I lived in rural southwestern Virginia, the nearest cities several hours away and those were smallish cities. Relatively little of what I saw on television conveyed much sense of urban reality, perhaps because it was still inherently difficult to film in large cities. Except for Los Angeles, and I saw a lot of that, and Los Angeles never did become much a part of my imagination’s map of cities.
I reverse-engineered a concept of urban life from Doyle’s rich and intriguing (and cozy) construct. I walked through my hometown, imagining it a city. What I was imagining, I now see, was an increase not in size but in number of choices.
Cities afforded more choices than small towns, and constantly, by increasing the number and randomization of potential human and cultural contacts. Cities were vast, multilayered engines of choice, peopled primarily with strangers.
You never know whom you might meet in the city. In a small town, you’re less likely to encounter people or things or situations you haven’t encountered previously. These people or things or situations may be wonderful or horrible, in either city or town, but cities have the numbers, the turnover. To a writer of fiction, this is extremely handy, a city being able, more or less believably, to mask excessive coincidence, producing, as Doyle taught me, whatever the narrative might require.
Should the populous mechanism of the fictive city fail to produce phenomena of sufficient weirdness, our literature of the fantastic often turns, quite reflexively, to dead cities, our most profoundly and mysteriously haunted artifacts.
Many deserted cities probably never were engines of choice. To stand in the vast plaza of the pre-Columbian Monte Albán, for instance, is to know that Monte Albán was about decreasing choice, narrowing it. Monte Albán was a control machine, an acoustically perfect environment with magnificent lines of sight: a theater of power. We don’t know why Monte Albán was as abruptly deserted as it may have been. Perhaps the show failed, finally, to come off, and no other was available, or possible, within that inflexible, uni-purposed structure.
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Meanwhile, though, some of the world’s largest human settlements are now not only places where one can weld on the sidewalk but places that have bypassed many of the ways in which Europeans and North Americans have assumed cities necessarily need to grow: Rio, Mumbai, Nairobi, Istanbul, Mexico City…. Vast squatter conurbs, semi-neo-Medieval in their structure and conditions. The future will emerge from such cities as surely as it will emerge from the Disneylanded capitals of an Old World that now includes North America.
The future of cities will consist of two different modalities combined within the ageographical and largely unrecognized meta city that is the Internet.
See the Interview they have with Gibson for further thoughts concerning cities and their role in fiction and the Canadian Notes & Queries’ “An Interview with William Gibson“
