[Continued from yesterday's Part 1].

Yesterday’s exploration of 1984 (a devastating movie, by the way) developed the poverty of slums: how Winston Smith and all his like were ground into subservience by squalid living conditions, deliberate under-maintenance, and oppressive overt surveillance – where both work and home are merely a low-grade prison.

Big Brother is watching you

Early in the novel Winston Smith writes, I understand the how, I do not understand the WHY.  He comes to.

Just as a slum is the proof of poverty, poverty itself makes all of existence into a slum – and it is no coincidence that Winston’s seminal act, the one crimethink from which flows the entire novel, is nothing more dangerous than writing in a book, and not just any book but an opulent, luxurious, sensual book:

He went back to the living room and sat down at a small table that stood to the left of the telescreen.  From the table drawer he took out a penholder, a bottle of ink, and a thick, quarto-size blank book with a red back and a marbled color. 

By a quirk of the room’s layout (housing again), Winston has a tiny sanctuary of invisibility, where he may quietly commit apostasy to Big Brother:

For some reason the telescreen in the living room was in an unusual position.  Instead of being placed, as was normal, in the end wall, where it could command the whole room, it was in the longer wall, opposite the window.  To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston was now sitting and which, when the flats were built, had probably been intended to hold bookshelves.  By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went.  He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not be seen. 

It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do. 

In his corner, Winston may do the most erotic thing George Orwell could imagine:

But it had also been suggested by the book that he had just taken out of the drawer.  It was a particularly beautiful book.  Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past.  He could guess, however that the book was much older than that.  Page 9.

With that, he begins to write his own words in this luscious book.

To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone – to a time when truth exists and what has been done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the day of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink – greetings!  Page 27

Winston understands – it is his first insight – that poverty is itself a prison, one that subjugates and destroys the human spirit.  First he writes:

Until they [the poor] become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.  That, he reflected, might almost have been a transcription from one of the Party textbooks.  Page 61.

Later this goal is explicitly said back to him, with the most chilling earnestness:

In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement.  Everything else we shall destroy – everything.  We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman.  No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer.  Page 220.

Winston’s confessor might have been describing a place where there is no law, where the state is absent.

But in the future there will be no wives and no friends.  Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen.  The sex instinct will be eradicated.  Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card.  We shall abolish the orgasm.  Our neurologists are at work upon it now.  Page 220.

You are the last man, Winston

Throughout the story, Winston’s spirits are mirrored in his surrounding, and in particular the man-made objects of his surroundings.  Enjoyment of the simplest pleasures is itself a rebellious act:

Even before he had taken it he knew by the smell that it was very unusual chocolate.  It was dark and shiny, and was wrapped in silver paper.  Chocolate normally was dull-brown crumbly stuff that tasted, as nearly as one could describe it, like the smoke of a rubbish fire.  But at some time or another he had tasted chocolate like the piece she had given him.  The first whiff of its scent had stirred up some memory which he could not pin down, but which was powerful and troubling.  Page 101

It burns like fire

Again and again, the tool of oppression is poverty, and the tiniest wealth is represented as freedom:

The first packet that she passed to Winston had a strange and yet vaguely familiar feeling.  It was filled with some kind of heavy, sandlike stuff which yielded where you touched it.

“It isn’t sugar?” he said.  Page 117.

Coffee smells of sex:

The smell that rose from the saucepan was so powerful and exciting that they shut the window lest anybody outside should notice it and become inquisitive.  What was even better than the taste of the coffee was the silky texture given to it by the sugar, a thing Winston had almost forgotten after years of saccharine.  Page 120.

Oceania’s leaders did not so much create this grinding poverty as they recognized how its manifestation could become a tool of their own self-perpetuation:

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.  War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking into the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.  Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labor power without producing anything that can be consumed.  Page 157.

Berlin, 1945

No matter how many pictures we see of those times, those of us my age and younger cannot conceive just how desperately poor was Western Europe in 1945, particularly Britain, which had been at war for six solid years, bombed beginning and end.  Meat rationing was not eliminated in England until 1952.  His Winston Smith, born in 1945 (in 1984 he’s 39), personifies the era:

He remembered better the rackety, uneasy circumstances of the time [1955]: the periodical panics about air raids and the sheltering inn Tube stations, the piles of rubble everywhere, the unintelligible proclamations posted at street corners, the gangs of youths in shirts all the same color, the enormous queues outside the bakeries, the intermittent machine-gun fire in the distance – above all, the fact that there was never enough to eat. 

Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me

Orwell knew what he was talking about: his Down and Out in Paris and London chronicled his year living as a hobo.

He remembered long afternoons spent with other boys in scavenging around dustbins and rubbish heaps, picking out the ribs of cabbage leaves, potato peelings, sometimes even scraps of stale breadcrust from which they carefully scraped away the cinders; and also in waiting for the passage of trucks which traveled over a certain route and were known to carry cattle feed and which, when they jolted over the bad patches in the road, sometimes spilt a few fragments of oatcake.  Page 133.

In Oceania, people area controlled with the simplest, cheapest of means.  Let them fight desperately, miserably for shoelaces, razor blades, proper soap, and keep coffee or chocolate as half-remembered ecstasies. 

In all his travels, Winston meets one kindred soul – O’Brien, and it is O’Brien who proves to be Winston’s interlocutor, Winston’s torturer, Winston’s confessor, and in the end, his spiritual guide. 

We are kindred spirits, Winston thought

Unique among 1984’s characters, O’Brien lives well, for he is part of Oceania’s rulers: the Inner Party:

It was only on very rare occasions that one saw inside the dwelling places of the Inner Party, or even penetrated into the quarter of the town where they lived.  The whole atmosphere of the huge block of flats, the richness and spaciousness of everything, the unfamiliar smells of good food and good tobacco, the silent and incredibly rapid lifts sliding up and down, the white-jacketed servants hurrying to and fro – everything was intimidating.  139.

No one dares trust

Reading 1984 again, as a science fiction author, I have found an economic flaw in his horror: Orwell’s Oceania cannot survive, because it is living on borrowed time economically.  Oceania’s buildings are falling down, and when they collapse, nothing will replace them … and Oceania’s bureaucracy will collapse.

In my amateur political diagnosis, that’s why South Africa ended apartheid.  All the sanctions, all the approbation, all the editorials played their tiny part.  When four-fifths (the blacks) were held in intellectual and economic subservience, half of the population (women) were sidelined as spouse, and a solid third of the remainder were engaged either in policing their own country or trying to police their neighbors’ – well, there was simply not enough labor to sustain a productive economy.  The Law of Economic Gravity took hold, and the nation went bankrupt – and to their credit, the whites had the good sense to see this before it happened, and to make a gift of what they would have had to surrender in any event.

Finance too plays a role.  As we’ve seen, cities require infrastructure, and infrastructure costs so much money it takes financial markets.  Dictatorships can command forced labor into vast civic works projects, but that is all.  They tend to run catastrophic macroeconomic policy, which leads to ruinous inflation, and chokes off capital investment.

Dictatorships that commit so much of their state’s wealth to policing eventually implode on themselves – they cannot generate enough wealth, and they cannot invest.  As we have seen – in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe –

2007: Starvation in Zimbabwe

– and in Kim Jong Il’s North Korea – the collapse can go one and on and on, the poor being reduced to starvation as an ever-dwindling elite circles ever-shrinking wagons. 

It matters not how many die, if I am surrounded by loyal troops

In 1984, there is no hope – because there are no economics.  In Zimbabwe, there must be hope, as there must be in North Korea.  The hope comes not from institutions, not from their disgusting and evil leadership, not alas from the people inside those wretched countries, but from the law of economic gravity.  A dictatorship can impoverish its own people, it can grind them into passivity with a combination of force, prisons, slums, and poverty.  Doing so writes its own death warrant – and so our hope, a hope Winston Smith never had, is that those states go bankrupt, as soon as possible. 

“If that is granted, all else follows.”

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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

Cities in Flight, Part 1 and Part 2: 8/08

Perhaps the most famous year in fiction begins in the most tactile not-present:

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.  Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

In previous posts, I’ve profiled visions of ultimate future cities.  Some of these visions are nightmares – and yet, nightmares that can see around us if we know where to look, in the slums inside.

Victory mansions? Soviet flats

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats.  At one end of it a colored poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall.  It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a meter wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black mustache and ruggedly handsome features. 

George Orwell’s writing has the clarity and simplicity of genius: with never an inflation, nary an exclamation point, nothing but the impressions of everyday, he created the world’s catchword for dystopia, and all out of his own experience.  Poverty, disease, war, humiliation, bombing, death, and political cant – he experienced them all, and in 1948 he wrote the work that, in reversing two digits, made itself into a symbol.

George Orwell in 1948 …

Winston Smith in 1984 …

Tyranny, says Orwell, is enforced poverty, and what makes 1984 remarkable is Orwell’s understanding of how denying people even the most trivial and mundane of personal accessories can reduce them to groping about for a rusty razor-blade, or an unbroken shoelace.

Winston made for the stairs.  It was no use trying the lift.  Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours.  It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week.  The flat was seven flights up, and Winston who was thirty-nine, and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way.  Page 5.

In ancient Rome, the cheap rooms – the insulae – were always on the top floors, above the rich who occupied the spacious atria and impluvia below.  So it remained past Dickens’ time – the higher you had to climb, the poorer you were – until the invention of elevators, when status and value were reversed.

Until, that is, the elevators break.

Exterior hallway in Robert Taylor Homes, Chicago

Some months back I was in India, visiting a friend who lived in a large, fantastically located apartment in downtown Mumbai – on a side street abutting the shorefront, with a view of the dark sparkling Indian Ocean to the west.  The elevator scarcely worked; in fact it seldom worked, for the building was rent-controlled, payments frozen in the rupees of fifty years earlier, so the landlord had no incentive to maintain, and every incentive to allow the building to age into obsolescence, decaying into physical collapse, whence it could be condemned, emptied and sold, to be demolished and replaced with a springing thirty-story high-rise. 

A broken elevator testifies that a landlord does not care – and that is the message being sent by the Party, rulers of Oceania:

Victory Mansions were old flats, built in 1930 or thereabouts, and were falling to pieces.  The plaster flaked constantly from ceilings and walls, the pipes burst in every hard frost, the roof leaked wherever there was snow, the heating system was usually running at half steam when it was not closed down altogether from motives of economy. 

Even solid construction dies without maintenance, and without money

In fact, worse than the landlord who does not care is the landlord who wants to prevent improvement:

Repairs, except what you could do for yourself, had to be sanctioned by remote committees which were liable to hold up even the mending of a window pane for two years.  Page 21.

George Orwell, seeing a future

For Orwell, tyranny meant poverty, and poverty meant housing poverty – a slum. 

The Parsons’ flat was bigger than Winston’s, and dingy in a different way.  Everything had a battered, trampled-on look, as though the place had just been visited by some large violent animal.  Games impediments – hockey sticks, boxing gloves, a burst football, a pair of sweaty shorts turned inside out – lay all over the floor, and on the table there was a litter of dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise books. There was the usual boiled-cabbage smell, common to the whole building, but it was shot through by a sharper reek of sweat, which – one knew this at the first sniff, though it was hard to say how – was the sweat of some person not present at the moment.  In another room someone with a comb and a piece of toilet paper was trying to keep tune with the military music which was still issuing from the telescreen.  Page 21.

Decaying high-rise public housing, Chicago

Re-reading 1984 twenty or so years after my last reading, I am struck by how consistently Orwell paints his dystopia in the practical terms of living and working – especially living – and how the simplest comforts denied are the instruments of repression.  Everything is decaying:

The reality was dingy, decaying cities, where underfed people shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched up nineteenth-century houses that smelt always of cabbage and bad lavatories.  He seemed to see a vision of London, vast and ruinous city of a million dustbins, and mixed up with it was a picture of Mrs. Parsons, a woman with lined face and wispy hair, fiddling helplessly with a blocked wastepipe.  Page 64. 

Oceania is a world of slums, vividly described and all too believable:

He was walking up a cobbled street of little two-story houses with battered doorways which gave straight on the pavement and which were somehow curiously suggestive of rat holes.  There were puddles of filthy water here and there among the cobbles.  In and out of the dark doorways, and down narrow alleyways that branched off on either side, people swarmed in astonishing numbers – girls in full bloom, with crudely lip-sticked mouths, and youths who chased girls, and swollen waddling women who showed you what the girls would be like in ten years’ time, and old bent creatures shuffling along on splayed feet, and ragged barefooted children who played in the puddles and the scattered at angry tells from their mothers.  Perhaps a quarter of the windows in the street were broken and boarded up.  70.

For Orwell, as for my developer friend, a slum can be a low-cost prison.  Victory Mansions’ rooms are little different from prisons – in fact, his descriptions of being in prison are roughly the same as Victory Mansions, where you are the prisoner and ‘they’ are the jailers:

Big Brother is watching you

A prison is a place of no privacy – as O’Brien puts it, we shall meet in the place where there are no shadows.

Winston kept his back to the telescreen.  It was safer; though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing.  A kilometer away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape.  This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste – this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania.  Page 7

In a prison, your schedule is not your own.  You rise on their schedule, you work on their schedule, you eat and sleep on their schedule, you do what they want:

The Physical Jerks would begin in three minutes [… ] Winston sprang to attention in front of the telescreen, upon which the image of a youngish woman, scrawny but muscular, dressed in tunic and gym shoes, had already appeared.  “Arms bending and stretching!” she yapped out.  […]

“Smith!” screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen.  “6079 Smith W!  Yes, you!  Bend lower, please.  You can do better than that.  You’re not trying.  Lower, please!  That’s better, comrade.  Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me.”  Page 34.

If they are the jailers, ‘we’ are the prisoners, and if we are in prison, we are already guilty, so anything more we do is no more than confirming our guilt:

Life as she saw it was quite simple.  You wanted a good time: ‘they,’ meaning the Party, wanted to stop you having it;’ you broke the rules as best you could.  She seemed to think it just as natural that ‘they’ should want to rob you of your pleasures as that you should want to avoid being caught.  109. 

Julia: “Always yell with the crowd, that’s what I say.  It’s the only way to be safe.”

We read 1984 and it grips us because we all fear it.  We fear falling from the ladder of success, falling out of the nest of material possession, falling into begging.

“You see now,” said O’Brien, “that it is at any rate possible.”
“Yes,” said Winston.  Page 213

“They do not exist.  You do not exist.”

Poverty, in 1984, is a slum, and all its characters live and work there every day.

All but one.

We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness

[Continued tomorrow in Part 2].

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Continuing our occasional series on the Ultimate Future City:

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

Opinions change with age; otherwise, what is age for?

– James Blish, in The Triumph of Time, page 504

James Blish and his children, mid-1950s’

Yesterday’s post, one of our series on the ultimate future city, introduced James Blish’s Cities in Flight, who provide the knowledge transfer and wealth generation of an entire galaxy, as New York mayor John Amalfi describes it:

“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

3.         Cities and cops in the economic ecosystem.  Cities, as mission entrepreneurial entities, keep the galactic ecosystem healthy.  They are therefore protected – the ecosystem needs them – but they must stay financially healthy, for bankruptcy means not just insolvency but physical dissolution:

It may seem heartless to dissolve an entity, but …

Before bankruptcy, the alternative was the poorhouse, from which few emerged undamaged

“According to the law, a bankrupt city must be dispersed.  It’s essentially a humane law, in that it prevents desperate mayors and city manages from taking bankrupt cities out again on long job-hunting trips, during which half the Okies on board will die just because of the stubbornness of the people in charge.”  337

The system works only because the rule of law applies not just to workers but also to the enforcers:

“I’d have let us be captured; we could have paid the fine on the Vacate violation, just barely, and with luck we could have gotten a show-cause injunction against breaking us up slapped on the corps for that ‘treason’ charge.”  287

Outright piracy is rare because the cities need the galactic society to thrive:

“The pirates eventually died out, thousands of years ago, when sailing ships were replaced by fueled ships.  The fueled ships were faster than sailing vessels, but they couldn’t themselves become pirates because they had to touch civilized ports regularly to coal up.  They could always get food of some uninhabited island, but for coal they had to visit a real port.”  292

Blish here highlights an important dynamic relevant to our world.  If thieves, criminals, and terrorists can operate completely outside the civilized system, they have the ability to retreat to deserted islands – but if they need the technological benefits of civilized society, eventually civilized society can develop admission and regulatory procedures to hunt down the pirates.

We can’t get nice clothing from a hole in the wall

Blish’s worker cities are citizens, with rights and the expectation of rights, and that’s an important element of balance in the power relationships with the cops:

“The law prescribes that participating cities be broken up.  The full penalty will be applied.”

“No, it won’t either, any more than it is in ninety-four cases out of a hundred.  We’re not a raiding force and we aren’t threatening Earth with anything but a couple of good loud beefs.  We’re here because we couldn’t hope for a fair deal any other way.  All we want is justice.  We’re citizens, not crooks.  We want justice done us, and we’re coming on in to see that it gets done.”  410

An essential of citizenship: demanding justice from one’s government

As I’ve posted elsewhere, non-government entities also have their useful role of being agents on behalf of government, where government transfers risk and pays only for results.

“You [cops] don’t risk a thing.  Either I deliver the planet to you, or I don’t.  If we don’t deliver, you don’t pay.”  270

4.         Rogue cities and the shared interests of civilized entities.  In every ecosystem there are parasites, free riders, who exploit the brand value of pollinating bees, and Blish’s universe has such rogue cities:

“[Bindlestiffs are] the kind of outfit that gives all Okies a bad name.  Most Okies are true hobos; they work for their living wherever they can find work.  The bindlestiff lives by robbery – and murder.”  290

As in other situations, both cops and cities have a shared interest in running the bindlestiffs out of business:

We can’t make a living if the bindlestiffs predominate

“The planets are tough on bindlestiffs for the same reason.  The bindlestiffs are diseased bees; the taint that they carry gets fastened upon innocent cities, cities that are needed to keep new techniques and other essential information on the move from planet to planet.  Obviously, cities and planets alike have to protect themselves from criminal outfits, but there’s the culture as a whole to be considered, as well as the safety of the individual unit; and to maintain that culture, the free passage of legitimate Okies throughout the galaxy has to be maintained.”  399

Over the years, I’ve read Cities in Flight four or five times, previously just for sheer entertainment, but when I hauled it off my shelf to collect the quotes for this post, I found myself hitting paragraphs like that one and thrilling with satisfaction.  Cities, in Blish’s universe, are not only the agents of commerce, they are also the custodians of culture.

This has been true throughout history.  The Medici were urbanists. 

If we have a Renaissance, I can make more money

The Renaissance was hatched in cities; so was the Industrial Revolution, and the Information Revolution.  (Religions may be inspired by hermits and born in deserts, but political revolutions start in cities – St. Petersburtg, Philadelphia, Boston – although to explore this idea would take us off topic.)

Cities, in short, drive technology, and they drive culture. 

What drives the city?

5.                   What is the soul of a city?  Blish started his series out of rapture for his premise, and wrote Earthman, Come Home as a series of serialized novellas, but even from the beginning he incorporated the role of computers.  Blish’s City Fathers, basically a massive CPU in the basement of City Hall somewhere, are described in sketchy early 1950’s terms – they run on vacuum tube, for goodness’ sake! – as huge lumbering boxcars of circuitry that actually shuttle about, coupling and uncoupling to make synaptic connections. 

It looks like this …

But it thinks like these

Nowadays, nobody bothered to remember many facts.  That was what the City Fathers and like machines were for; they stored data.  Living mean memorized nothing but processes, throwing out obsolete ones for new ones as invention made it necessary.  When they needed facts, they asked the machines.  319

They are an adjunct to decision-making, something important when life spans have extended to centuries:

The older a man became, the more quickly he saw answers to tough questions because the more experience he had to bring to bear on them; and the less likely he was to tolerate slow thinking among his associates.  If he were sane, his answers were generally right answers — if he were insane, they were not; but what mattered was the speed of the thinking itself.  In the end, both the sane and the insane became equally dictatorial, less and less ready to explain why they picked on answer over another.  319

Perhaps because mayors could become insane autocrats, the City Fathers have a curious role as a check on the executive.  Although only advisory – a mayor can turn them off, and Amalfi several times does – they also adjudicate the results of elections, and when displeased can remove a city manager from office (by shooting him dead, as happens to one of Blish’s protagonists).  Despite this, Amalfi and others see them as little more than electronic abacuses:

“Let’s put the whole problem up to the City Fathers.  I have always found them useful for resolving doubts.  In questions involving value judgments, it’s helpful to have an opponent who is not only remorselessly logical, but also can’t distinguish between a value and a Chinese onion.”

On this point, of course, he was wrong, as he found out rather quickly.  He had forgotten that machine logic is a set of values in itself, whether the machine knows it or not.  571

A value system even if all unknowing

Blish also endows them with unexpectedly poetic memory banks:

‘If this be the whole fruit of victory, we say: if the generations of mankind suffered and laid down their lives; if prophets and martyrs sang in the fire, and all the sacred tears were shed for no other end than that a race of creatures of such unexampled insipidity should succeed, to protract in saecula saeculorum their contended and inoffensive lives – why, at such a rate, better lose than win the battle, or at all events better ring down the curtain before the last act of the play, so that a business that began so importantly may be saved from so singularly flat a winding-up.’  The Will to Believe, by William James.  474

William James: I will believe in a better future

There comes a moment, whose plot significance I will not spoil, when the City Fathers are consulted about a matter of great importance, to which they respond with a remarkable display of what Amalfi calls ‘the prime rationalization of all time’:

“Contradiction.  Third factor.  Take us.”

“Justify,” said Amalfi, a little unevenly.

“Our prime directive is the survival of the city.  The city no longer exists as a physical organism, but we are still being consulted, hence the city in some sense survives.  It does not survive in its citizens, since it no longer has any;’ they are new Earthmen now.  We conclude that we are the city, and we are ordered to survive by our prime directive; therefore, take us.”  572

I grew up in a pleasant suburb – Marblehead, a charming and picturesque town to which I always return with a nostalgia bordering on unreason.  Yet I live in a city, one of the world’s great and perplexing cities, and have become not just a city-dweller but a city-lover.  In all their mess and chaos, in their maddening production of slums, there is in cities something that raises people from their complacency to the great ambitions of changing the world. 

It’s not an illusion: people walk faster in cities, like Dharavi, Mumbai

As Amalfi says, at another apologetic moment:

“Mind you, Miramon, I hold out no hope, but –”

“—except the hope you hold out,” said Miramon, his eyes shining.  “Now I am hearing from you what I hoped to hear.  This is the voice of Earth of memory.”  518

Hope is a phenomenon of cities.  So is creativity.  So is squalor, injustice.  Cities in Flight is more than just a story of the far future; it’s a clarion call for the twenty-first century, and a motto for what we want human society to be.

That was unknowable.  But the unknowable was what he wanted.

There was no reason to delay.  Retma had already pronounced the epitaph for Man: We did not have the time to learn everything that we wanted to know.

“So be it,” Amalfi said.  He touched the button over his heart.

Creation began.  596

Not just a vision, a motto

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Continuing our occasional series on the Ultimate Future City:

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 Pittsburgh of the solar system; the spindizzy had lifted the mining equipment and the refining plants bodily to bring life back to that lichen-scabbed ball of rust.  239

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 New York, NY, too, but that, the old maps showed, was misleading; the city aloft was only Manhattan, or New York County.   242

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 Thirty-Fourth Street and the [Sixth] Avenue, down to Bowling Green, where City Hall was.  249

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 Manhattan centuries ago; this one evidently had been the Astoria line of the BMT.   319

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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Author’s note: Sir Arthur C. Clarke, the last of science fiction’s original Big Three, died yesterday at the age of 90.  Three weeks ago, I was in Colombo, where Clarke lived, and in the very brief period when I wasn’t working with the Slum Dwellers International folks, several colleagues and I strolled to dinner at the Galle Face Hotel, in whose lobby there’s a plaque honoring Clarke, who in 1997 resided there for three intense weeks while banging out his novel 3001.

I always thought of Clarke as ageless and sexless.  I knew he was infirm, and his writing had wound down, so what with my busy-ness and not wishing to try to foist myself upon him as a minor science fiction writer, the thought of trying to find him never crossed my mind, particularly as the work I was doing on formalizing and improving slums seems unimaginably far from Clarke’s futures.  Yet his novel The City and the Stars, which presents a particularly Clarke-ian vision of the future of homo urbanis, in its own way stands as something to which humanity may aspire, or which humanity may achieve.

I’ve had this post in inventory for some time, thinking it timeless.  Today it is in some sense one day too late.  So let this post stand in lieu of an obituary of an author whose best work I greatly admire and repeatedly recall, an author who changed what science fiction was, who changed many people’s vision of the future, and along the way contributed to my thinking about housing and cities.

Science fiction of the Nineteen-Fifties was strongly influenced, I think, by World War II.  For the first time, cities themselves had become vast battlegrounds, and were comprehensively destroyed.  While Hiroshima and Nagasaki put the final punctuation mark on warfare in the urban environment, the firebombing of Dresden, the house-to-house battles of Stalingrad, and the London Blitz had all shown that in aerial and mechanized warfare, cities became targets for destruction.

London, 1940

This shift — from redoubt to ground zero — represent a sea change in human history, because before World War II, cities had been spared warfare.  (This trend will continue in the twenty-first century, where war will invest itself in cities that become permanent low-level battlegrounds among sub-national micro-groups.)  Whereas in the second war Berlin and London were targets for incendiaries and ordnance, during World War I they were brightly lit fleshpots of R&R.  Further back in time, cities were the targets of siege, not of shelling.

The world had never experienced technological urban warfare

The result, in the 1950’s, was that science fiction took on the urban future as its topic.  Previously I’ve posted three times about science fiction’s cities:

·         First about Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel (1954), where humanity lives in overly dense grim hives.

·         Then about The Naked Sun (1956), where wealth has let a handful of sybarites cover a whole world.

·         Most recently, about Robert Silverberg’s highly disturbing The World Inside (1970), where humanity has embraced fecundity and its consequence, vertical density.

Common to all these visions is the presumption, indeed the axiom, that the urban environment shapes not only society but human interaction itself.  Nowhere is that thinking more explicitly presented than in Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars, the germinal idea of which was published in 1950 as Against the Fall of Night.  

Imagine how different Clarke’s story was from those published with it

From its opening paragraphs, the novel leaps into a far future time where the exoskeletal city itself has become protector of society and the fragile human society within:

Like a glowing jewel, the city lay upon the breast of the desert.  Once it had known change and alteration, but not Time passed it by.  Night and day fled across the desert’s face, but in the streets of Diaspar it was always afternoon, and darkness never came.  The long winter nights might dust the desert with desert, as the last moisture let in the thin air of Earth congealed — but the city knew neither heat nor cold.  It had no contact with the outer worked; it was a universe itself.

Neither the novel nor Mr. Clarke himself ever explained how he chose the name, but its echoes of diaspora, of people uprooted from their homes, that serves as an unstated counterpoint to the story’s manifest message of shelter.

Men had built cities before, but never a city such as this.  Some had lasted for centuries, some for millenniums, before Time had swept away even their names. 

A good candidate for the oldest continuously inhabited city is Damascus, which has traceable habitation perhaps 4,000 years. 

Even in 1677, Damascus had been occupied for nearly 4,000 years

Diaspar alone had challenged eternity, defending itself and all it sheltered against the slow attrition of the ages, the ravages of decay, and the corruption of rust.

Since the city was built, the oceans of Earth had passed away and the desert had encompassed all the globe. 

A city surviving for even multiple millennia is rare enough, so one lasting a million years is likely to be more than just luck — it takes management.

The last mountains had been ground to dust by wind and rain, and the world was too weary to bring forth more.  The city did not care; Earth itself would crumble and Diaspar would still protect the children of its makers, bearing them and their treasures safely down the stream of Time.  Page 3.

In Mr. Clarke’s conception, human memory is fallible and tradition is fickle.  Yet Diaspar keeps its nervous system intact:

The monitor was now recalling its memories at a far higher rate; the image of Diaspar was receding into the past at millions of years a minute….  Through all these changes, the basic design of the city had not altered.  Buildings came and went, but the pattern of streets seemed eternal, and the park remained as the green heart of Diaspar.  Page 75.

My favorite example of the persistence of vision effect as it relates to streets is in lower Manhattan, near Battery Park. 

When the Dutch settled Manhattan, the lower tip was their most accessible and defensible point, so naturally New York’s great main roads (such as Broadway) begin here.  

Many cities start with a fort on a point of land

Then came the ferries, which tied up at Battery Park because that was where the city was.  Then, when it came time to build the bridges and tunnels, sure enough they ran right through Battery Park, because that was where the major streets were. 

The sea and streets were the same seventy years ago

Each layer of network and nervous system braided into the established one, even as the buildings were torn down and built higher, ever higher.

A nerve center for 350 years, and still green

Yet, for all its persistence, the time scale I’ve just described is only 350 years.  If the ultimate future city is to preserve its imprint of itself for multiple millennia, it must have an incorruptible and eidetic guardian.  Enter Mr. Clarke’s favorite protagonist, the computer:

“Diaspar is not merely a machine, you know — it is a living organism, and an immortal one.  We are so accustomed to our society that we can’t appreciate how strange it would have seemed to our first ancestors.  Here we have a tiny, enclosed world which never changes except in its minor details, and yet which is perfectly stable, age after age.  It has probably lasted longer than the rest of human history — yet in that history there were, so it is believed, countless thousands of separate cultures and civilizations which endured for a little while and then perished.  How did Diaspar achieve its extraordinary stability?”

“Through the Memory Banks, of course,” he replied.

Though wags suggested Clarke derived H-A-L from taking one letter off of I-B-M, he himself denied it.

“That is only a very small part of the answer.  With exactly the same people, you could build many different patterns of society.  I can’t prove that, and I’ve no direct evidence of it, but I believe it’s true.”

Here Mr. Clarke’s vision diverges from his contemporary Asimov: he seems to be positing that even if its coral skeleton is immutable, the people within it are permutable.  He goes so far as to imagine that the people of Diaspar have fixed their numbers in absolute terms.  No deaths — when a body has accumulated enough experiences, the person goes to the Memory Banks, edits out unpleasant or dross memories, and stores his personality electronically, heading into a sleep of many centuries.  Although Diaspar’s notional population might be ten million (as I recall, the author himself never specifies), at any given time only 1/1000th of them are alive at any one point, so the subset animate population is always a new shuffle of the psychological, intellectual, and cultural deck.  Even this constant aeration is, however, merely a diversion, simply a chance to create new combinations within tightly circumscribed limits.  Diaspar’s denizens sought stability at all costs:

“The designers of the city did not merely fix its population; they fixed the laws governing its behavior.  Diaspar is a frozen culture, which cannot change outside of narrow limits.”  Page 42.

Though culturally static, Diaspar as an adult’s Disneyland, where everything is imaginable and nothing Is dangerous:

They were not bored, for they had access to everything that had happened in the realms of imagination or reality since the days when the city was built.  To men whose minds were thus constituted, it was a completely satisfying experience.  That it was also a wholly futile one, even Alvin did not yet comprehend.  Page 30.

A city in perfect stasis is a dull place for a story, so Mr. Clarke combines his amateur sociology with its storytelling imperatives and introduces an out-of-whack-event maker:

I’ll play the fool, to fool the king

The office of Jester was the solution — at first sight naïve, yet actually profoundly subtle — which the city’s designers had evolved.  In all the history of Diaspar there were less than two hundred persons whose mental inheritance filled them for this peculiar role.  They had certain privileges … on rare and unforeseeable occasions, the Jester would turn the city upside-down by some prank which might be no more than an elaborate practical joke, or which might be a calculated assault on some currently cherished belief or way of life.  Page 51.

Diaspar needs the Jester because it lacks children as the eternally randomizing element.   And it lacks something else:

There was now no woman in Diaspar who knew or cared for what had once been the final aim of love.

So central we deify it

This is a very curious conception for an author who himself never had any children and whose marriage was exceedingly brief, almost perfunctory.

There were no real emotions, no deep passions, in the immortal city.  Perhaps such things only thrived because of their very transience, because they could not last forever and lay always under the shadow which Diaspar had banished.  Page 165

The shadow of death?  The shadow of birth?  We never learn, for there is very little story in The City and the Stars aside from its conception of the immortal city, self-preserving through its inanimate computer guardian.  Yet there is a curious linkage because Mr. Clarke’s antiseptic Diaspar and Mr. Silverberg’s bountiful urbmons.  Both of them assume that the human reproductive urge is a powerful driver not only of civilization but also of urbanization — that we make cities in order to be fruitful and multiply beyond nature’s un-technological bounty.  At the same time, whereas Mr. Silverberg’s world is so consumed with procreation that every form of leisure is sacrificed, Mr. Clarke’s is so consumed with eternal leisure that procreation itself is banished as unnecessary.

For Mr. Silverberg, homo urbanis is a baby-making swarm; for Mr. Clarke, homo urbanis is urbanely childless.  Despite their antithetical approach to the child-rearing problem, by taking their imperatives to their logical conclusion, they have respectively produced cities that are as much dead ends as Asimov’s antipodes of the enclosed steel caves or the wide-open empty spaces populated by narcissistic recluses.

In the eternal city, we watch each other watching each other

Postscript: Arthur C. Clarke had no children.  His progeny were exclusively in the realm of ideas, and in the realm of ideas they will live on long after him.

Another ultimate future city: the ship Discovery

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