The ultimate future city: Cities in Flight: Part 1, the city and its stars
Continuing our occasional series on the
The Caves of Steel, by Isaac Asimov, 11/07
The Naked Sun, by Isaac Asimov, 11/07
The World Inside, by Robert Silverberg, 12/07
Diaspar, The City and the Stars, by Arthur C. Clarke, 3/08
“What city has two names twice?” 380
That question is posed, to a fellow spacefaring mayor, by John Amalfi, the mayor of an iterant city, in the four-volume epic future history Cities in Flight.
My own fascination with cities both began with science fiction and found its expression in Future Boston and In the Cube (about which I’ll have to post one of these days), and it owes much to these great visions, of which I find Blish’s four-volume opus, nearly sixty years after its first publication, the most striking conception ever of a far future of homo urbanis – in which entire cities migrate through the galaxy among the inhabited planets, like hobos or Okies, seeking paying work performing services:
The once-golden motto – Mow Your Lawn, lady? – looked greener than ever in the light of the giant planet. 250
Any work you need done, lady, we can do it.
Blish’s universe is worth visiting in its own right – he’s a smooth and wise writer, undeservedly obscure now – and also for his grasp of the city as economic organism competing with other cities to sell its services to planets and nations.
1. The premise: cities flying among the stars. Blish’s vision was rooted in fanciful technology, with his industrialized cities traveling from planet to planet – but in a twenty-first century world where information is the valuable commodity and skills are the competitive advantage, his vision rings true for today’s cities:
“The commodity we all have to sell is labor. Hand labor, heavy work, isn’t worth anything. Machines can do that. But brainwork can’t be done with anything but brains: art and pure science are beyond the compass of any machine. Now, we can’t sell art. We can’t produce it; we aren’t artists and aren’t set up as such. But brainwork in pure science is something we can sell, just as we’ve always sold brainwork in applied sciences. If we play our cards right, we can sell it anywhere, for any price we ask, regardless of the money system involved. It’s the ultimate commodity, and in the long run it’s a commodity which no one but Okies could merchandise successfully.” 380
In Blish’s world, chiefly in his two great novels, Earthman, Come Home (the first of his Okie novels to be written, although the third in his future chronology), and The Triumph of Time, he posits a power source, the Blackett-Dirac gravitron accelerator (colloquially, the ’spindizzy’) that shuts down the angular momentum of electrons relative to gravity and means that the top speed of objects is related to their mass, so that when the spindizzies are fired up, a city can lift itself right out of its planetary cradle:
The squat towers were swaying, and all around the edge of the city, huge blocks and clods heaved and turned over, like surf. Impossibly, a thin line of light, intense and ruddy, appeared above the moiling rock. The suns were shining under the city …
The line of light widened. The old city took the air with an immediate bound, and the rending of the long-rooted foundations was ear-splitting. 463
Entire cities could go aloft – and in Blish’s world, they did, the ultimate migrant workers:
The mobile factories changed Mars into the
City Hall became both a belfry and a bridge:
The ledge ran around the belfry of City Hall. The city, however, was a spaceship, much of which was sometimes operated from this spot, and from which Amalfi was accustomed to assess the star-seas that the city sailed. That made it a bridge. But the ship was a city, a city of jail and playgrounds, alleys and alley cats, and there was even one bell in the belfry, though it no longer had a clapper. The city was still called
Lift it all into space
Like the great wind-powered sailing ships, the vessel that is a city travels with its passengers, its crew, its trash, its rates, its greenery:
It was a fairly long haul from the control tower, which was on
Is that a bridge or a belfry?
I have always found these descriptions of severed urban networks — bridges sliced halfway across, subway tunnels cauterized and plugged – unbearably romantic.
The bottom of an airlock drifted into his field of view. The lock, drilled directly into the great granite disc which was the foundation of the city, was a severed end of what had been a subway line running out of
With their own internal power source, cities work for money, expressed in Blish’s world first by the metal germanium (for solid-state electronics) and later by anti-agathic drugs (that indefinitely retard senescence and death by aging). Cities become hobos, who proudly wear the nickname Okies:
Where would an Okie go? They were going, that was all. If there was a destination, no one could know what it was. 333
A betterlife is out there, somewhere
2. Cities as economic migrants, bidding for work. The flying cities are always looking for work, and they choose their clients:
So long as the city was not committed legally, it could refuse jobs, leave them when it pleased, and generally exercise the freedom of the unemployed. 263
The freedom of the unemployed?
I find curious the sense of yearning in that phrase. Unemployment is freedom only if you have self-sufficient wealth. “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”?
Nothing left to lose?
Blish’s story departs from the typical science fiction and delves extensively into economics, with a fully worked-out set of rules of engagement among migrant cities as workers, planets as customers, and a roving galactic policy force to maintain order:
Steam shovels, by and large, had been more characteristic of the West than tanks, but in a fight between the two, the outcome was predictable; that situation never changed.
The Earth police put the rebel cities down; and then, in self-protection, because the cities were needed, Earth passed laws protecting the cities. 241
Cities necessary? Blish makes explicit the cities’ economic role:
I’m just looking out for my own honey, that’s all
“Do you know what a bee is? It’s a prime factor in cross-fertilization of plants. The bee doesn’t know that he’s essential to the ecology of his world – all he’s out to do is collect as much nectar can – but that doesn’t make him any less essential. The cities have been like the bee for a long time. The governments of the advanced planets, earth in particular, know it, even if the cities generally don’t. The planets distrust the cities, but they also know that they’re vital and must be protected. “ 399
The galactic economy thus mirrors AHI’s thinking of a healthy ecosystem, in which cities play the role of mission entrepreneurial entities.
A man on a mission
Though humanity has yearned for the country since time immemorial, in point of fact wealth is generated in cities. Cities are places where strangers live peaceably together, and where every form of specialization can exist in close proximity to every other, stimulating innovation via commerce. For cities to survive, therefore, they need both formality and a money economy, with a solid currency:
“If you want to know whether or not we have operating capital, our City Fathers will give you the statutory Yes or No answer if you can give them the data on your system that they’ll need to make the calculation.” 340
Having recently returned from a visit to Brazil, which as recently as a decade ago was experiencing ruinous hyperinflation that has stunted the development of mortgage finance and held back investment in property, I’m struck by Blish’s insight that cities have to maintain solvency, even if they are acting principally as workers and capital consumers. Cities as contract workers are also held accountable by the Earth police:
“Pay your fine and beat it, or you’ll get hurt.”
“Can’t.”
“What’s to prevent you?”
“We have a contract with the Hruntans.”
“You’re pretty sharp. All right, proof your contract over on the tape. Go ahead and land if you’ve got a contract. The more fools you. Make sure you stay for the full contract period. If you do get off before we reduce the planet, make sure you can pay your fine. If you don’t – good riddance, Okie!” 262
Stay solvent, or be broken up
When truly independent bodies are transacting, the problem of enforcement always arises, because there is no supra-party entity capable of holding both sides to their bargains. Blish solved his dilemma militarily (at one point he reports that any space cruiser could handle five cities). In our modern world we solve the problem of unaccountable states with the global capital markets, which works in states with a responsive government or a money economy, but fails against megalomaniac dictators and psychopaths.
I get by with a little help from my friends
Blish’s flying cities can go bankrupt –
[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]
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