Fantastic Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror

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MANTIS (1994-5) is perhaps best remembered for having brought one of the first Black superheroes to American television. Starring Carl Lumbly as the scientist turned vigilante Miles Hawkins, MANTIS piqued my interest as a child with a burgeoning interest in geography due to its memorable vision of security and surveillance in the dystopian metropolis of Port Columbia. In “The Eyes Beyond,” Hawkins must overthrow the City Eye, a fascistic, panoptic supercomputer, whose spherical lair made inventive use of the iconic dome of Vancouver, British Columbia’s Science World as a filming location. To this day, the booming voice of the City Eye, voiced by Malachi Throne, still occasionally haunts my dreams, perhaps summoned by the police helicopters I regularly hear overhead living in downtown Los Angeles.

Cities provoke fantasy, and speculative fiction has long been a powerful site for both reiterating and interrupting ideological common sense about relationships between urban space, race, class, violence, and power. Yet it is only recently that the city of speculative fiction has been afforded the sustained collective attention it deserves as an object of analysis in its own right. Originating in a 2014 American studies conference in Europe, Fantastic Cities gathers sixteen essays from scholars of film, literature, history, and urban studies examining visions of the urban in science fiction, fantasy, and horror, with a principal, though not altogether exclusive, focus on cities in the United States.

The volume opens with a first-rate theoretical essay by editors Stefan Rabitsch and Michael Fuchs that surveys cities’ seeming ubiquity and recurrence in speculative fiction and enumerates some recurring characteristics of the Fantastic City. Understanding cities’ imagined incarnations, they argue, matters because fantasy is so constitutive of “the world we know”. (14) Shaped by conventions, but assembling and juxtaposing forms of life in sometimes-unexpected configurations, Fantastic Cities are at once national and transnational, vertical and horizonal, and simultaneously bounded, expansive, and mobile.

Perhaps most crucially, Rabitsch and Fuchs contend, Fantastic Cities are palimpsestic, “in perpetual flux of (de)construction and (re)development, constantly redefined”. (25) This invocation of the figure of the palimpsest is an important early indication of this volume’s potential interest to critical geographers as well as literary and film scholars, as the physicality of the palimpsest’s persistent traces accords well with contemporary human geography’s materialist approach inquiry into the contested production of urban space. To undertake a palimpsestic inquiry into fantastic urban space is also a necessarily ethico-political project, requiring an openness to being haunted by remainders, ghosts whose presence is never fully erased.

The editors of Fantastic Cities are to be commended for the consistent standard of rigor and accessibility met by all the contributions, which are organized into sections on imagination, apocalypse, freedom, and ecology. Yet the volume’s most successful chapters are arguably those that embrace the palimpsestic approach outlined in the introduction, holding in consistent tension cities’ simultaneously material and fantastic dimensions, and remaining in meaningful dialogue with the normative and critical as well as descriptive aims of contemporary American studies as a field that has been revolutionized by critical political economy, a postnationalist turn, and the rise of critical ethnic studies.

Carl Abbott’s contribution, for instance, persuasively explicates Kim Stanley Robinson’s critical optimism about cities—which are so often troped in speculative fiction as spaces of alienation and anomie—as sites of experimental coalitions and provisional solidarities across race and class. From Washington, D.C. to Orange County to New York City to Mars, Robinson figures cities as places where people make do amidst the quotidian emergencies of climate change, capitalist development, and an overgrown military-industrial complex. In such perilous places and times, Abbott observes, Robinson nevertheless holds out hope and imaginative space for forms of urban “community animated by vigorous democracy”. (75) Chris Pak’s chapter, on visions of terraforming in the work of Robinson, Arthur C. Clarke, and Frederick Turner, takes a complementary angle, considering how fantastic cities can give rise to human relationships to nonhuman nature on terms that exceed capitalist and anthropocentric logics.

Though its source material hardly shares such optimism, Jacob Babb’s treatment of Colson Whitehead’s novel Zone One (2011) is equally sophisticated. For Babb, Whitehead’s zombified New York is at once apparently “postracial” and brutal in its treatment of both zombies and the workers tasked with “clearing” the city of them. In such a grim scenario, Babb speculates, “Whitehead seems to be telling us that the only hope… is to abandon hope and face the bleakness”. (99) Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock’s chapter, on the vampire films Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), likewise finds considerable bleakness in extractive urban capitalist landscapes. That both films present sympathetic protagonists who eke out nourishment, beauty, enchantment, and pleasure however they can, Weinstock astutely suggests, renders “the vampiric taking of blood… preferable to the capitalist creation of human misery”. (115)

Three other chapters distinguish themselves in their theoretically rigorous dialogues with postnational and hemispheric visions of American Studies. María Isabel Pérez Ramos brings the cutting-edge decolonial criticism of Walter Mignolo to bear on dystopian visions of desert cities in the U.S. Southwest, praising writers like Leslie Marmon Silko and Rudolfo Anaya, who turn to Indigenous and Chicanx ancestral knowledges for viable alternative visions of eco-futurity. J. Jesse Ramírez’s interpretation of Peruvian American director Alex Rivera’s dystopian film Sleep Dealer (2008) intervenes in longstanding debates on alienation in Marxist science fiction criticism, rightly insisting that cognitive estrangement is always relative, and materially anchored in specific histories and geographies of race, class, and nation. And James McAdams finds in Samuel Delany’s novel Dhalgren (1975) experimental, innovative, and radical visions of social selfhood that become possible only in a postnational urban America—an American city in which “the social mythology America has created for itself [is] removed”. (192)

As an urban geographer and American studies scholar with a foot (or at least a few toes) in science fiction studies, I read Fantastic Cities with great interest. The book’s accessibility makes its eminently teachable. In fact, I began referring undergraduate students to it before I had even finished it. Although not every chapter excited me as much as those foregrounded in this review, as is perhaps inevitably the case for anyone reading an edited volume cover-to-cover, the volume fully succeeds in bringing the city from the background to the foreground of speculative fiction studies, and will no doubt be an important touchstone for subsequent research.

David K. Seitz is Associate Professor of Cultural Geography in the Department of the Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California and extended faculty in the Cultural Studies Department at Claremont Graduate University. He is the author of A Different ‘Trek’: Radical Geographies of ‘Deep Space Nine’ (University of Nebraska Press, 2023) and essays on Star Trek published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Jacobin, Science Fiction Film and Television, Geopolitics, The Geographical Bulletin, and Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society. He lives in Los Angeles.