The Urban as Narrative

Abstract

137 BOOKS IN REVIEW to be able more easily to find some of these sources oneself. Rather than accuse a fellow scholar of shoddy work, I would suggest these errors are symptomatic of the broader crisis in the humanities. There is less time and money available for editing, constructing bibliographies, and indexing, and algorithms cannot do this in a way that is truly beneficial to humans (yet). Humanistic inquiry is slow, costly, and crucial to the healthy functioning of civil society. We as scholars must either make meaningful progress advocating for conditions that allow university presses to once again afford such necessities, or seriously reconsider the monograph as a hurdle to attaining tenure.—Nathaniel Isaacson, North Carolina State University The Urban as Narrative. Yael Maurer and Meyrav Koren-Kuik, eds. Cityscapes of the Future: Urban Spaces in Science Fiction. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Rodopi, 2018. 217 pp. $87 ebk, $96 hc. At the beginning of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), the viewer watches as the film slowly pans over a bleak, artificially lit landscape. Fire roars upward from long, pipe-like towers whose purposes are obscured. This harrowing landscape proclaims to the viewer that they are in a desolate place. The landscape establishes the dark tone of this future world and the trials of protagonist Rick Deckard take place in this dense noir urbanism. The city is an important feature of Blade Runner’s narrative. In recognition of the deep and complex connections of urbanism to sf narrative, editors Maurer and Koren-Kuik have brought together a collection of essays in Cityscapes of the Future that explore the ways in which the location of a narrative effects and affects the characters, the plot, and the reader’s engagement with the story. In this collection, the reader is offered a look into how place contains narrative. Cityscapes of the Future is divided into three main sections: “The City and the Body,” “Cities of Estrangement,” and “Cities of Imagination.” This thematic division gives the chapters an enjoyable flow and allows the reader fully to engage with each section before moving on to the next. The grouping of texts with similar approaches and theoretical discourses organizes the individual articles into a digestible whole. “The City and the Body” considers the effects of urbanism on the body; in this context, body is both physical—the character’s body as described by the author—and subjective—the character’s body as that character experiences it. The authors in this section point to parallels in the ways that sf creates and organizes cities to mirror characters. In the first chapter, “Urban Twinship,” Inbar Kaminsky demonstrates how the city of Veniss in Jeff Vandermeer’s Veniss Underground (2003) reflects the bodies of the characters. This is a strong article that makes the connection between the different levels of the stratified city of Veniss and the desirability of the characters’ bodies: the higher levels of the city and the bodies of the people living at those levels are cleaner, wealthier, and more beautiful. As the characters travel down into the bowels of Veniss, Kaminsky shows the reader how this urbanism is embodied. The lower levels are dirty and maze-like, inhabited by “grotesque bodies” (25). This chapter is followed by Eduaro Barros-Grela’s “Past Future Cityscapes,” which examines the fluid nature of the city of Tokyo-3 from the 138 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) anime Neon Genesis Evangelion (1996) and of the urban settings in Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark (2008). Barros-Grela uses these examples to demonstrate how posthumanism can create a posturbanism. This article tries to do rather too much, however, in a short space in terms of establishing a posthuman and posturban urbanism, and it is not as clear as it might be. Elsa Bouet brings this section to a close by examining the sf urban landscape as it relates to body, control, and punishment. Bouet demonstrates how the urban architectures in China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000), Alastair Reynold’s Terminal World (2010), and Christopher Priest’s Inverted World (1974) play a part in regulating the social status of the body. Bouet’s analysis nicely combines Marxist...