Fantastic Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror ed. by Stefan Rabitsch et al.

Abstract

Reviewed by: Fantastic Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror ed. by Stefan Rabitsch et al. Jeremy Withers (bio) Cities of Hope and Cities of Despair. Stefan Rabitsch, Michael Fuchs, and Stefan L. Brandt, eds. Fantastic Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. UP of Mississippi, 2022. x+ 311 pp. $99 hc, $30 pbk. This volume brings together an impressive collection of essays to argue that "American cities appear to be everywhere" (10) in the global cultural landscape. In their introduction to the collection, Stefan Rabitsch and Michael Fuchs go on to assert: "Indeed, rather than through firsthand experience, we primarily encounter the American city on the movie screen, at the end of the TV remote, or while operating a game controller" (9). As their collection aims to prove, that statement is no less true when applied to works that fall under the label of the fantastic: works of sf, fantasy, and horror. Also in their introduction, Rabitsch and Fuchs declare that the American city is one defined by "overlapping dualities" (4) such as rich vs. poor, high vs. low, dark vs. light, and so forth. To help bolster this claim, the editors sketch out some of the vacillating historical perceptions of American cities, ranging from the Puritans' redemptive "city upon a hill" to Thomas Jefferson's anti-urban agrarianism to the utopianism of writers such as Edward Bellamy. The second half of the introduction consists of Rabitsch and Fuchs's discussion of what they see as nine essential characteristics of "the Fantastic City": such a city is representational, relies on scripts, is modular (i.e. assemblage-like), transnational, horizontal, erodes the separation between urban space and its surroundings, is vertical, interlinked with mobility, and is a palimpsest. Within the collection proper, the essays favor an examination of cities in works of popular culture such as big-budget Hollywood films and video games, with some essays focusing instead on works more associated with high culture, such as the literary fiction of Colson Whitehead and Samuel R. Delany. [End Page 582] Fans and scholars of sf will be pleased to find that this genre receives the most attention. With regards to essays focusing (primarily) on science-fictional film, Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper's chapter examines The Phantom Empire (1935), a "musical-science fiction-western hybrid" (54) starring Gene Autry, to argue that this Depression-era serial film frets about the sterility of urban environments and modern technology while celebrating the values of the American frontier and heartland. Robert Yeates contributes a timely study of race and racism in three post-apocalyptic works: W.E.B. Du Bois's story "The Comet" (1920) and the films The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959) and Z for Zachariah (2015). Yeates's essay poignantly concludes with the observation that "the fact that these three texts tell such remarkably similar stories highlights how uncomfortably similar the problems faced by African Americans are in 2015 to those perceived by Du Bois in 1920" (132). Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns's chapter analyzes two dystopian films starring action icon Sylvester Stallone and reveals how they "both tap into preoccupations about city violence and urban decay in the 1980s and 1990s" (167). Michael Fuchs and Sarah Lahm shift the focus to virtual realities as represented in the video game Assassin's Creed III (2012) and the films The Thirteenth Floor (1999) and TRON: Legacy (2010) to explore how virtual environments offer up promises of freedom but inevitably reveal themselves to be places of constraint and limitation. Usefully pivoting away from the Anglo-American focus of much sf scholarship, J. Jesse Ramírez discusses Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer (2008), a film whose setting of Tijuana, Mexico, marginalizes the "cities … usually represented as epicenters of futurity" (211), such as Los Angeles or London. Further, the film's depictions of technological disembodiment explore how such technology is steeped in the utopian potential to forge connections across borders at the same time as it might be a dystopian tool for neocolonial exploitation. With regard to essays focusing on sf literature, Carl Abbott's comes first in the collection and is, unfortunately...