Re: Cities in Fantastic Fiction (Repressentative and otherwise)

Pete Fenelon wrote:

> Tux Wonder-Dog <wes.parish@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Meanwhile M. John Harrison's Virconium seems to be more
>> Liverpool-Coventry-York, etc - not that I've ever been to any of those
>> cities,
>
> I have, in fact I've lived half my life in Liverpool and half in York,
> and I've visited Coventry several times, and I'm afraid you've got some
> wires crossed somewhere.

I thought as much - but the scenery evoked in those stories always seemd to
me to be similar to the photos I've seen of mostly Midlands cities.

> I suspect you're making simple associations
> like "grotty bits + petty crime = Liverpool",

"grotty bits" always evokes Liverpool in my mind. It's the impression given
by various otherwise long-forgotten BBC movies.
> "old bits = York",

What else is there in York? That's its stock-in-trade, apart from the
Cathedral, and _that's_ one of the oldest still surviving bits.
> "industry
> = Coventry",

Wouldn't know. The most I know about Coventry is that it's got a cathedral,
it's the *** of a snide comment based on a historical incident, and it got
bombed during the Blitz.
> but Viriconium isn't English. It isn't *anywhere*; it's it's
> everywhere. If anything, it speaks to me more of Prague or Paris than
> of any British city and I suspect there's a fair slice of fin-de-siecle
> Vienna in there too.

I always connected the quietly desperate poets of Viriconium with Paris,
since that's part of Paris' reputation. But the rest of it has seemed to
me, ever since I first encountered the books, has seemed to me to be set in
the English Midlands.
>
> Harrison's an adoptive Yorkshireman ("Climbers" is a fantastic book, and
> Pennine scenery features in many of his other stories) so it's not
> inconceivable that some aspects of Viriconium resemble Yorkshire cities,
> but there's no simple mapping from it to one (or more) real-world
> cities, which, I thought, was kind of the point -- Viriconium is a
> universal city where Harrison can set any kind of story from broad
> fantasy to delicate character studies.

Yes, there's that. That's a major part of his attraction.
>
>> What I'm trying to ask, is what is the most usual city to be used as a
>> representative human city for fantastic fiction? Is there a sort of City
>> of Man (to quote the name of one of John Bunyan's more notorious
>> characters. ;) in fantastic fiction, and a sort of City of God?
>
> In most low-end sf novels, "the city" is either a crude take on Rome
> towards the end of the empire (bread and circuses, decadence, Praetorian
> guard, barbarians at the gates), Byzantium (court intrigue, exoticism,
> city as centre of a weird empire), London at some point between
> 1500s and the late 1800s (teeming hordes of petty criminals in a
> maze of back-streets, possibly some 'steampunk' elements), New York
> (technophilia, enterprise, "getting things done", urban toughness and
> humour), or Tokyo (neon, rain, dense information, crowding, corporate
> dominance). Some more modern writers are prepared to tackle cities in
> "the developing world" - Mumbai or Mexico City or Shanghai for instance
> (overpopulation, pollution, street life)... You get the occasional
> Stalinist Moscow or Speer take on Berlin too (parades, uniforms,
> monumental architecture, dictators, police), often in mil-sf.

And that's one of those things I hate most about much of what passes for SF.
The crudely-disguised
Rome-as-imagined-by-a-devoted-reader-of-cheap-popularizations ... As well
as the carefully-undisguised use of humans-in-funny-suits as "hostile
aliens with a bad attitude".
>
> Mieville's New Crobuzon is interesting; when I first read it it felt
> like a mix of Paris and my *perception* (I've never been there) of the
> down-at-heel bits of Rio; but it is in fact modern South London in a
> heatwave! ;)

Perceptions! ;)
>
> pete

Wesley Parish
--
"Good, late in to more rewarding well."  "Well, you tonight.  And I was
lookintelligent woman of Ming home.  I trust you with a tender silence."  I
get a word into my hands, a different and unbelike, probably - 'she
fortunate fat woman', wrong word.  I think to me, I justupid.
Let not emacs meta-X dissociate-press write your romantic dialogs...!!!
.