City Limits: Boundary Conditions and the Building-Cities of Science Fiction

Amy Butt

doi:10.16995/olh.233

Abstract

Can the rigidly bound city-buildings of science fiction (SF) provide a critical space to resist a movement towards structural divisions within the urban realm? Drawing on the growing body of urban studies research that utilizes the radical imagination and cognitive estrangement of SF as tools for critiquing the modern city, this paper focuses on three SF texts which explicitly address the architectural and social implications of extreme urban enclosure: Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Oath of Fealty (1981), Isaac Asimov’s Caves of Steel (1953) and James Blish and Norman Knight’s A Torrent of Faces (1967). In each, the implications of gated communities are extrapolated and exaggerated to offer a glimpse into societies where a physical boundary creates spatial privilege by intensifying difference. By providing an estranging and critically distanced perspective on urban enclosure, these novels support existing movements to identify and resist damaging social division and structural segregation in the cities we currently inhabit.

Highlights

All outputs in CentAUR are protected by Intellectual Property Rights law, including copyright law
The authors of Oath of Fealty, Caves of Steel, A Torrent of Faces have each stripped away the nuances of a multitude of influences on behaviour to explore a direct relationship between society and the built environment that houses it
The cognitive estrangement established by these novels provides a continual site for re-appraisal of the city, a space to critique the seemingly inevitable development of segregated space and resist the patterns of habit which allow these morally unjustifiable spaces to be developed

Summary

Introduction

All outputs in CentAUR are protected by Intellectual Property Rights law, including copyright law. By providing an estranging and critically distanced perspective on urban enclosure, these novels support existing movements to identify and resist damaging social division and structural segregation in the cities we currently inhabit.

Results

Conclusion