2008) and Gallagher (2006). 10 This is, however, more coherently articulated in Matheson’s novel, which addresses postWWII atomic fears, race relations and white cultural anxieties in post-war Los ­Angeles. Such claims do downplay the film’s incoherent address of racial, gender and sexual ­politics, both foregrounding and effacing the contemporary politics of race and sex in reinforcing and unsettling (white) male power. For example, Matthias’ now-white black militant lieutenant is castigated for his adherence to the ‘old hatreds’ and rhetoric of black power. 11 While Neville’s alcoholism is undeclared, it is clearly connoted in repeated bouts of drinking, distraction from his pursuit of the first (female) survivor he meets by a shelf of wine and liqueurs, and capture by the Family while in a cellar.

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man’ as prey. Burton’s uncertain assumption of post-apocalyptic control and tenuous steps towards interracial romance with Sarah are thoroughly fractured by the late arrival of an older white male survivor, with threat again marked by whiteness. Ben Thacker (Mel Ferrer) – Burton’s racial Other – embodies the persistence and return of pre-apocalypse society, white patriarchy and oppressive racial hierarchy that Burton fears – and sustains through his restorative endeavours and unfailing adherence to civilisation’s social codes – from his arrival in New York.12 In his single-minded pursuit of Sarah, Ben provokes armed conflict with Burton – again seeking to preserve barriers between white and black space – and in the ensuing hunt, ruthlessly hunts and shoots at the black man from the city’s heights. The black ‘final man’ is thus emphatically returned to his opening ground level status – surveiled, targeted and dominated from above – reinforced by optical point-of-view shots (attributable to Burton) of the skyscrapers above that recall Burton’s arrival. The feared persistence (or return) of white presence in the post-apocalyptic city is now violently confirmed.13

Conclusions: Abandoning the City, the Hero’s Monstrosity and the ‘Final Woman’

Belying their initial depiction, the urban post-apocalypse experiences of the ‘final men’ ultimately undermine masculine (and American) notions of control, despite the opportunities afforded by the science-fictional apocalyptic landscape; neither male fantasies of consumer playgrounds emptied of Others nor the freedom to repair and remake the city. Each ‘final man’ is not only lonely, besieged and guilty, but his dominion is challenged by monstrous racial and ideological Others. Each post-apocalyptic city is corrupted and monstrous, and the province of the feared Other – the Darkseeker, the Family, the white survivor – the ‘final man’ cannot expel. Yet the experiences of the two Nevilles and Burton diverge significantly in the end. In I Am Legend and Omega Man, the ‘final man’ is both immune to and the identified cure for the city and the Other’s monstrosity. In I Am Legend, Neville ultimately sacrifices himself to protect a cure he passes on to two fellow survivors before using a 12 13

Ben’s status as white romantic rival is confirmed when Burton explicitly likens him to the white male mannequin Burton earlier ‘murders’ after he declares his interest in Sarah. During the hunt, Burton runs past the un headquarters, and his refusal to fight is inspired by the quote from Isaiah 2:4, which prophesies apocalypse before restoration and peace: ‘They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more’.

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grenade to martyr himself and kill the attacking Darkseekers. In Omega Man, Neville also passes on a cure derived from his blood, with his self-sacrifice ensuring the rejuvenation of humanity and symbolically reinvigorating the white ­institutional male. ­However, the cityscape so coveted is finally ceded to the monstrous Other, shattering male fantasies of control and ‘ownership’ of the initially ­idyllic cityscape, seemingly emptied of the problem of others. The ‘final man’s’ inability to restore or maintain control confirms its monstrosity and decay, and compels its abandonment, as American anxieties about race unsettlingly persist. In Omega Man, the hope for humankind’s future, a band of child survivors, symbolically survives outside the blighted city, and is conventionally associated with innocence and nature. Humanity’s future, imagined by Neville as an undiscovered and untouched Eden (an imagined pre-lapsarian ‘America’), also symbolically lies outside the city. This characteristic cultural idealisation of non-urban America is echoed in I Am Legend, with a surviving woman and child – a symbolic, ad hoc multiracial ‘holy family’ – likewise arriving from outside the city and traveling to an envisioned rural survivor colony in Bethel. After Neville’s death in I Am Legend, the ‘holy family’ delivers the cure to the colony, depicted as a utopic, fortress small-town America; a supposed ‘post-­racial’ fantasy space nevertheless founded in black sacrificial death, the O ­ ther’s blood, white male authority, and a surviving white child.14 The ­implications of abandoning the monstrous city now overrun by the racial/ ideological Other for a non-urban American future that precludes the ‘final man’ must here be considered. Each Neville’s martyrdom and blood is foundational in the establishment of a new world, yet he lives and dies in a monstrous urban space with his antagonists. In I Am Legend, the ‘final man’s’ home too must be completely destroyed when the Darkseekers enter. In so doing, Neville too – ­mirroring the city’s and the Darkseekers monstrosity – also becomes a monstrous Other, the suicide bomber.15 In Omega Man, whiteness is figured throughout as ambivalent, both deadening and heroic, diseased and curative, with Neville too considered heroic, dangerous and complicit in equal measure. Indeed, the cured boy recognises that the ‘final man’ shares Matthias’ monstrosity, with both equally and intimately attached to hatred, violence 14

15

Neville symbolically destroys the Darkseekers, yet their actual annihilation is merely elided, with the blood of a female Darkseeker (fused with Neville’s) directly providing the cure. See Donnar for a discussion of Neville’s ultimate monstrosity in both the original and reworked theatrical release – unconsciously adhering to Matheson’s original construction of the ‘hero’ (Donnar 2013).

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and the infected post-apocalyptic city. He presciently identifies that neither Neville nor Matthias has a place in the new world, declaring each man’s redundancy: “You know what, you’re hostile, you just don’t belong”. The ‘final men’ in Omega Man and I Am Legend cannot leave the benighted and monstrous city, their stubborn desire to master and own it ensuring their final fates. D ­ espite the redemptive goals of each film, each ‘cures’ monstrosity, but not before succumbing to it. In twtftd, on the other hand, Burton is not immune to the city’s monstrosity – the persistence of diseased old world social codes, of white privilege and black exclusion – but rather haunted by it. Indeed, he even labours to repair and sustain it. Yet in contrast to Omega Man and I Am Legend, the post-­apocalyptic cityscape is not abandoned, and the surviving threesome walks into the city – and a cautiously refigured new world writ large as ‘The Beginning’. Burton partially ‘cures’ the persistent monstrosity by refusing Ben’s desires for violent resolution, throwing down his weapon to conclude the hunt. However, the fledgling, hopeful new post-apocalyptic cityscape is founded by the ‘final woman’.16 In taking the hand first of the timid Burton – in an extreme close-up that displaces but communicates interracial sensuality and love – and then of the defeated Ben, she symbolically refigures, even cures, the black ‘final man’, his white rival and monstrous city alike. Burton, like the two Nevilles, remains linked with his antagonist, but no longer in violence or death. The postapocalyptic cityscape remains resolutely not his, but promisingly may become theirs. In each /final man’ film, patriarchy survives in Ben and the blood of each Neville, but male dominion, control and mastery is unsettled and the sources of racial anxiety persist. Bibliography Primary References

Lawrence, Francis. 2007. I Am Legend. usa: Warner Bros. Pictures. MacDougall, Ranald. 1959. The World, the Flesh and the Devil. usa: Warner Home Video. Matheson, Richard. 1999. I Am Legend. London: Millennium. Original edition, 1954. Ragona, Ubaldo, and Sidney Salkow. 1964. The Last Man on Earth. Italy/usa: Alpha Video. Sagal, Boris. 1971. The Omega Man. usa: Warner Home Video.

16

For an extended (re)consideration of the significance of Sarah’s role in establishing the ‘new’ world, see Donnar (2015).

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Secondary References

Avila, Eric. 2004. “Dark City: White Flight and the Urban Science Fiction Film in Postwar America” in Redmond, Sean (ed.) Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader. London: Wallflower Press: 88–97. Boyle, Kirk. 2009. “Children of Men and I Am Legend: the disaster-capitalism complex hits Hollywood” in Jump Cut 51(Spring). Online at: http://www.ejumpcut.org/ archive/jc51.2009/ChildrenMenLegend/text.html (consulted 17.06.2011). Brayton, Sean. 2011. “The Racial Politics of Disaster and Dystopia in I Am Legend” in The Velvet Light Trap 67: 66–76. Broderick, Mick. 1993. “Surviving Armageddon: Beyond the Imagination of Disaster” in Science Fiction Studies 20(3). Online at: http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/61/ broderick61art.htm (consulted 3.02.2012). Copier, Laura. 2008. Preposterous Revelations: Visions of Apocalypse and Martyrdom in Hollywood Cinema 1980–2000. PhD thesis. University of Amsterdam. Courtney, Susan. 2005. Hollywood and Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race, 1903–1967. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press. Davis, Mike. 1998. Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the imagination of disaster. New York: Metropolitan Books. Donnar, Glen. 2013. “Gendering Apocalypse and Selling (In)Security: Redeeming Father, Performing Consumption and Securing the Home in I Am Legend” in Apocalypse: Imagining the End. Oxford: Interdisciplinary Press: 85–93. Donnar, Glen. 2015. “Race, Sexuality and Miscegenation: The Persistent Ambivalence of Children in Hollywood “Final Man” Films” in Olson, Debbie (ed.) The Child in Post-Apocalyptic Cinema. Lanham: Lexington: 185–205. Gallagher, Mark. 2006. “Omega Men: Late 1960s and Early 1970s Action Heroes” in Action Figures. New York: Palgrave Macmillan: 81–111. King, Claire Sisco. 2012. Washed in blood: male sacrifice, trauma, and the cinema. New Brunswick, n.j.: Rutgers University Press. Larrieux, Stéphanie. 2010. “The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: The Politics of Race, Gender, and Power in Post-Apocalyptic Hollywood Cinema” in Quarterly Review of Film and Video 27(2): 133–143. Moreman, Christopher M. 2008. I Am Legend in Journal of Religion & Film 12(1). ­Online at: http://www.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol12no1/reviews/ILegen.htm (consulted 17.06.2011). Nama, Adilifu. 2008. Black space: imagining race in science fiction film. Austin: University of Texas Press. Nilges, Mathias. 2010. “The Aesthetics of Destruction: Contemporary us Cinema and tv Culture” in Birkenstein, Jeff, Froula, Anna and Randell, Karen (eds.) Reframing 9/11: film, popular culture and the war on terror. New York: Continuum: 23–33.

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Page, Max. 2011. “The Future of New York’s Destruction: Fantasies, Fictions, and Premonitions after 9/11” in Bridge, Gary and Watson, Sophie (eds.) The New Blackwell Companion to the City. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell: 305–316. Patterson, Kathy Davis. 2005. “Echoes of Dracula: Racial Politics and the Failure of Segregated Spaces in Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend” in Journal of Dracula Studies (7): 19–27. Weaver, Roslyn. 2011. Apocalypse in Australian fiction and film: a critical study. Jefferson, n.c.: McFarland.

Imagination Reloaded: Transfiguring Urban Space into Virtual Space in the tv Series Caprica Torsten Caeners Abstract This chapter discusses the negotiations of varying forms of urbanity in the tv series Caprica. The urban space of the city of Caprica is intricately and actively intertwined with the personal and socio-political developments depicted. This is facilitated by means of Caprica City’s relationship with its fully immersive virtual copy, New Cap City. The transgression of boundaries (spatial, mental, moral and sexual) is seductively invited by means of the possibilities offered by Caprican urbanity, both real and virtual. In this manner, the series’ specifically postmodern urbanity raises and negotiates questions of the border between fantasy and reality in contemporary metropolitan spaces. The constant negotiations between these two urbanities invite interrogations into the nature and possibilities of today’s dynamic and ever-changing urban spaces.

Key Terms space of flow – postmodern – virtual reality – identity – transgression

The tv series Caprica (2009–2010) ran for one season on the American cable channel SyFy. The series is a spin-off prequel of the critically acclaimed reimagined Battlestar Galactica (2003–2009), and its events take place approximately six decades earlier. The show's plot revolves around the creation of the Cylons, intelligent robots that will eventually gain free will and turn against their human masters. Within this overall framework, religious conflict, questions of adolescence, loss, as well as the possibilities and dangers of virtual reality and robotics, are major themes. Caprica negotiates these various aspects specifically within an urban context. It is first and foremost a series about a city, its many facets and its imaginary projections. This manifests itself through the metropolitan lives, the urban work spaces and the suburban homes of two men and their families: Daniel Greystone and Joseph Adama. Daniel Greystone is the head of Greystone Industries, the company that revolutionised Caprican society with the invention of the “holoband”, a pervasive technology that allows users to enter a fully realised virtual reality (V-World). Joseph Adama © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004361317_013

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is a lawyer who relocated to Caprica City from the planet Tauron. In the first episode, both Daniel Greystone and Joseph Adama lose their daughters in a terrorist attack. The attack is attributed to the Order of the One, a movement advocating a monotheistic belief system that stands in stark contrast to the polytheism practiced by the majority of Caprican society. A virtual version of Greystone’s daughter, Zoe, which she herself created before her death, still exists in V-World. Greystone manages to bring to life a similar virtual avatar of Adama’s daughter Tamara. The centrality of the city is clearly established from the first time the opening credits start: the first image introduces Caprica City by zooming in from the skyline thus constituting it as the central location of the show. Caprica is Caprica City. The various shots of the city that constitute the opening credits further evince the vastness, complexity and diversity of the metropolis. This is also emphasised by the different living spaces connected to the Adamas and the Greystones. The Greystones live in a luxurious, modern seaside mansion that is clearly part of Caprica City’s wealthy suburban areas. In contrast to the Greystone’s lavish and technologically advanced lifestyle, the Adamas live as part of the Tauron immigrant community in a humble part of the city. Sam Adama, Joseph’s brother, is a member of the Ha’la’tha, a Tauron-based mafia organisation that will draw Joseph and Daniel Greystone in as the series progresses. These two parts of the city are each clearly marked off from the other by their architecture, their inhabitants and their social and family structures. Each set of characters basically has their own ‘city’ within the vastness of Caprica City. Taken together, all this suggests the vastness of the city but also its diversity and complexity. The complexity and diversity of the urban space of Caprica City implies ­dynamic processes of change and transformation at work. Thematically, diegetically and visually, the series negotiates processes of transgressive transformations between different modes of urban reality. It foregrounds said ­processes of transformation by staging them on various levels. In the following I will therefore analyse the tensions and reciprocal transformations of urban spaces in Caprica. I will argue that these processes pick up and comment on current metropolitan developments. To facilitate this, the first step is to have a closer look at the ways Caprica’s urbanity is constructed.

The Nature of Caprica’s Urbanity

This centrality of the city for the series is already conveyed through the proper noun ‘Caprica’ itself which refers to both the entire planet and its capital city. The fictional urban space of Caprica City is itself fictionalised by means of its

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virtual copy New Cap City. In the virtual space of New Cap City, the reality of Caprica City has been imaginatively transfigured into a noir version of itself. New Cap City is a dark and desolate urban space that represents the overtly dystopian counter-image of its physically tangible counterpart. In Caprica, therefore, urban space becomes the place of imagination and transgression that is expressed doubly, namely through the ‘real’ city and its virtual counterpart. Caprica’s urban spaces, both inside and outside V-World, are mutually interdependent and reciprocally determine each other. In this way, the series’ specifically constructed twofold urbanity is able to raise and negotiate questions of the borders between fantasy/virtuality and reality in contemporary metropolitan spaces. Caprica City is always represented as simultaneously real and virtual, concrete and elusive, stable and fluid. This notion of a twofold expression of urbanity in Caprica will be at the heart of my analysis. The transformations and negotiations of the urban in the series manifest themselves in the ever-changing representations of the city’s double existence. Caprica City as a specific urban space is constructed in various ways. The opening credits of Caprica play a significant role in establishing the centrality of the city in general and Caprica City’s specific urbanity in particular. Mark Gottdiener and Leslie Butt note that a “unique aspect of cities resides in [the city’s] architecture, especially the tall structures known as Skyscrapers” (2005: 10). They further stress that “the city ‘skyline’ is an important marker for space” (Gottdiener and Butt 2005: 10). The skyline as a marker for Caprica’s urban space is precisely what the opening credits foreground as the camera moves past rows of skyscrapers zooming in on the Greystone Industries Building. The Greystone Industries Building quickly becomes the tallest structure visible, effectively dwarfing the skyscrapers surrounding it. Because it is visually given such a prominent position, the Greystone Industries Building functions as an emblematic symbol for Caprica City’s urbanity as a whole. The Greystone Industries Building’s unusual architectural style evokes a subtle futuristic difference from contemporary metropolitan spaces that extends to the city as a whole. Following these first establishing shots of Caprica City’s skyline, the next images are of the factories and laboratory of Greystone Industries. Both are work spaces that are closely associated with the city. The factory then transforms into a cemetery the elaborate tombstones and sculptures of which evoke London’s Highgate Cemetery. A further scene is set in what is clearly a cathedral, that is, a building which is found in and thus associated with major cities or metropolitan areas. The penultimate scene takes place on a rooftop in the dark, providing an almost 360-degree view of the city at night. The skyline of V-World’s New Cap City provides the final image of the opening credits.

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By introducing Caprica City’s skyline at the beginning and closing with New Cap City’s skyline, the opening credits offer viewers two distinct visualisations of the city’s urban spaces. This double vision of the city highlights the importance of urbanity in the series while simultaneously juxtaposing the real and the virtual. Caprica thus evokes the urban by means of a semiotically redundant system of signs, establishing the city as the central location of the series. Also, the reiteration of the opening credits with every episode re-establishes the importance and centrality of the urban subject matter anew each time. Caprica’s urbanity evokes images of contemporary metropolitan spaces while adding futuristic elements that are suggestive rather than depictive. It is a combination of contemporary elements with elements of futuristic design. This is underlined by the spaceships and smaller shuttlecraft that can be seen flying around from time to time which is counteracted by the use of regular cars by the characters. Similarly, urban screens are a distinct presence in the city without, however, taking on an oppressive character like, for instance, in the movies Blade Runner or The Fifth Element. The urban screens, like the flying craft, are subtle elements that evoke the future otherness of Caprica City without breaking verisimilitude. Future otherness is thus suggested through the subtle use of connotative signifiers such as the dialectical juxtaposition of architectural designs or the sporadic flying craft in the background as opposed to the use of regular, old-fashioned cars. Caprica City’s urbanity is basically constructed through a mixture of futuristic elements with elements of the past. This binary relation between future and past is connected to and partly based on the binary relation between corporate power (Greystone) and organised crime (Adama). This relation is one of the series’ major themes and one that is particularly intricately connected to the city. There is a strong thematic link to the cyberpunk genre underlying this relation, because cyberpunk deals predominantly with notions of corporate power and organised crime and their interdependencies within a futuristic urban environment: Cyberpunk’s social, political, and economic structures are an extreme version of today’s headlong movement to the privatization of public functions. ... An increasingly small and powerful set of multinational corporations [Greystone Industries] and crime cartels [the Ha’la’tha] become controlling institutions. Class-based representations of the industrial age are masked or replaced by fragmented cultural and ethnic formations at the local and regional scale that have tribal characteristics. Some urban landscapes are recognizable and viable; others are mutations. … An attendant array of advanced computer and communication technologies

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evolves into cyberspace through a merger of the Internet, virtual reality, and a three dimensional database. warren et al. 2004: 396

The combination of the “recognisable” and “viable”, meaning older and traditional urban structures, with “mutations”, that is, imagined or futuristic ­elements of urbanity connected to cyberpunk, or “cyburbia”,1 is central to Caprica’s construction of a believable futuristic urbanity. As Steve Graham notes: Cyberpunk hammers home both the astonishing rate, and a deeply politicized nature, of technological change in computing, the new media, and biotechnology. It also underlines the ways these processes of change come together in reshaping the spatialities and politics of cities and urban life. GRAHAM 2004: 389

In the series, the past is thematically connected and evoked by the Adamas and their Tauron way of living, including the crime organisation of the Ha’la’tha. The Adamas’ daily lives are not primarily defined by technology and the manic need for progress, but rather by traditional values, the adherence to tradition and the practice of rituals. The Tauron’s close relationship with simpler ways of living is also evinced by their continued closeness to the ground they come from. The term “Ha’la’tha”, for instance, means “always faithful to the soil” (cf. “False Labor” [1.13]). When Tomas Vergis visits Greystone at home in “Things We Lock Away” (1.12), he explains: “‘Control your return to the soil’, meaning: plan your death. I am Tauron”. The Tauron idiom of the “return to the soil” emphasises that culture’s link to and therefore its allegorical representation of traditional notions of place. Clearly, the Tauron community and the Adamas combine thematically and visually the “recognisable and viable” of traditional forms of urban dwelling with cyberpunk’s emphasis on organized crime. In contrast, the Greystones signify a highly postmodern and futuristic mode of urban living that is connected to cyberpunk’s focus on the corporation. The Greystones are depicted as constantly embedded in technology. Daniel is driven by the existential need to invent new and better technology and will do whatever is necessary to achieve his goals, including immoral, illegal and downright criminal actions. The futuristic is thus associated with the Greystones and their corporation. Caprica sets up a dichotomous relationship between the Adamas and the Greystones and, consequently, the two modes of urbanity they represent. 1 Dewey (1997: 260–280).

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However, it does not construct its version of the urban based on a mere contrast or combination of the elements represented by the two families. Rather, cyberpunk is “recognisable and viable” and its futuristic “mutations” are functionalized by means of the constant oscillation between the different worlds of the Greystones and the Adamas. These closely intertwined themes and elements form a dichotomous pair that characterises Caprica’s urbanity while simultaneously rupturing it. It is ruptured in the sense that, while it unites both types of urbanity within its urban space, they remain separate. This produces an urbanity where flexibility and dynamic developments are precluded, because the two contrasting modes of urbanity essentially exist in a perpetual stalemate. It is, therefore, in the dynamics of the conflicts that emerge in the threshold between the two poles of the binary that Caprica’s urbanity is criticized, negotiated and ultimately re-defined. The merging of past and future elements of urbanity and, as we will see in detail later, the juxtaposition of imagined or virtual spaces with real ones strongly suggests a culturally critical comparison with current developments of urbanity. The differences between the two cityscapes associated with the two main protagonists, Daniel Greystone and Joseph Adama, characterise and embody the rupture in the city’s urbanity. Conceiving of “the urban space as consisting of irregular sectors and centres rather than concentric zones” (Gottdiener and Budd 2005: 84) oriented by one massive city centre,2 the two places of living are established as two sectors or centres within Caprica City’s vast metropolitan space. This aspect is stylistically represented by a different colour scheme used to represent the two families and their respective urbanities: blue for the Greystones and brown for the Adamas. By the 4th episode, it is clear to the audience which characters are going to appear in the scene, as each scene starts with an establishing short in either blue or brown. The brown colour-scheme used in the scenes taking place in Little Tauron consists primarily of warm and earthy colours which creates a homely and personal atmosphere for this part of Caprica City. It also symbolises a closeness to the earth, the soil, which is fitting for Tauron culture. The blue colour-scheme that defines the Greystone’s home conveys the opposite: coldness, distance, isolation. These two almost entirely different urban spaces represent the urban process of de-centralisation. “It involves not simply the dispersal of actions, but of social organization. With de-centralization comes a different way of connecting people through social as well as technological ways” (Gottdiener and Budd 2005: 90). In his seaside mansion, Greystone communicates mainly through phones, uplinks and video conferences, sometimes even with his wife who is in the same house. In Little 2 See also Harris and Ullman (1945).

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Tauron, social interaction is firmly conducted via primary relationships, that is, face to face interaction and direct, physical and personal relationships.3 When Sam Adama walks through Little Tauron with his nephew, for instance, he nods and greets the people passing him. When they get arrested by the police later on, even the officers know his face and name (cf. “Rebirth” [1.02]). Both homes are part of Caprica City’s urbanity, but expressive of diametrically opposed aspects of it.

Caprica as the Space of Places and the Space of Flows

In essence, Little Tauron figures a pre-modern form of urbanity that is much more closely related to stereotypical small town America than to metropolitan areas. The Adamas, then, are characterised by what Manuel Castells terms the “space of places”, namely “the historically rooted spatial organization of our common experience” (2001: 408–409), which “is the organization of the merchant society or of the industrial society” (2001: 442). Contrary to Little Tauron, Daniel Greystone’s home is primarily characterized by the use of cold surfaces such as metal and polished stone. This space is defined by what might be called cyburbanism. “In cyburbia, conditions of contact that would prevail across continents or thousands of miles become common across thirty miles, the mile, half a mile, and between rooms in a single home” (Dewey 1997: 174). Spatially, Greystone’s mansion is located in a suburban part of Caprica City but his home is marked most strongly by its integrated technologies and networking interfaces. Greystone has a fully equipped laboratory and workshop in the basement, a robotic butler and fully interactive rooms where the windows serve as both communication screen and tv set. It is a “space of flows” where commodities, goods and even identities, become absorbed within the essentially placeless logic of the network. Instead the electronic network links up nodes where strategic control functions are located with communication exchanges found in the hubs of the system. The places that are selected as nodes or hubs depend on a particular network’s tasks and are articulated spatially by both the functions that the network serves and by the directives of their dominant elites. boyer 1993: 20–21

3 Wirth (1938).

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Greystone represents the dominant elite of Caprican society and his world is clearly defined by the space of flows where, the network of communication is the fundamental spatial configuration: places do not disappear but their logic and their meaning becomes absorbed in the network. … The space of flows is not spaceless, although its structural logic is. It is based on an electronic network, but this network links up to specific places, with well-defined social, cultural, physical and functional characteristics. castells 2001: 443

With Daniel Greystone, the space of flows becomes even less concrete, because the “specific places” his networks link up to are not nearly as “well-defined” as Castells’ definition would like them to be. Greystone’s home is the prototypical space of flows: his lab and workshop on the premises are linked to his office in the Greystone Industries Building, but the fully networked house allows him to work in all other rooms as well. His family photos and videos are accessed and displayed in the bedroom, the living room and the lab in equal measure. It can thus be argued that the Greystone family signifies the future city as a space of flows where even the quintessential space of places, the home, dissolves into the data stream. In contrast to the relationships in Little Tauron, those inhabitants of Caprica City that exist in the fluid urbanity of the space of flows interact almost exclusively in a tertiary manner, namely “based on indirect relations and contacts, … non-face to face, disembodied relations” (Gottdiener and Budd 2005: 8). Due to the widespread use of the holoband and V-World, most inhabitants of Caprica City belong to this group. As the inherently different homes of the Greystones and Adamas show, the urbanity figured by Caprica City is able to contain older modes of living together as well as postmodern ones. While this is a positive aspect at first glance, suggesting that modern urbanity can house diverse ways of living, the two modes of living are spatially as well as socially distinctly different and separate. Nevertheless, both become equally closely associated with corruption and crime. This implies that neither alternative constitutes a viable option. Paul Delaney describes the contemporary city as a space of “hybridization and transcultural mixing of many ethnic cultures. Residentially, ethnic groups are highly dispersed, without sharp demarcation lines between neighborhoods” (qtd. in Gottdiener and Budd 2005: 124). In contrast to this, Caprica City harbours two hegemonies of power, each located around a differently demarcated and functionalised urban space. Castells notes that the space of flows and the space of places exist “in different spaces and times: … instant time of computerized

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networks and clock time of everyday life. Thus, they live by each other, but do not relate to each other” (2001: 506). The Greystone mansion and Little Tauron (and their respective residents) signify this very relationship of the space of flows and the space of places. Both versions of the urban function on different premises and organise separate complexes of socio-economic power relations. Such a clear-cut separation “does not allow us to grapple with the hybrid, fused, recombinant and remediated realities of cyber-cities when icts [Information and Communications Technologies] are increasingly becoming embedded, taken for granted, and fused invisibly into the physical and corporeal worlds of the city” (Graham 2004: 390). The almost completely separate character of these urban spaces within Caprica City allows for hegemony to exist, but at the price of flexibility, morality and adaptability to socio-cultural changes. The notion of a flexible middle ground between the two extremes, an urban cityscape that emerges as the best of both worlds, is the promise that Caprica negotiates. Indeed, after defining and demarcating the two spaces by means of the Greystone and Adama homes, the plot begins to move them closer together. The city’s industrial district and its centre, the Greystone Industrial Building, where Adama and Greystone primarily interact at the beginning of the series, represents a mixture of the two urban spaces by means of its conflation of diachronic architectural styles. The separated notions of urbanity come together symbolically in the Greystone Industries Building. This is only fitting as it is here that Adama and Greystone often meet and work together. The architectural features of the place are suggestive of the possibilities inherent in the coming together of Greystone and Adama. Consequently, the ways in which the urban spaces of Caprica are constructed, utilised and eventually transformed are expressions of the series’ thematic concerns. The urban space itself is functionalised as a semiotic space of meaning production that complements the series’ other modes of examining the city. The Greystone Industries Building does not mimic the phallic shape of most skyscraper architecture; rather, its base is pyramidal in nature and only its upper half corresponds to the common phallic design. It is thus clearly a hybrid structure that combines the past and the new. It is surrounded by ponds, lawns and trees into which the building is integrated, a combination reminiscent of structures such as the Google Campus or Apple’s vision for its new headquarters.4 By means of its design philosophy, the Greystone Industries Building thus 4 For instance, see David Knowles, “Apple’s mothership headquarters is almost ready for takeoff”, New York Daily News, October 1, 2013, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ apple-spaceship-headquarters-prepares-lift-off-article-1.1473099 (accessed February 10, 2014); Lloyd Alter, “Our buildings, ourselves: The difference between Apple and Google,

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connects to contemporary postmodern architectural designs – envisioned as well as already realised – which are closely associated with cutting-edge technology, progress and creativity. On closer inspection, the architecture and the material the Greystone Industries Building is constructed from become reminiscent of the signature exterior of the Empire State Building and a modernist, early 20th century design philosophy. The “sharp edges of modernist geometry” (Gottdiener and Budd 2005: 123) become discernible. In contrast to the all-glass façade of contemporary skyscraper design, the Greystone Industries Building emphasises its structural features of concrete. In combination with its pyramidal base suggesting antiquity and tradition, the building expresses futuristic aspects in conjunction with modernist or classical ones. When Daniel Greystone and Joseph Adama have a cigarette break on a balcony of the building in the episode “False Labor” (1.13), the balcony, its railing and the confining walls are clearly constructed from weathered concrete. As a contrast, the background depicts the mirroring and reflecting surfaces of the adjacent skyscrapers. From afar, the sleek, neon-lit Greystone Industries Building demonstrates the ultimate power of the postmodern corporation by means of its classical phallic shape. Up close, its traditional design elements become predominant, which links it thematically with the Tauron community and hence with organised crime. The Greystone Industries Building thus symbolises the possibility of an integration of the two notions of urbanity that exit separately in Caprica City. This possibility is also subliminally hinted at by a third colour-scheme using the colour grey. This marks the city’s industrial district visually as a third space. It is when the two hegemonic spaces – Greystones’ home and the Adamas’ Little Tauron – are invaded by interactions with the respective other that the hegemony of their powers is destabilised. The interaction between Adama and Greystone brings each face to face with his respective other and, diegetically, also represents a confrontation of the themes the two characters channel. In dealing with Greystone, Adama is forced to enter the space of flows. He does this literally by entering V-World. When he follows Greystone into the virtual world for the first time, he cannot move and has to follow Daniel’s instructions to learn how to navigate the space of flows (cf. the pilot episode). Conversely, once Greystone becomes involved with the Ha’la’tha, he is faced with problems unfamiliar to him in the space of flows. When, for instance, Tomas Virgis follows Tauron customs and kills himself in Daniel’s home (cf. “Things We Lock represented by their headquarters”, treehugger, February 28, 2013, http://www.treehugger .com/urban-design/you-are-your-building-difference-between-apple-and-google-represent ed-their-headquarters.html (accessed February 10, 2014).

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Away” [1.12]), Daniel does not know how to deal with a real dead body in his house. He ends up calling the Adamas and has the Ha’la’tha clean the mess up. Their working together represents the invalidation, at least temporarily, of the difference between the space of flows and the space of places. The previously fixed poles of Caprica’s urbanity become unstable and blurred. In turn, both hegemonies become subverted. The reciprocal incursions of the space of flows and the space of places into each other’s boundaries opens up both spaces to the possibilities of the other at the cost of endangering their respective unity and identity. By means of a continuous movement of juxtaposition, a ceaseless foregrounding of inherently different elements, Caprica figures an urbanity that is fundamentally decentred, conceptually as well as spatially and temporally, and which emerges as a space of contention. In this manner, the series depicts and comments on matters and processes of contemporary urban development. If “[w]e conceive of urban culture as a particular set of cultural practices which are highly determined by their urban situatedness” (Gurr and Butler 2013: 142), then Caprica City figures the fragmented and de-centered nature of contemporary urbanity. However, the series does not pursue and negotiate this opening, this rupture, in the reality of Caprica City. Adama and Greystone soon fall out and their friendship turns into mistrust and rivalry. The old hegemonies become separated dichotomous forces once again. The possibilities held by the Greystone-Adama friendship, namely to open the two modes of urbanity towards the creation of a joint and therefore more dynamic, live-able and moral form of urbanity, is followed through in the hyperreal of the virtual reality of V-World. Caprica negotiates questions of identity – urban, individual, religious, ethnic, economic and cultural – predominantly in V-World and here, again, specifically through the construction of a certain mode of urbanity, namely that of New Cap City. It is thus in the simulated reality of V-World that the dichotomous notions of urban space that define and rupture Caprica City are actively negotiated and, finally, balanced out. The fact that V-World is, in essence, a pure space of flows is, as I will continue to show, only seemingly a paradox.

Simulated City – Imagined Identity

In his seminal essay “Simulacra and Simulation”, Jean Baudrillard notes that “simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (2001: 166). The hyperreal has no connection to or origin in reality, but it is based on

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the real. The word ‘hyperreal’ that Baudrillard uses here to define the new level of simulation reached in a world defined by the media and tele-technologies, needs closer scrutiny. Etymologically, ‘hyper’ means ‘above’ or ‘beyond’. The hyperreal is therefore beyond or above the real. It is clearly marked as different from the real, but this does not mean that it bears no relation to the real at all. It is true that Baudrillard establishes four successive phases of the image which culminate in an image that “bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum” (2001: 170). However, a simulation which is generated by “models of a real” cannot but be based on some notion or concept of reality. The virtual representation of Caprica City, New Cap City, might be construed as such a fourth level simulacrum as it is a simulation of a fictional city in a tv series. It is relational only to other simulacra. It is, however, recognisably a simulation of an urban environment and thus possesses a link to the real, if not to reality in a representational and mimetic sense. This raises questions about the relation between the simulation of New Cap City and the reality of Caprica City. The answers to these questions have implication on how the urbanity proposed in the series comments on currents urban developments. In Caprica, the hyperreal is clearly expressed as the cyberspace of V-World where the laws of reality can be broken at will. V-World is designed as a recreational space where one can freely interact with various environments and other users. It is in the public domain and accessible to everyone who possesses the right technology, namely a holoband and wireless access. Andreas Broeckmann notes that the “city is still a prime site of experimenting with the new public domain. … The city can be seen as both an interface to, and a generator of, new interfaces to different publics” (2004: 379). V-World is thus linked intimately with the notion of the contemporary city which provides the ­infrastructure without which access to the online world is impossible. The ­double function of the contemporary, postmodern city as both a place of control and surveillance (cf. cctv) and a place of – primarily criminal and artistic – transgression becomes particularly foregrounded in the information age and gains even more weight through the doubly expressed futuristic extrapolation of current urbanity depicted in Caprica: The instability of the public domain is a condition of its democratic potential. Artistic urban interventions strive to counteract the safely ­surveilled and appeased urban terrain of the transparent city with its technologies of security and privatization … by means of tactics and technologies of conflict and participation, reclaiming the public domain with and for multiple heterogeneous groups. broeckmann 2004: 379

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V-World harbours spaces of subversion, conflict and participation that exist apart and that have been re-figured imaginatively by their anonymous creators. There are spaces which are not part of the public domain, but that “reclaim … the public domain with and for multiple heterogeneous groups” (Broeckmann 2004: 379); these spaces are only accessible with the right password and connection. These subversive virtual spaces create an urban reality in which imagination is allowed to run free. This is negatively connoted, however, as it leads to uncontrolled and excessive behaviours and activities. The most shocking are the illegal nightclubs created by teenagers and hackers where atavistic rituals of sacrifice are performed and a hedonistic take on matters of sexuality is commonplace. The cyberspace of V-World is thus a morally corrupted hyperspace that exits as, with and through the city. This is visually foregrounded as V-World is strongly marked by the urban. Most scenes in V-World take place in the virtual city of New Cap City. It is an exact, virtual replica of the urban architecture of Caprica City, but re-imagined along noir, cyber- and steampunk lines. Jacques Derrida’s notion of the trace helps to describe the relation between New Cap City and Caprica City. Derrida links the concept of the simulacrum with his notion of the trace. He notes that the trace is not a presence but is rather the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond itself. The trace has, properly speaking, no place, for effacement belongs to the very structure of the trace … It is no longer what every reference refers to in the last instance; it becomes a function in a generalized referential structure. It is a trace, and a trace of the effacement of a trace. DERRIDA 1984: 24

The Derridian notion of the trace can be usefully employed to outline the function of the simulated reality in the negotiation of a futuristic urban identity in Caprica. The trace can be seen as the presence of an absence. Like in Baudrillard, it does not re-present anything, but it is a presence and as such it takes the place of something else which is absent. “[I]t intervenes or insinuates itself inthe-place-of” (Derrida 1976: 44). By inserting itself “in-the-place-of” an absence, the simulacrum becomes presence and part of reality. Since it is only ever “inthe-place-of”, however, it is never fully itself but always partly other. The simulacrum is itself displaced and “beyond itself” and figures a hyperspace that undoes its referentiality by means of a ceaseless process of effacement. Gilles Deleuze connects the simulacrum with identity and resemblance. He notes of “identity and … resemblance that they are ‘simulated’: they are products of systems that relate different to different by means of difference (which is why

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such systems are themselves simulacra)” (2004: 126). Caprica City and New Cap City resemble each other closely. There is a resemblance that connects these two modes of reality via a shared architectural urban identity. ­Resemblance does not equal complete sameness, however. Similarly to the two hegemonies that define the urbanity of Caprica City, the differences that exist within the resemblance between the virtual and the real rupture the quasi-identity of ­Caprica City and New Cap City. This links the two cities “by means of difference”. In this sense, resemblance facilitates the transfiguration from one reality to the other. An urban identity emerges from within a simulacrum which constructs an identity by “relat[ing] different to different by means of difference” ­(Deleuze 2004: 126), that is, figuring a relationship of difference between the real of C ­ aprica City and the hyperreal of New Cap City. The processes of transfiguration from the real into the hyperreal (and vice versa) that are involved in this are fluid and dynamic processes of imagination. Urban identities previously regarded as fixed and clearly defined against each other – the spaces of flows and places – become unsettled and overlapping as they are imaginatively refigured into the virtual world. Where a sustained and functioning collaboration of the two hegemonic notions of urbanity was negated in Caprica City, imagination is able to express, refashion and eventually successfully and permanently conflate different modes of urban identity within the virtual reality of New Cap City. In this virtual world, imagination makes and marks the difference.

Playing a New Urbanity

New Cap City is a product of creative imagination. Like a true simulacrum, it does not have an origin and it does not have a clearly defined goal. It is different from the real Caprica City but simultaneously it is a perfect copy of its topography. Most importantly, it is defined as a game that people are invited to play. It is a game that does not limit the player by any kind of rules. There are no rules at all and no stated objective. In the fifth episode, Tamara Adama meets Tad who goes by the alias of Heracles in New Cap City. He explains: “It’s almost like figuring out the object of the game is the object of the game” (“There is another Sky” [1.05]). All the game provides is the setting, namely the urban space of a virtual copy of Caprica City. Since the goal of the game is unknown, players have to imagine their individual rules. Players have to imagine their own goal. This is a seductive proposal. Thomas Docherty notes in the context of seduction that there is a “tension between the local and the international, between domestic ‘culture’ and the flight from that culture, there is a replacement of the principle of identity with a principle of difference and alterity” (1996: 22).

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In the present context, Docherty’s ‘local’ and ‘international’ can be replaced with ‘real’ and ‘virtual’. Looking at the quote from this angle, it becomes clear that New Cap City – being, for the player, a virtual space lacking identity – ­seduces players into replacing the principle of difference and alterity with that of an identity filling an absence. This imaginative act determines a position and consequently an identity. The mutual transgressions of the space of flows and the space of places that prove disruptive and even destructive to the two associated hegemonies in Caprica City are dissolved in the complete freedom of imagination that defines the reality of New Cap City. This freedom represents an unlimited transgression in its nullification of all limits and borders. Since everything is possible and there are no boundaries, all actions, all transgressions lose their meaning. Transgression, Docherty notes, becomes truly effective “only when it works in alignment with the seductive techniques of immaterialisation and deterritorialisation” (1996: 29). This is exactly what New Cap City facilitates. By providing a virtual no-space, New Cap City not only allows, but actively calls for the transgression of established structures from the segregated hegemonic urbanities that characterize Caprica City. New Cap City figures the ultimate space of flows, one in which the inhabitants are players with the ability of marking out their own territory and identity within an undefined set of rules. In doing so, the dichotomous tensions that disrupt Caprica City are effectively avoided in New Cap City. The transgressions that are called for in New Cap City manifest themselves in a highly negative and destructive manner, however. New Cap City is a city that it is defined by the abandonment of morality and excesses of abuse and violence even more disturbing than in regular V-World. It is a deeply dystopian place. It represents what an urban space based solely on the space of flows, of imagination run free, can become. With New Cap City, the series suggests that a complete and boundless space of flows insinuates itself “in-the-place-of” the city, which provides this space of flows with the needed interface infrastructure, is one possibility of current urban developments. In such an urban space, normal life becomes all but impossible. New Cap City needs to be infused with some reality, some real fixture, that can centre or ground human behaviour. This infusion takes the form of death. There is only one rule in the game, namely that when one person dies in the game, that person is banned forever from New Cap City. Virtual death is thus not without consequence (as it is in most mmorpgs today) ,5 but means 5 mmorpg is the acronym for Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. This is indeed what the New Cap City game is, only that the immersion into the virtual reality is much more complete than in today’s mmorpgs. The New Cap City game thus functions as yet another signifier for the futurity of the series’ setting.

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eternal banishment from the reality of New Cap City. In a sense, the ‘real’ Caprica City becomes the afterlife, the place where one goes after death.6 In this context, the two characters of Zoe Greystone and Tamara Adama become vital. Zoe and Tamara have both died in Caprica City, but they continue to exist as virtual avatars of their deceased original selves in V-World. They are pure simulacra that have insinuated themselves “in-the-place-of” the dead as their supplement. Reality here insinuates itself into the simulation of New Cap City as simulated avatars that have real life. At the same time, as perfect simulacra of the deceased, they challenge the concept of death in the real world of Caprica City. In the real world, death becomes non-final, because it is possible to continue one’s existence in V-World after death. Caprica City with its network infrastructure becomes the conduit to another reality and to personal immortality. By means of this doorway, the two realities merge and effectively become one urban reality that expresses itself in a twofold manner. Simulation thus becomes reality and reality becomes simulation. By introducing the consequence of death into New Cap City, this virtual space becomes a simulation that is its own self-sufficient reality. It is therefore as real as its counterpart. Paradoxically, the dead walk the streets of New Cap City as immortals. They cannot die in New Cap City and they also exhibit god-like powers. Without the need of an interface, they can imaginatively refashion New Cap City as they please. Because imagination affects reality here and, in fact, is reality, New Cap City is the place that provides the basis for the negotiation of a new alternative, a new identity based on openness and play that can bring together the space of flows and the space of places in a manner that both are expressed simultaneously. The characters of Zoe Greystone and Tamara Adama serve as exemplary cyphers for this notion of urbanity. At first, the series follows Tamara as she enters New Cap City. It is clear that she does not know who she is or how to react and interact in this new environment (cf. “There is another Sky” [1.05]). In this respect, her behaviour mirrors that of her father, marking her as a signifier for the space of places. It is Heracles who explains the world of New Cap City to her. They soon discover that Tamara cannot be killed and use this to their advantage. It is during her adventure with Heracles that Tamara learns she can control the virtual environment of New Cap City. By simply imagining what she wants to happen, this becomes reality. Tamara thus learns to control the ambiguous, heterogeneous urban space of flows of New Cap City. In her first

6 One of the main plotlines in the series concerns the process of “apotheosis 8 in which persons who die in the “real” world are resurrected as virtual avatars with their memories and feelings intact. This construes V-World as heaven.

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imaginary act, she makes security guards disappear in the vault of a bank. Tamara gains control of the space of flows in a setting that is (a) markedly urban and (b) closely associated with the space of flows. The great financial buildings of modern cities are representatives of the space of flows in that they serve transactions which have become almost exclusively virtual. It is also significant that Tamara’s first notion of control of New Cap City’s urbanity takes the form of violence. The first step in getting to know, understanding, incorporating and finally controlling the other is to set it in violent opposition. In contrast to Tamara, Zoe enters New Cap City with more confidence and more knowledge. This is not surprising as she is fully aware of how she was created and what she is. The heterogeneous, fluid urbanity she enters is thus not a frightening other for her. She is the space of flows and immediately able to control her environment, for instance when she is attacked by a gang of thugs in the episode “Unvanquished” (1.10). She stops this attack by freezing the avatars in space which allows her to dispatch them with ease. Zoe eventually finds Tamara as the leader of brutal, gladiatorial games staged in New Cap City’s version of Caprica City’s Pyramid Stadium. Tamara represents the space of places that exists in the unfixed and imaginary space of New Cap City. As such, she enacts a violence which is temporarily directed backwards, hence the gladiatorial showcasing of violence. Tamara presides over a spectacle that stages and enacts the finality of death. Under her Tauron gaze, players “return to the soil” of the arena time and again. Essentially, she has created a space of places in New Cap City’s urban space of flows. The fight that ensues between Tamara Adama and Zoe Greystone, who represents the space of flows, is thus to be read as a fight between the two forms of urbanity previously already associated with the Adamas and Greystones in the ‘real’ world of the series. It is, however, clearly not a fight for dominance as much as a fight for identity. Tamara brings Zoe to the ground numerous times which triggers memories of the ‘real’ Zoe, her childhood and the creation of the Zoe avatar. The overarching questions that emerge from these memories are those of “who am I” and of “what is my purpose”. These are fundamental questions of identity and, metaphorically, also questions concerning urban identity. In the end, Zoe manages to immobilize Tamara, which results in the following exchange: Tamara: “Do you want to kill me?” Zoe: “Haven’t you been paying attention: Neither one of us can die” … Tamara: “We’re nothing alike!” Zoe: “We are! You have great abilities here! [Tamara makes clear that she is not the same girl Zoe remembers] That girl is gone. So what does this

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girl like and what does this girl hate? … New Cap City is disgusting. It’s a place for people to come and act out their own worst impulses. To kill, to rape, destroy. It’s wrong!” Dirteaters 1.16

Without saying another word, Tamara understands. The two stand up, hold hands and leave the arena together. This symbolises the unity of the space of places and the space of flows. We meet the two girls again sitting on top of a skyscraper overlooking New Cap City. They are wondering what to do next and Zoe announces: “We can build a place where nobody will be able to touch us” (“Dirteaters” [1.16]). The camera then moves away from them and we see how the urban landscape of New Cap City becomes transfigured, via their imagination, into a forest landscape and the skyscraper Zoe and Tamara were standing on top of has become a type of medieval castle. The virtual city, the ultimate representation of the space of flows, a place of violence, oppression, immortality and un-reality, is thus transformed into a locus of nature, innocence and purity. Through their imagination, Zoe and Tamara are able to project a space of new possibilities. Nature literally grounds the space and the only constructed building is made of brownish stone that merges seamlessly with the rest of the landscape. It is a space of places, but it is one that is constructed from within the space of flows by the spectral action of imagination. Before this transformation starts, Tamara suggests leaving New Cap City for V-World but Zoe emphatically states that it is “safer for [them] in New Cap City” (“Dirteaters” [1.16]). The new space is thus constructed from within New Cap City and remains located within it. This endows this new space with a reality in which death has meaning. The imaginary transfiguration of the fluid urbanity of New Cap City, itself a hyperrealisation of the space of flows aspects of Caprica City, into a space of places within this space of flows, creates a place of flows; it represents a notion of urbanity that takes into account the increasing importance of tele-technologies, but grounds those in an imagined place of places. Caprica is set in a futuristic urban environment that is characterised by a conflicting relationship between the space of places and the space of flows. Each of these spaces is closely associated with a family of characters the conflicting interaction of which figures the reciprocal incursions of the two types of urban spaces and their essential incompatibilities. This ruptured, inherently unstable urbanity that defines Caprica City cannot settle into a stable identity. The negotiation and eventual formation of a new mode of urbanity takes place in the virtual realm of New Cap City, which initially figures a pure space of flows defined by the absence of boundaries, moral, legal, sexual and otherwise. It is in the joining together of the allegorical figures for the space of places

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(Tamara Adama) and the space of flows (Zoe Greystone) that a new mode of urbanity is envisioned and constructed. It is a place of flows, a space of flows that figures a space of places grounded by a moral code and a system of punishment for its transgression (death). The urban space of Caprica City has been transformed, first, into the virtual space of New Cap City which has, in turn, facilitated the transformation and creation via imagination of a place of flows where death serves to make this virtual place real and alive. Bibliography Primary References

Caprica. 2009. Prod. Roland D. Moore et al. David Eick Productions. dvd.

Secondary References

Alter, Lloyd. “Our buildings, ourselves: The difference between Apple and Google, represented by their headquarters”. treehugger, February 28, 2013. http://www .treehugger.com/urban-design/you-are-your-building-difference-between-apple -and-google-represented-their-headquarters.html Baudrillard, Jean. 2001. “Simulacra and Simulation” in Poster, Mark (ed.) Jean Baudrillard Selected Writings. Cambridge [et al.]: Polity Press: 166–184. Blade Runner. 1982. Dir. Ridley Scott. Warner Bros. Studios. dvd. Boyer, Christine. 1993. “Violent Effacements in City Spaces” in Assemblage 20: 20–21. Broeckmann, Andreas. 2004. “Public Spheres and Network Interfaces” in Graham, Steve (ed.) The Cybercities Reader. New York: Routledge: 378–382. Castells, Manuel. 2001. The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. 2nd ed. Oxford [et al.] Blackwell. Delaney, Paul. 1994. Vancouver: Representing the Postmodern City. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 2004. Difference and Repetition. London: Continuum. Derrida, Jacques. The Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Brass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (trans.). Baltimore: John Hopkins up. Dewey, Fred. 1997. “Cyburbanism as a Way of Life” in Ellin, Nan Architecture of Fear. New York: Princeton Architectural Press: 260–280. Docherty, Thomas. 1996. After Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh up. The Fifth Element. 1997. Dir. Luc Besson. Gaumont Buena Vista International. dvd. Gottdiener, Mark and Leslie Budd. 2005. Key Concepts in Urban Studies. London [et al.]: Sage.

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Graham, Steve. 2004. “Introduction to Section ix”. in Graham, Steve (ed.) The Cybercities Reader. New York, Routledge: 386–393. Gurr, Jens Martin and Martin Butler. “On the ‘Cultural Dimension of Sustainability’ in Urban Systems: Urban Cultures as Ecological ‘Force-Fields’ in Processes of Sustainable Development” in Caeners, Stefanie et al. (eds.) Healthy and Liveable Cities: Selected Papers from the Essen Conference / Gesunde und lebenswerte Städte: Ausgewählte Beiträge der Essener Tagung. Essen: avedition: 138–151. Harris, Chauncy D. and Edward L. Ullman. 1945. ‘The Nature of Cities’ in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 242: 7–17. Huntington, Samuel P. 2005. Who are We Challenges to America’s Identity. New York [et al.]: Simon & Schuster. Knowles, David. 2013. “Apple’s mothership headquarters is almost ready for takeoff”. New York Daily News (1 October, 2013). Warren, Rob, Stacey Warren, Samuel Nunn, and Colin Warren. 2004. “The Future of the Future in Planning Theory: Appropriating Cyberpunk Visions of the City” in Graham, Steve (ed.). The Cybercities Reader. New York: Routledge: 395–400. Wirth, Louis. 1938. “Urbanism as a Way of Life” in American Journal of Sociology 44 (1): 1–24.

The Dame Wore Skyscrapers: The Science-fictional City as a Detective Story Shawn Edrei Abstract The city of the future is frequently presented as a space inscribed with ambiguities. Protagonists traversing these locations will function as formal or informal detectives, piecing together the mystery of their respective plots. But the city also invites a second detective: the reader, whose engagement with the text is akin to the cognitive p ­ rocess of extrapolation. Where diegetic investigations are typically character-centric, the ­extradiegetic mystery pertains to the nature of the fictional world itself – and only the reader is able to solve it. This chapter will analyse three texts featuring futuristic urban spaces, and the way they disperse textual and visual clues designed to lead the readerdetective towards ontological ‘truth’.

Key Terms detective fiction – ontology – investigation – cityscape – video games – graphic novel

In discussing the 2008 television series Fringe, Amy H. Sturgis notes that the protagonist’s role as an fbi investigator is no coincidence: Both the modern detective story and modern science fiction sprang from a common idea born of the Enlightenment: that the Universe could be understood through reason, and that using the proper investigative method would uncover the answer – whether the question was how to reach outer space or who killed the victim. sturgis 2011: 27

In fact, this juxtaposition is a common phenomenon in science fiction, as many seminal authors such as Isaac Asimov, Douglas Adams and Alfred Bester have positioned detectives as their primary focalisers, and having them solve mysteries within the fictional world. Other characters such as Constable Odo (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), Douglas Quaid (Total Recall), April Ryan (The Longest © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004361317_014

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Journey) and Chell (Portal) reinforce this archetype across multiple media, as they all play the role of the investigator whether they are formally empowered to do so (as officers of the law) or not. Within the genre, these investigators are most frequently situated in urban or urban-like environments, just as the 20thcentury metropolis served as a breeding ground for the modern-day detective. However, while Sturgis accounts for the proliferation of this character type within the genre, claiming that “applying logic and creativity to mysteries in the belief that the unknown can be known is a process any detective or scientist, fictional or real, would appreciate and recognize” (2011: 29), an additional layer exists within the structure of these stories – one which works directly upon the reader on the extradiegetic level. The cities which serve as the primary setting for the narratives in question are also designed to serve as platforms for a larger ontological inquest; and by gathering clues and analysing evidence, the reader plays out the role of a secondary detective, gradually deciphering the enigma that lies at the heart of the genre – namely, what is the nature of these future cities? This chapter will examine three science fiction texts – Elana Gomel’s novel A Tale of Three Cities, the Grant Morrison/Frank Quitely graphic novel jla: Earth 2 and Ion Storm’s 2001 video game Anachronox – and will demonstrate how the protagonists of these narratives are shadowed by ‘reader-detectives’, tasked with piecing together fragmented bits of background information to solve the mystery of how these future cities came to be. Comprehending the way in which this process is enacted across a wide spectrum of science fiction narratives requires both an examination of the genre’s inner workings and an understanding of how cities are constructed in literature. Adam Roberts points out that all science fiction stories contain inherently innovative concepts which challenge the reader on a cognitive level (for instance: time travel, faster-than-light transportation, alien species), but the innovation itself is not what gives these concepts their power: “It is not so much the ingenuity of the novum, or the strangeness of it, that is important; it is the symbolic purchase its point of difference provides on the world we live in” (2000: 19). In other words, readers of science fiction are constantly confronted with the question of how the world depicted in the text has been extrapolated from what we perceive as reality – and this holds true whether the specific story exposits the nature of that world or not. Tsevtan Todorov’s “The Typology of Detective Fiction” indicates that the modern detective story operates along a similar set of rules: We might further characterize these two stories by saying that the first – the story of the crime – tells “what really happened”, whereas the second – the story of the investigation – explains “how the reader (or the

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narrator) has come to know about it”. … The first, that of the crime, is in fact the story of an absence: its most accurate characteristic is that it cannot be immediately present in the book. TODOROV 2000: 123

Just as with science fiction, the detective story requires a gap in the reader’s knowledge of the world, with the investigation tailored to close that gap by the story’s conclusion. However, where the latter focuses the reader’s attention on the same mystery as the protagonist and/or narrator, science fiction takes a different approach. In these texts, the protagonist is typically a person who lives within the setting, and therefore takes its alienated nature for granted – rather, the character’s investigation relates specifically to a smaller-scale incident such as a murder or a theft. The detective then proceeds to deduce the nature of the crime and the identity of the perpetrators, all the while gradually exposing the reader to more and more aspects of the fictional world (the ontological revelations are often – but not always – impressed upon the focaliser as well). By the story’s conclusion, the ‘truth’ has been revealed on both the diegetic and the extradiegetic levels: the detective has solved the criminal mystery, and the reader-detective has solved the ontological mystery, bridging the gap between the futuristic cityscape and consensus reality. This process affirms Farah Mendlesohn’s assertion that “the thought experiment, the ‘what if?’ (which Darko Suvin calls the novum), is crucial to all sf [science fiction], and has led to the most popular alternative interpretation of ‘sf’: speculative fiction. It is here that sf most departs from contemporary literature, because in sf ‘the idea’ is the hero” (2003: 4). One way in which this novum can manifest – and the primary method through which the reader-detective investigates the ontological mystery – is in the representation of the science-fictional city as a microcosm of the world in which it exists. Hana Wirth-Nesher’s City Codes identifies “four aspects of the cityscape in the representation of the city in narrative: the ‘natural’, the built, the human, and the verbal” (1996: 11). On the significance of the cityscape itself to the larger story, Wirth-Nesher elaborates: “Each of these environments can be perceived and represented by all of the senses as the a­ ction of the novel unfolds. The reader is then put in the position of apprehending the cityscape in a visual, audial, or tactile manner, but always mediated by the written word” (1996: 17). Thus, all aspects of the science-fictional city contribute to the reader-detective’s perception of the fictional world, and assist in deducing the specific ontological and conceptual nova which distinguish said world from our own. Elana Gomel’s novel A Tale of Three Cities is an apt demonstration of this duality, and the ways in which the narrative is structured to provide parallel

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courses of investigation for the protagonist and the reader. The story begins with an introduction to Mrs. Mara Raven, a clairvoyant who occasionally ­assists the police in solving murders. Though not an official agent of the law, Mara’s social/financial status allows her the same latitude offered to her literary predecessors Hercule Poirot, Sherlock Holmes and Jane Marple, and her observational skills are immediately on display when she catches sight of the victim: “Mara instantly knew she was no prostitute. Her round face glittered with expensive make-up, bespeaking complacent wealth: crushed sapphire on her eye lids and liquid crimson on her lips, smeared by the rain” (2013: 8). But while Mara prepares herself for the impending investigation, the reader is slowly exposed to various hints that the city Mara inhabits is different: the Chief Constable is beholden to a mysterious entity known as the Fur Guardian, Mara avoids offending religious practitioners by not wearing animal fibres, and mention is made of worshipping “Ancestors”. The reader’s cognitive estrangement is then crystallised during Mara’s visit to the Animal House, an aspect of Wirth-Nesher’s built environment: On top of the six-storey gray pile, above the architrave, loomed four huge sculptures representing the four Slaughtered Ones: the Lion, the Tiger, the Seal, and the Bear. …Ronald had been so proud of his name. And she had been happy enough to exchange her own plebeian Ferret for his aristocratic Raven! gomel 2013: 8–13

At once, the City’s architecture and the memories it evokes in the focaliser alert the reader to several facts which alienate the Plain City. At this early point in the novel, several other characters have been introduced or referenced – Mr.  Seal, Detective Hart, Chief Constable Jay-Mole – but this description of the Animal House provides a critical clue to solving the ontological mystery: every character’s surname is based on an animal, because this is a world in which animals are worshipped as deities. Mara’s own last name is an indicator of her social class and status, just as Constable Jay-Mole is looked down upon for h ­ aving two last names with conflicting animal types (a bird and an underground burrower). In addition, Mara’s encounter with the Fur Guardian reveals the existence of a transhuman population, hybridised with animal features: The Temple surgeons were skilled: the scars, if any, were lost in the rugose hanging jowls that framed the shallow muzzle into which his nose and mouth had been fused. His face was free of the brindled mangy fur that covered the rest of his body. It looked dirty and unkempt, with balding

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patches or perhaps just areas where the transplant had failed. His arthritic fingers ended in dark claws. gomel 2013: 13

Of course, Mara does not react to this information, as her diegetic perspective accepts the human environment of the Plain City as part of her everyday life. Rather, it is the reader-detective who must make use of the evidence to begin the process of deciphering the nature of this altered world. In keeping with the generic framework of the contemporary detective s­ tory, the murder of rich socialite Elvira Sparrow is only the first link in a chain of events which turn Mara’s inquest inward, towards the mystery of her own husband’s disappearance. With every step of her journey, the reader’s perception of the City is constantly expanded, to the point of incorporating two additional cities – one located in the South Continent (long thought to be largely devoid of human life), and a third within the “dream sea”, the source of Mara’s visions and intuitions. The connection between these three cities is only fully revealed in the final chapters after Mara has solved the entire ­sequence of mysteries ­arrayed before her – the murders, Ronald’s disappearance, and her own anomalous abilities: “There was nowhere to run, walk, or swim. Nowhere to hide. And yet she felt strangely at peace. Here she was, Mara Raven. Everything else had been taken away from her: her lover, her friends, her mother, her City. Only she remained, and it would have to suffice” (2013: 313). This constitutes a denouement both for the protagonist and for the reader-­detective ­shadowing her ­every move; Mara’s revelations occur in tandem with the reader’s o­ ntological ­discoveries. The conclusion of this process closes the gap b­ etween the projected fictional world and consensus reality, as the origins of the Plain City, its warped reality and its bizarre inhabitants are laid bare in such a way that they represent the culmination of all evidence presented to the reader. By the n ­ ovel’s conclusion, all mysteries – diegetic and extradiegetic – have been solved. As a text-based narrative, A Tale of Three Cities relies upon literary ­techniques to help the reader-detective along the way towards ontological denouement; the initial stages of Mara’s investigation are juxtaposed with increasingly ­unnatural – and violent – phenomena wreaking havoc upon the City: The cloud on top of Lonelyhearts split open like an overripe fruit, releasing a worm that had coiled inside. A twisting column the color of slate, limned in running lines of fire. …The ungainly construction shuddered and started collapsing, slowly at first and with gentle grace, and then gaining momentum, shedding dark tatters of impromptu dwellings and dots of bodies, folding in upon itself, occasional licks of golden flame

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blossoming in the dark air and doused by the heavy rain that started falling again upon the City. GOMEL 2013: 68

Every waypoint in the course of Mara’s journey is marked by further damage to the Plain City (and, later, to the other two Cities she encounters); and while this raises the diegetic stakes for the main character, it also further emphasises the reader-detective’s investigation: the City becomes both the victim and the suspect of the extradiegetic whodunit, and every blow to the cityscape is a sign of progress on the reader’s part. jla: Earth 2 similarly uses a fictional city to initiate an ontological investigation. The story, set in the colourful superhero realm of dc Comics, begins with the discovery of a parallel universe in which the familiar roles of the Justice League of America are inverted in the Crime Syndicate of Amerika: the heroic paragon Superman is mirrored in the tyrannical bully Ultraman; the Amazon warrior Wonder Woman’s counterpart is the seductive dominatrix ­Superwoman, and the self-controlling urban vigilante Batman meets his match in the methodical killer Owlman: “Thirty cops support Wayne in the gcpd. Satan knows where he finds them but they’re all here on disk, and as soon as we’ve dealt with Ultraman’s Crime Syndicate emergency, I’m going to find them too” (2000: 29) When the Justice League decides to overthrow the Crime Syndicate, they are transported to an alternate version of Superman’s home city, Metropolis. For the reader, this is the moment of introduction to a twisted reflection of the familiar built environment: a squalid urban nexus of crime and brutality, mirroring Ultraman in the same way that the p ­ seudo-utopian Metropolis reflects the idealism of its protector. The human environment is similarly defamiliarised, with multiple panels depicting a populace alternately cowed by and hateful towards superhumans – a sharp contrast to the nearuniversal adoration directed at the League and its members. In this particular science fiction narrative, the League’s attempts to repair the Syndicate’s damage to their world is shadowed by the reader-detective’s exploration of the alternate Earth, navigating the various environments of the mirror-cities in the manner described by Karin Kukkonen: As readers follow reader surrogates on their paths through the storyworlds of the multiverse and experience events with or rather through them, they understand together with these characters that they have moved from one storyworld of the multiverse to another. But readers do not merely follow their surrogate characters experientially on their physical paths through the multiverse; they are also privy to the explanatory

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models of the multiverse that these characters either develop on their own or have conveyed to them by others. KUKKONEN 2013: 221

It is important to note that the League find the mirror universe just as estranged as the reader – unlike Mara, who initially does not question the Plain City because it is already familiar to her, the device here is one of exposition: as the superheroes traverse the mirror-cities, they (and the reader) discover the ­history behind these spaces, revelations which slowly assemble a clear picture of the other Earth (2000: 54–81): “President Benedict Arnold declared war on the British Colonies when they announced their independence from u.s. Amerika back in 1776. They’ve been enemies ever since.” (2000: 54) Like ­Metropolis, visual representations of Washington d.c. and London serve to further demonstrate the reversals of history, and to further the reader-detective’s cognitive processes. Batman’s attempt to empower the beleaguered police force of Gotham receives the following response from Commissioner Wayne: “I’m going to build a new Gotham. I’m putting a wall around this city; making it self-sufficient and strong and clean. Anyone who doesn’t like it gets a bullet in the face”. And, in fact, it is Batman – the wealthy socialite-cumdetective, much like Mara Raven and her literary predecessors – who provides the final clue which completes the ontological puzzle: “We have to abandon this world. Failure is our only option if we want to win. … Only because our methods can’t succeed on this world. It’s a law of nature; everything we do is ordained to fail. Even good deeds go bad here, Diana” (2000: 58). The reversals and inversions which have characterised the familiar cities become a law of narrative, of story and of physics – in the world of superheroes, good always triumphs over evil, but the Syndicate rule supreme because their universe allows them to do so. When transplanted into each other’s home realities, both groups must act in contradiction to their familiar roles in order to return home: “That was the logic flaw in your plan, Brainiac; you didn’t count on us deliberately doing something bad. Like walking away in the midst of a crisis”. (2000: 81) Of course, as superhero narratives are cyclical rather than linear, the ontological revelation lacks the irreversible finality demonstrated in A Tale of Three Cities; rather, both the League and the Syndicate are allowed to return to their own realms, and the story concludes with dual images of Washington d.c. – one being repaired by superheroes, the other being reconquered by supervillains. In contrast to A Tale of Three Cities and its text-based peers, jla: Earth 2 invests much of its extradiegetic clues in the visual imagery which constitutes a fundamental aspect of graphic literature. As Roland Barthes states in ­Image-Music-Text, any image is thought to contain three components – “a

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linguistic message, a coded iconic message, and a non-coded iconic ­message” (1978: 36). In graphic literature, the linguistic message is self-evident, presented via speech and thought bubbles and narrative captions; the coded and noncoded images serve as the visual component of the text. jla: Earth 2 makes full use of these coded and non-coded layers in order to guide the reader-­ detective’s investigation into the nature of the alternative Earth: the novel’s cover depicts Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman standing upright with their Crime Syndicate counterparts as inverted shadows beneath them, and among the Syndicate’s trophies are the defaced head of the Statue of Liberty and ­gender-inverted statues of David and Venus de Milo. Most significantly, the alternate cities themselves provide hints which are meant not for the League members but for the reader: the streets of Metropolis are strewn with garbage, the name of the Daily Planet (Clark Kent’s place of employment) is displayed in red rather than blue and gold, and London’s Parliament building is in ruins, with a statue of Adolf Hitler positioned in front of it. As part of a larger serial franchise, many of the clues embedded in the imagery are specifically coded towards readers with previous knowledge of the storyworld and its inhabitants – those who unfamiliar with Metropolis will not fully grasp the extent to which its twin’s dilapidated state foregrounds the darker nature of the other Earth. Anachronox, a role-playing video game, approaches the process of dual investigations in a slightly different manner. The plot strongly resembles intersections of science fiction and detective stories in other media: Sylvester “Sly” Boots is a private detective living on Anachronox, an enormous planet-sized city somewhere in deep space. If Mara Raven echoes the classic British detective (a wealthy socialite with no formal training), and Batman represents the urban vigilante archetype, Boots is a very traditional take on the post-WW2 American noir detective both visually and in terms of his characterisation: a trench coat-clad loner with ambiguous ties to a hostile criminal organisation, whose talents are concealed by his cynicism and his borderline-poor financial state. As the game begins, Boots (the player’s avatar in the gameworld) is approached by museum curator Grumpos Matavastros to aid in the recovery of alien artefacts known as MysTech. Boots’ partnership with Grumpos is initially one of convenience; as Grumpos comments: “Well, I don’t need you in particular, but you’ve got a flair for fighting and everyone else I know is dead. What you need is a change of venue. When we come back, you’ll have enough money to pay off your debt and start a new life”. (Ion Storm/Eidos Interactive: 2001) However, the story quickly escalates to the discovery of a massive conspiracy, with the fate of the entire universe at stake. From the start of the game, the built environment of Anachronox itself ­visually conforms to iconic preconceptions of the urban noir metropolis:

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dark, labyrinthine streets and towering megastructures, controlled by criminal elements to which the protagonist is opposed in theory, if not in action. Similarly, the human environment also corresponds to classic noir character types, from Boots’ beleaguered virtual secretary Fatima to his diminutive but loyal best friend PAL-18, to assassin-for-hire Stiletto Anyway (the archetypal femme ­fatale). One of the game’s antagonists, the alien kingpin Detta, has an ­antagonistic yet somewhat affectionate relationship with the protagonist, reminiscent of the relationship dynamic between criminal bosses and ­private ­detectives often seen in the works of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond ­Chandler: “Remind me why I’m keeping you alive? … Nostalgia. You bring to mind my humble beginnings. One must stay grounded, despite one’s success”. (2001) These f­ amiliar tropes and character types are offset by the planet’s constant shifting, which the player is constantly aware of: entire city blocks ­rotate away and attach themselves elsewhere, gravitational anomalies require the player to ascend 90-degree climbs in order to proceed, and a multitude of unknown alien species go about their business with little interest in human interaction. From the moment Boots first steps out into the streets of Anachronox, the player is presented with a visual representation of a world which is defamiliarised even by the standards of the video game medium, in which a sense of geometrical and navigational chaos persists. Again, the architecture and population of the city serve as a staging ground for the extradiegetic mystery of the city-planet’s true nature – one of the first details revealed about the planet is that it is a relic of an extinct alien ­species, only recently colonised by humans. As a result, Anachronox is as much a mystery to its inhabitants as it is to the player. However, the established formula for the process of ontological investigation is subverted here: Anachronox ­itself ­remains an unanswered question within the narrative of the game, its origins undiscovered. Rather, Boots and his companions stumble onto the trail of a much grander mystery concerning the sudden activation of all MysTech ­artefacts and the destruction of an entire planet via an unknown cosmic phenomenon. With the addition of scientist Rho Bowman to the team, the true nature of the threat is revealed simultaneously to both the player and the protagonist: Imagine what would happen if we added some mass to our universe. An increase in the amount of matter leads to an increase in the strength of the gravitational pull speeding up the collapse. The more matter there is, the faster it will implode. … My point is, the spatial disturbance that split Sunder in half was matter from the previous universe pouring into our own. … Not only is someone from the previous universe adding matter into our own, they’re also removing matter from theirs at the same time.

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If they remove enough dirt from their backyard, they’ll escape the gravitational pull that would otherwise cause their universe to collapse. That means our universe will never be born. We will never exist. ANACHRONOX 2000

This discovery upends the player’s assumptions about the nature of A ­ nachronox as a narrative: as with A Tale of Three Cities and jla: Earth 2, the danger which emerges as a direct result of the protagonist’s inquest is on a scale far beyond the framework of the initial investigation. The game concludes with the discovery that Anachronox is, in fact, a prison city, designed to contain cosmic horrors from the future – determined to save the universe, Boots and his allies travel through an unknown portal to confront their enemies. It is crucial to note that just as jla: Earth 2 makes use of the tools unique to its medium, so too does Anachronox require a clear understanding of the reception of video game narrative. As Bob Rehak points out in “Playing at ­Being: Psychoanalysis and the Avatar”, the fact that the medium requires active ­participation on the part of the player is directly relevant to the way in which the video game narrative is constructed and experienced: “The video game avatar, presented as a human player’s double, merges spectatorship and participation in ways that fundamentally transform both activities” (2003: 103). David Owen’s “The Illusion of Agency and the Affect of Control within Video Games” further emphasises the importance of the player’s direct manipulation of e­ lements within the gameworld by noting that the illusion of agency translates to a sense of control, immersion and emotional investment: “The idea of l­osing oneself within a game world and investing in the outcome of your ­actions as the active agent in the narrative can be both pleasant and painful; a form of sublime experience unique to the medium of video games”. (2013: 72) For Anachronox specifically, this principle manifests in the fact that Boots serves as the player’s avatar: unlike text-based or graphic literature, the medium of video games position the reader not only as an extradiegetic detective but as the protagonist of the narrative as well. Consequently, the player-as-Boots must solve the ontological puzzle from within its structure, rather than try to piece together evidence while the diegetic investigator pursues his/her own course. This results in a completely different cognitive process: the player’s attempts to reconcile the nature of Anachronox with consensus reality occurs in tandem with Boots’ own discoveries on the level of the text. Doctor B ­ owman’s expository speech is a simultaneous denouement for the characters and the playerdetective. Moreover, Boots’ status as an avatar results in the player ­having to conduct the specifics of the investigation in-game: it is the player who must make Boots travel from planet to planet, traversing the alleys of virtual cities,

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interrogating suspects, recruiting allies and assembling an array of clues meant to point the private detective towards further enlightenment. The archetype of the science-fictional detective is common precisely because, as Sturgis notes, All of these characters are committed to discovering the seemingly unknowable. By pioneering ahead into the great mysteries of the cosmos armed with both reason and imagination, they represent the curiosity and courage that fuel the scientific enterprise, even if, as in Fringe, some of their discoveries range far afield of reality as we understand it. STURGIS 2011: 33

The frequent positioning of said detective in urban spaces is a further demonstration of this desire to pierce the veil and understand that which is alien and estranged: more often than not, these cityscapes are deliberately configured to serve as ontological enigmas which the audience must decipher, using embedded clues to unravel the mystery even as the diegetic protagonists continue along the trajectory of their own storylines. Thus, the cognitive dissonance so intrinsic to science fiction as a whole becomes a singular challenge for the reader/player – one which is uniquely intellectual, and carries upon it the genre’s very modus operandi: to imagine future scenarios extrapolated from our own understanding of the universe, and comprehend those scenarios through the scientific discourse of research, deduction and investigation. Bibliography Primary References

Gaubert, Richard Zangrande. 2001. Anachronox. Ion Storm/Eidos Interactive. Gomel, Elana. 2013. A Tale of Three Cities. New Jersey: Dark Quest Books. Morrison, Grant and Frank Quitely. 2000. jla: Earth 2. New York: dc Comics.

Secondary References

Barthes, Roland. 1978. Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill and Wang. Kukkonen, Karin. 2013. “Navigating Infinite Earths” in The Superhero Reader. eds. Charles Hatfield, Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Mendlesohn, Farah. 2003. “Introduction: Reading Science Fiction” in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. eds. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Owen, David. 2013. “The Illusion of Agency and the Affect of Control within Video Games” in Ctrl-Alt-Play: Essays on Control in Video Gaming. ed. Matthew Wysocki. Jefferson: McFarland. Rehak, Bob. 2003. “Playing at Being: Psychoanalysis and the Avatar” in The Video Game Theory Reader. eds. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron. London/New York: Routledge. Roberts, Adam. 2000. Science Fiction: The New Critical Idiom. London/New York: Routledge. Sturgis, Amy H. 2011. “In Search of Fringe’s Literary Ancestors” in Fringe Science: Parallel Universes, White Tulips, and Mad Scientists. ed. Kevin R. Grazier. Dallas: BenBella Books Inc. Todorov, Tsvetan. 2000. “The Typology of Detective Fiction” in Narrative Reader. ed. Martin McQuillan. London/New York: Routledge. Wirth-Nesher, Hana. 1996. City Codes: Reading The Modern Urban Novel. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Index Ackroyd, Peter 143, 150 Anachronox 213–215, 216 Anime 1, 5–6, 28–29, 29n, 30–31, 33–35, 41, 43, 47–48, 87, 117 Anno, Hideaki 28–31, 34, 41, 45–46, 48 See also, Neon Genesis Evangelion 5, 28–29, 29n, 30–38, 38n, 39–48 Asimov, Isaac 31n4, 46, 206 Auster, Paul 5, 28–29, 31, 40–46 See also, City of Glass 40–41, 46 See also, Man in the Dark 5, 28–31, 40–41, 43, 45–46 See also, Travels in the Scriptorium 41, 46 Babington, Macaulay Thomas 80, 84 Bachelard, Gaston 4, 8 Bakhtin, M.M. 4, 9 See also, Chronotope vi, 4, 7, 9, 100, 139, 149 Barthes, Roland 212, 216 Baudrillard, Jean 8, 23, 96, 99, 100, 127–128, 136, 196–198, 204 Benjamin, Walter 2, 3, 9 Benoit, Sokal 6, 102, 105, 109, 119 Bilal, Enki 109–110, 110n10, 111–112, 119 Booker, M.K. 161, 166 Bordage, Pierre 6, 102, 105, 114, 116–119 Broderick, Mick 168, 170, 184 Carroll, Noel 141, 150 Cavallaro, Dani 123, 126, 129, 135 Certeau, Michel de 3, 8, 9 Chrysalis (film) 6, 102, 104–109, 118–119 Collins Suzanne 7, 151, 153–154, 161, 166 See also, Catching Fire 152, 158, 158n4, 162–163, 166 See also, Hunger Games Storyworld vi, 7, 151–163, 165–166 See also, Hunger Games, The 152, 166 See also, Hunger Games Trilogy 7, 151–153, 155, 159–162 See also, Mockingjay 152, 158, 166 Copier, Laura 170, 184 Cyberpunk 7, 90, 120, 122–123, 127, 135, 189–191, 205

Davis, Mike 154, 166, 168–169, 184 Debord, Guy 42, 47 Defiance (tv Series) 2 Deleuze, Gilles 17, 23, 27, 30, 30n, 42, 47–48, 63–64, 198–199, 204 See also, and Guttari, Felix  63–64, 198, 204 Derrida, Jacques 198, 204 Dickens, Charles v, x, 5–6, 52, 64, 87–88, 91–101, 150 See also, Bleak House 87, 91–94, 100–101 See also, Hard Times 52, 64 See also, Our Mutual Friend 6, 92, 98–100 Domosh, Mona 73, 77, 85 England, George Allan v, 6, 69–70, 73–75, 77, 79, 80–84 Expanse, The (tv Series) 2 flâneur 2–4 Foucault, Michel 30, 32, 56, 59–60, 64, 141–142, 150, 155, 166 Freedman, Carl 4, 9 Freud, Sigmund 20, 27, 148 Gaiman, Neil 139, 142–145, 148–149 See also, Neverwhere 139, 142–145, 148–149 Gibson William vi, viii, 6, 120–133, 133n, 134–136 See also, Count Zero 6, 120–122, 126, 130–133, 135 See also, Mona Lisa Overdrive 6, 120, 122, 125, 130–131, 133–135 See also, Neuromancer 6, 120, 121, 127, 131–132, 134–135 See also, Sprawl Trilogy 6, 120, 124, 127, 131, 133 Giddens, Anthony 125, 136 Gomel Elana vi, vii, x, 7, 92–93, 95, 98, 100, 139, 207–210, 216 See also, A Tale of Three Cities 207–208, 210, 212, 216 Grosz, Elizabeth 49, 56–57, 65

220 Halberstam, Judith 47 Hall, Stuart 136 Haraway, Donna 47 Harvey, David 1, 2, 9, 29–30, 33–34, 38, 47, 50n1, 65 Hutcheon, Linda 100 Jameson, Fredric 23, 27, 148, 150 Jenkins, Henry 73, 156, 163, 167 jla: Earth 2  207, 211–213, 215, 216 Lawrence Francis 183, 171, 166 See also, I am Legend (film) 7, 171, 171n2, 172–173, 175, 175n5, 177–179, 181–185 See also, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (film) 152n4, 158, 162–163, 166 See also, The Hunger Games: Mockinjay (films parts 1 & 2) 152, 158, 164–166 Le Corbusier 93, 101, 147 Lebbon, Tim 7, 93, 101, 139, 148–149 See also, Echo City 138, 148–149 Lefebvre, Henri 30, 38, 41–43, 47, 49–50, 50n2, 58n5, 63, 65, 142, 150 Leinster, Murray 5–6, 69–73, 74, 77–82, 84–85 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 18, 26, 27 Marx, Karl 49, 65, 155, 167 Matheson Richard 171n2, 180n10, 182–183 See also, I am Legend (book) 171n2, 180n10 Matrix, The (film trilogy) 1 Mendlesohn, Farah 208, 216 Metropolis (film) 1 Miéville, China viii, 5, 7, 49, 51–53, 54n, 55, 63–65, 139, 146–147, 149–150 See also, City and the City 7, 139, 146, 147–149 See also, Perdido Street Station 5, 49, 51, 53–54, 54n, 55–58, 61, 63–64, 65 Napier, Susan 30–31, 47 Nietzsche, Friedrich 56, 56n, 65 Page, Max 85, 185

Index Pohl, Frederik 106, 119 Prakash, Gyan 2, 9 Priest, Christopher 5, 49–51, 57–60, 64 Reeve Philip 4, 9 See also, Mortal Engines 4, 9 Reynolds, Alastair 5, 49, 51, 61, 64 Roberts, Adam 89, 101, 103, 119, 207, 217 Ross, Gary (director) 153, 166 See also, The Hunger Games (Movie) 153, 166 Ruttmann, Walter 153, 166 See also, Berlin Symphony of a Great City (film) 166 Sagal, Boris (director) 172, 183 See also, The Omega Man (film) 7, 172–173, 175n, 177n, 178–183 Scott Ridley 2, 204 See also, Blade Runner (film) 1–2, 31, 90, 101, 189, 204 Sennett, Richard 21–22, 27, 93, 101, 141, 144, 147, 150 Simak, Clifford 1 See also, City 1 Soja, Edward 30, 32, 35–36, 42–43, 48, 121–122, 131, 136 Sturgis, Amy 206–207, 216, 217 Suvin, Darko 3, 4, 103, 103n1, 119, 208 See also, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction 3, 103n1 See also, novum 3, 4, 103, 103n1, 207, 208 Todorov, Tzvetan 142, 145, 147–148, 150, 207–208, 217 Wells, H.G 70–73, 77–79, 114 Wirth-Nesher, Hana 208, 209, 217 Yasuyuki, Ueda 89, 97, 100 Yoshimasa, Mizuo 87, 97, 100 Žižek, Slavoj 48