Fantastic cities : American urban spaces in science fiction, fantasy, and horror

Contributions by Carl Abbott, Jacob Babb, Marleen S. Barr, Michael Fuchs, John Glover, Stephen Joyce, Sarah Lahm, James McAdams, Cynthia J. Miller, Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Chris Pak, María Isabel Pérez Ramos, Stefan Rabitsch, J. Jesse Ramírez, A. Bowdoin Van Riper, Andrew Wasserman, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, and Robert Yeates Metropolis, Gotham City, Mega-City One, Panem's Capitol, the Sprawl, Caprica City—American (and Americanized) urban environments have always been a part of the fantastic imagination. Fantastic Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror focuses on the American city as a fantastic geography constrained neither by media nor rigid genre boundaries. Fantastic Cities builds on a mix of theoretical and methodological tools that are drawn from criticism of the fantastic, media studies, cultural studies, American studies, and urban studies. Contributors explore cultural media across many platforms such as Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy, the Arkham Asylum video games, the 1935 movie serial The Phantom Empire , Kim Stanley Robinson's fiction, Colson Whitehead's novel Zone One , the vampire films Only Lovers Left Alive and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night , Paolo Bacigalupi's novel The Water Knife , some of Kenny Scharf's videos, and Samuel Delany's classic Dhalgren . Together, the contributions in Fantastic Cities demonstrate that the fantastic is able to "real-ize" that which is normally confined to the abstract, metaphorical, and/or subjective. Consequently, both utopian aspirations for and dystopian anxieties about the American city become literalized in the fantastic city. Acknowledgments Contents Introduction (Stefan Rabitsch and Michael Fuchs) Section 1: Imagining Fantastic Cities Imagining Gothom: Hard Knowledge in a Soft City (Stephen Joyce) "Whither Mankind?" The Fantastic Meets the Frontier in The Phantom Empire (Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper) Cities and Communities: The Urban Vision of Kim Stanley Robinson (Carl Abbott) Section 2: Picturing the End of the Urban World The Banality of the Apocolypse: Colson Whitehead's Necropolis and Mirthless Parody (Jacob Babb) Cities of the Dead: Urban Vampires in Only Lovers Left Alive and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock) Confronting Race and Racism in the Post-Apocalyptic American City (Robert Yeates) The Water Apocolypse: Utopian Desert Venice Cities and Arcologies in Southwestern Dystopian Fiction (Maria Isabel Pérez-Ramos) "It's Not Good Here Anymore": Nuclear Survival and New York City's Space in Kenny Scharf's Videos (Andrew Wasserman) Seclion 3: Freedom and Restrictions in the Fantastic City Sylvester Stallone and Urban Order in the 1980s and 19990s: Gendering the City in Demolition Man and Judge Dredd (Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns) "We Speak Another Language Here": Samuel Delany's Dhalgren and the City of Folly (James McAdams) Imagining Digital Cities: Freedom and (Non-)Human Agency in Representations of Virtual Realities (Michael Fuchs and Sarah Lahm) Sleep Dealer; or, Tijuana, Ciudad del Futuro (J.Jesse Ramírez) Section 4 The City and Its Environment(s) Terraforming and the City (Chris Pak) Olympia, Wilderness, and Consumption in Laird Barron's Old Leech Cycle (John Glover) Ecological Plant-Based Urban Planning Makes Eleonor Cameron's The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet Real (Marleen S. Barr) Bibliography Contributors Index "Metropolis, Gotham City, Mega-City One, Panem's Capitol, the Sprawl, Caprica City-American (and Americanized) urban environments have always been a part of the fantastic imagination. Fantastic Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror focuses on the American city as a fantastic geography constrained neither by media nor rigid genre boundaries. Fantastic Cities builds on a mix of theoretical and methodological tools that are drawn from criticism of the fantastic, media studies, cultural studies, American studies, and urban studies. Contributors explore cultural media across many platforms such as Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy, the Arkham Asylum video games, the 1935 movie serial The Phantom Empire, Kim Stanley Robinson's fiction, Colson Whitehead's novel Zone One, the vampire films Only Lovers Left Alive and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Paolo Bacigalupi's novel The Water Knife, some of Kenny Scharf's videos, and Samuel Delany's classic Dhalgren. Together, the contributions in Fantastic Cities demonstrate that the fantastic is able to "real-ize" that which is normally confined to the abstract, metaphorical, and/or subjective. Consequently, both utopian aspirations for and dystopian anxieties about the American city become literalized in the fantastic city"-- Provided by publisher The Green Mister Rogers: Environmentalism in "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" centers on the show's environmentalism, primarily expressed through his themed week "Caring for the Environment," produced in 1990 in coordination with the twentieth anniversary of Earth Day. Unfolding against a trash catastrophe in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, Rogers advances an environmentalism for children that secures children in their family homes while extending their perspective to faraway places, from the local recycling center to Florida's coral reef. Rogers depicts animal wisdom and uses puppets to voice anxiety and hope and shows an interconnected world where each part of creation is valued, and love is circulated in networks of care. Ultimately, Rogers cultivates a practical wisdom that provides a way for children to confront the environmental crisis through action and hope and, in doing so, develop into adults who possess greater care for the environment and a capacious imagination for solving the ecological problems we face Focuses on the American city as a fantastic geography constrained neither by media nor rigid genre boundaries. The book builds on a mix of theoretical and methodological tools that are drawn from criticism of the fantastic, media studies, cultural studies, American studies, and urban studies.