My first review of 2024!
To quote a much younger me: “I’ve always been fascinated by imaginary and historical cities: the utopian (Tommaso Campanella’s 1602 work The City of the Sun), the allegorical (Calvino’s Invisible Cities), the multi-layered (Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance Rome), the planned (Palmanova), the [fantastically] decaying (Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris), the multi-tiered (Tolkein’s Minas Tirith)…”
The science-fictional examples–from the urban gestalt of San Francisco in John Shirley’s City Come A-Walkin’ (1980) to the arcologies of an overpopulated world in Robert Silverberg’s The World Inside (1971)–hold special appeal. As manifestations of societal decadence and vice or vibrant communities of interaction and discovery, they often become characters—changing and evolving over the course of the narrative.
To inaugurate my brand new short story review series on The Urban Landscape in Science Fiction, I’ve selected one of my favorite SF short stories: Michael Bishop’s “The Windows in Dante’s Hell” (1973). Bishop adeptly renders a human drama in a future Atlanta, replete with soaring dome and nine subterranean levels. I’ve paired it with two stories entirely new to me: Barrington J. Bayley’s “Exit from City 5” (1971) and A. J. Deutsch’s “A Subway Named Mobius” (1953). Bayley depicts a city as generation ship. A. J. Deutsch imagines a mathematical mystery within a rapidly expanding metro system underneath a future Boston.
Let me know if you have any favorite city-centric short stories that I haven’t covered on the site published pre-1985 that I could include in this series.
Up Next: TBD
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Paul Lehr’s cover for the 1974 edition
5/5 (Masterpiece)
Michael Bishop’s “The Windows in Dante’s Hell” first appeared in Orbit 12, ed. Damon Knight (1973). If you have an Internet Archive account, you can read it online here.
The Urban Nucleus sequence (1970-1979), collected and chronologically framed in the uniformly brilliant Catacomb Years (1979), charts the future history of an entombed/reborn Atlanta, Georgia from a diverse array of viewpoints–geriatric polyamorous couples, African American teenagers, etc. “The Windows in Dante’s Hell,” the second-published short story in the sequence, poignantly renders an old woman’s life-long attempt to survive within the dark subterranean reaches of an urban dystopia that alternatively serves as a metacommentary on the power of science fiction stories.
Mr. Ardrey, 23, and his African American boss’ 14-year-old son Newlyn, decide to retrieve the dead body of the one-hundred-year-old Almira Longhope, who lived more than 70 years of her life alone on Level 8. Normally automated servo-units would dispose of the dead without families. Mr. Ardrey gives in to the youth’s desire to see and experience something new. He knows that “human beings are invariably too compassionate” and the possibility of disquieting feelings when confronting a corpse and “all its attendant suggestions of loneliness” (40).
Nothing prepares them for the “immensely strange” world/mausoleum Almira Longhope carved out in her three-room cubicle (43). In what is essentially a direct reference to Star Trek: The Original Series (1966-1969), Almira recreated the command bridge of the Enterprise replete with banks of “computerlike gadgetry,” communication devices, and windows that peer into the world outside–domed city, moon, Saturn, the depths of space) (43). In her bedroom, piles of logs stored in old manilla folders ruminate on her deep sadness, often through the narrative lens of individual episodes like the alternate universe episode “Mirror, Mirror” (1967) (rendered by Bishop as “Between the Star Mirrors”). She ruminates: “I wish I could break through a moment and visit my other self” (50). Deeply fearful that she would find emptiness in both worlds, the episode serves as a salve. A bit of brightness illuminates her darkness: she’d always have an alternate universe to “reach into and to wonder at” (50).
Mr. Ardrey dismisses Almira’s obsession, an “epitaph out of old screenplays and pulp magazine stories,” as “junk” (47) and the sign of a life wasted. Newlyn, increasingly at odds with Mr. Ardrey, murmurs “It’s some of the neatest stuff I’ve ever seen” (49). As the two interlopers leaf peer into her imaginary world, they too must confront their own failings and the societal forces of the city metaphorically transforming its inhabitants into ghosts.
This is a beautiful story. Almira’s transformed cubicle, a window into an imaginary world, is a powerful image that has stayed with me since I read the story almost a decade ago. Her portal becomes the stage for a confrontation between Mr. Ardrey, increasingly an instrument of the status quo, and the young Newlyn, still fascinated by the world and its people. It’s a loving homage to Star Trek and fandom.
Bishop passed away on November 23rd after a period of hospice care. He’s one of my favorite authors and, in my brief interactions with him, a kind soul. Check out Rich Horton’s obituary, my reviews of A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire (1975) and Stolen Faces (1977) (among many others), and my guest post review series from early in the history of the site. His work is not to be missed.
Highly recommended.
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Richard Powers’ cover for the 1971 first edition
3/5 (Average)
Barrington J. Bayley’s “Exit from City 5” first appeared in New Worlds Quarterly, ed. Michael Moorcock (1971). I you have an Internet Archive account, you can read it online here.
City 5, a rocket-propelled metropolis of 2 million that departed Earth hundreds of years in the past, rests outside the material universe. The cause of the exodus? The mysterious shrinkage of an “entire conglomeration of galactic and stellar systems” (160). City 5 was the only vessel to successfully emerge outside the material universe. Its inhabitants, not entirely aware of their unique and extreme isolation, spend their days adhering to strict routines and conducting the labor-intensive inventories for the Inertial Stocktaking Department (153).
Within this closed system, Kord awakes from his “customary year of suspended animation” and his “special language of sociodynamic symbology” indicates dangerous tendencies afoot in City 5 (156). Kord views himself as the last in a line of leaders, “including men like Chariman Mao” (165), who believe that society’s survival depends on fixing it to an eternal pattern. He believes that humanity’s survival depends on creating a dreamtime in the mold of the Australian “aborigines” in order to create long-term stability in the harsh environment of the city that must not lose mass (167). In humorous Jungian fashion, Kord looks for “feminine” symbols rather than the “thrusting, probing” of “pointed lances” and “towers on the plain” (170). The city must look inside itself rather than outward beyond its dome.
The second threat follows the increasingly moody Kayin, who works for the Inertial Stocktaking Department. Previously a member of the Astronomical Society, a target of the newly awakened Kord for its outward thinking, Kayin does not know exactly where his loyalties lie. As rebellion swells inside of the city, Kayin takes another position–and into the metaphysical/orgasmic expanse (it’s the New Wave) we descend.
As with most of Barrington J. Bayley’s work I’ve read, “Exit from City 5” contains a maelstrom of fascinating ideas from Kord’s special language of sociodynamic symbology to his theories of hypnogogic interiority in the face of cosmic emptiness. I am reminded of colliding time waves in Collision Course (variant title: Collision with Chronos) (1973); the garment-maker as psychiatrist/priest and molder of public opinion in The Garments of Caean (1976); and the city as time-traveling empire-enforcing node in The Fall of Chronopolis (1974). Unfortunately, as with the novels I mentioned, Bayley’s visions rarely manage to entirely coalesce in a satisfying story with defined characters. Regardless, this is a unique take on the generation ship. In this formulation, there can be no destination.
I’ve gone ahead and included “Exit from City 5” in my series on generation spaceships.
Previous installment: Julian May’s “Star of Wonder” (1953).
Up Next: TBD
Recommended only for fans of Bayley’s cosmos-spanning idea bombardments.
3/5 (Average)
A. J. Deutsch’s “A Subway Named Mobius” first appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, ed. John W. Campbell, Jr. (December 1950). You can read it online here.
In a future Boston, the subway system develops a bewildering complexity: “two hundred twenty-seven trains running the subways every weekday, and they carried about a million and a half passengers” (72). When metro Number 86 disappears, it takes days for the operators to notice. A search yields nothing. A mathematician comes up with a crackpot theory. But there are other unusual events happening along the line, and Professor Tupelo’s talk of topology and Möbius strips and Klein bottles might yield a metaphysical truth.
“A Subway Named Mobius” reminded me of the feel of mathematician Chan Davis’ late 40s short stories–“The Nightmare” (1946) and “To Still the Drums” (1946)–that also appeared in Astounding. In both cases complex new problem and able experts, far from fleshed out or even vaguely interesting characters, attempt to solve it with extensive multi-page didactic dialogue. This style of science fiction does not resonate with me but provides a fascinating window into the editorial choices and aims of John W. Campbell, Jr. and the mentalities of the immediate post-WWII world.
I appreciate Deutsch’s willingness to use mathematics to speculate on a metaphysical possibility. That said, I found Paul Orban’s interior art (below) more evocative than Deutsch’s functionalist prose. Deutsch doesn’t seem willing to ruminate on the increasing complexity of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) as a topical metaphor for post-War urban transformation.
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Paul Orban’s interior art for “A Subway Named Mobius” in Astounding Science Fiction, ed. John W. Campbell, Jr. (December 1950)
If you are more mathematically and scientifically-minded than I am, “A Subway Named Mobius” might resonate in a far more transfixing fashion. As Deutsch refuses to push the metaphorical possibilities of his premise, there isn’t much beyond the central topological mystery, which, thankfully, is fascinating on its own.
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