There is so, so much in science fiction literature, indeed the destruction of cities is one of the staples of the genre. I suggest that you read the relevant entires in Clute and Nichol's Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, and follow the connections from there... my favourite is Samuel Delaney's very weird and difficult novel, Dhalgren... and the other 'new wave' novels of Brian Aldiss (Greybeard, Earthworks and Barefoot in the Head in particular) and the late great John Brunner (Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up, The Jagged Orbit).
There are also: Harrison's Make Room! Make Room! (flimed as Soylent Green); Kim Stanley Robinson's California trilogy: The Gold Coast, The Wild Shore, Pacific Edge; Zamyatin's We; Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four; Huxley's Brave New World, A Canticle for Leibowitz, McCarthy's The Road; practically all of Philip K. Dick's work especially Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Ubik, The Man in the High Castle, Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, A Scanner Darkly etc.; Ursula Le Guin did a tribute with the rather excellent The Lathe of Heaven; Ballard of course (Concrete Island and High Rise are perhaps his best urban works, before his more recent period of rather repetitious 'gated community as the end of the world' novels - although I do love his Memories of the Space Age sequence of stories). There is so much more...
In terms of analysis, there is Tom Moylan's Scraps of the Untainted Sky; Peter Marks who has written on utopia/dystopia in Surveillance & Society, and elswhere, and there are some things that might be relevant in Kittchen/Kneale's Lost in Space.
There was a reasonable piece by John Gold on cities in SF film a few years back, and another by Andrew Milner in the Journal of Cultural Studies in 2004 (I think called 'Darker Cities'),See also here: http://www.yume.co.uk/architectural-representations-of-the-city-in-science-fiction-cinema
I am working on a piece for E&PD right now on post-9/11 urban fiction for which I am interviewing a number of authors. I am not sure when this will eventually come out but I can send you an advance copy later this year when it is done...
Dr David Murakami Wood
ESRC Research Fellow, Global Urban Research Unit | Visiting Scholar, Postgraduate Program in Urban Management
Newcastle University, UK | Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná, Curitiba, Brazil
e-mail: [log in to unmask] | website: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/guru/staff/profile/d.f.j.wood | blog: http://ubisurv.wordpress.com
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From: A forum for critical and radical geographers [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Noah Quastel [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 31 March 2009 17:49
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: 'Eschatopolis'?
There is of course, the whole issue of whether urban metropoli can continue in the longer run-- from Logan's Run (1976) to Russel Holbain's Ridley Walker (1980) through to Rees and Wackernagel (1996)(Urban ecological footprints : why cities cannot be sustainable, and why they are a key to sustainability. Environmental Impact Assessment Review (1996) 16 (4) : 223-248) and up to Kunstler (2006) The Long Emergency there has been some doubt;
--- On Tue, 3/31/09, P.M. Howell <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
From: P.M. Howell <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: 'Eschatopolis'?
To: [log in to unmask]
Date: Tuesday, March 31, 2009, 8:52 AM
Dear Gareth,
Assuming eschatology rather than (just) dystopia, you should certainly try 'The City's End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York's Destruction by M Page, which came out last year.
Phil
On Mar 31 2009, Gareth Rice wrote:
> Dear colleagues,
> I wonder if any of you could recommend some good refs regarding 'Eschatopolis'. My aim is to stretch the urban dystopia literature as far as I can. So far I have been ploughing through the work of Mike Davis and the L.A. school in general, Adrian Atkinson's 'cities after oil' triptych, John Gray's 'Black Mass' and the 2002 theme issue of Geografiska Annaler on 'The Spaces of Utopia and Dystopia'. While I plan to stick with non-fiction I also found J. G. Ballard's unsettling novel 'Hello America' to be particularly insightful.
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> The refs will primarily be for teaching purposes but I also want to write something in the spirit of Dolores Hayden's 'What Would a Non-Sexist City Be Like? Speculations on Housing, Urban Design, and Human Work'. From the refs. you suggest I want to ask what would 'Eschatopolis' be like? Have geographers had a bash at envisioning this and if so what parameters have been used? What parameters would you suggest otherwise?
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> Thank you and apologies in advance for such a morbid post!
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> Gareth
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