SharedWorlds

Shared Worlds is proud to announce the following official sponsors, whose major contributions help make Shared Worlds possible:

• Tor Books
• Wizards of the Coast LLC
• Realms of Fantasy Magazine

For more information on corporate sponsorships, please contact us.

Shared World's Top Five Real Fantasy/SF Cities
What Would You Choose?

By Jeff VanderMeer, Shared Worlds Assistant Director and Instructor

At Shared Worlds students create fantasy and science fiction worlds to fuel their writing, art, and game development. But even the strangest made-up place can have some real-world spark. Our own planet is often surreal, alien, and beautifully strange–and cities tend to focus our fascination with these qualities. Sometimes the exoticness comes from finding the unexpected where we live, and sometimes it comes from visiting a place that's foreign to us. Everyone also has a different idea of what "fantasy" or "science fiction" looks like in real places. (In fact, as Neil Gaiman sagely told us: "I think as I get older I get more convinced that it doesn't matter what city you pick, they are all fantastical. It just means you have to look at them right, or pick the right time of day.")

So we decided to ask five top SF-fantasy authors – Elizabeth Hand, Nalo Hopkinson, Ursula K. LeGuin, China Miéville, and Michael Moorcock –the following question: "What's your pick for the top real-life fantasy or science fiction city?"

#1 - Elizabeth Hand - REYKAVIK, ICELAND

World Fantasy and Nebula Award-winning writer Elizabeth Hand is known for her evocative, often dark explorations of tangled relationships in a fantasy context. Her last novel, Generation Loss, took on themes close to home, with its brilliant evocation of her home state of Maine, and the madness that can haunt an artist.

"It's more like an off-world colony than any place on Earth. Architecture that consists largely of corrugated metal and concrete (think Quonset huts), a dauntingly inhospitable landscape –lava flows, cliffs, glaciers, hot springs, immense waterfalls. Very few trees –the vegetation in places consists largely of lichen or moss, with grass in the central areas and some stunted birch or conifers. Only one indigenous mammal, the arctic fox, though a handful of others have been introduced; overall, quite a small biomass though tons of birds. Fewer insects than anywhere else, excepting maybe the Antarctic. Combine that with a vibrant (well, maybe not so vibrant since the country went bankrupt), highly educated populace (highest literacy rates on the planet) and a huge proportion of cutting edge artists/musicians/writers, and you have a place that resembles Samuel R. Delany's Triton (Trouble on Triton) in real life."

#2 - Nalo Hopkinson – KINGSTON, JAMAICA

Currently living in Canada, Nalo Hopkinson has won the World Fantasy Award, the Locus Award, and the Aurora Award. Her distinctive, often lyrical prose, serves fantasy and science fiction novels pull from a variety of diverse influences, including the Caribbean. The New Moon's Arms is her latest book.

"It's where I was born, my home town, and every time I go back there, it seems more and more futuristic, in that gritty, William Gibson, China Miéville, Blade Runner kind of way. High technology (as often bootlegged as not) mixes happily with low. You'll see the newest cars, RVs and motorbikes from all over the world zipping along the winding streets, past everything from old sugar plantations and women doing their laundry by hand, to shiny, air-conditioned malls and the earth-moving machines of the big bauxite production facility. There's a whole drowned city just offshore; Port Royal, once the richest and most decadent city in the west. The lingua is a blend of English, Spanish and West African, with some Cantonese and Indian for good measure. And the people come in every colour and blend of colours under the sun. The soundscape of a Kingston morning can include the choir of the church down the road practising for Sunday morning, raunchy Jamaican dancehall music from the patty shop across the way, cocks crowing, a pig being slaughtered, a live sermon being broadcast by microphone into the streets, and the popping of gun shots. The future is here, and it is Kingston, Jamaica ."

#3 - Ursula K. LeGuin – VENICE, ITALY

From her recent Nebula Award-winning novel Powers to such classics as The Left Hand of Darkness and the Earthsea fantasies, Ursula K. LeGuin has long been considered an icon of science fiction and fantasy. From her home in Portland, Oregon, she continues to write fiction that emphasizes both the mundane and the extraordinary in human life.

"It isn't hard to imagine a city that's built on a marsh in a lagoon, and is slowly but inevitably sinking back into the marsh, but it's the details that count; and some of the details require an active fantasy. For instance, that all the main streets are water. Sidestreets are narrow and the bridges arched, so no horses, no motorized vehicles. For centuries and centuries all traffic is on foot and by boat; and the boats are special, long, narrow, driven not by oars but by poling, for the canal-streets aren't very deep. Then they allow motorized boats on the canals, and all of sudden there's pollution, noise instead of quiet, and also wakes, waves, swamping the streets and plazas, which are already going under water in storms. Long ago the city was a powerful community, wealthy, full of artists, and built beautiful palaces and churches along the canals and on the islands –high buildings that look as delicate and colorful as the creations of glass the city is famous for. Now these buildings are as battered and threatened by floods of tourists as they are by floods of water, and the city is forced to live as a sort of museum of itself, populated more and more not by its own citizens but by foreigners. What is it like, now, to be a Venetian in Venice?"

#4 - China Miéville – LONDON, ENGLAND

Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, among others, China Miéville continues to expand the possibilities of fantastical literature through novels such as his classic Perdido Street Station and the just-released The City in the City.

"Because it is the triumph of a lack of planning –both for good and bad. It's chaos –and whether you say that with a gasp of despair or glee or both is up to you. Whereas Paris (certainly in the centre) is the success of a single overarching monomaniacal topographic vision, London is a chaotic patchwork of history, architecture, style, as disorganised as any dream, and like any dream possessing an underlying logic, but one that we can't quite make sense of, though we know it's there. A shoved-together city cobbled from centuries of distinct aesthetics disrespectfully clotted in a magnificent triumph of architectural philistinism. A city of jingoist sculptures, concrete caryatids, ugly ugly ugly financial bombast, reconfiguration. A city full of parks and gardens, which have always been magic places, one of the greenest cities in the world, though it's a very dirty shade of green –and what sort of grimy dryads does London throw up? You tell me."

#5 - Michael Moorcock – MARRAKESH, MOROCCO

Widely considered one of the best of England's post-World War II writers, Michael Moorcock's honors are legion, and include the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. In addition to his novels, Moorcock's exploits include classic stints as an editor for New Worlds and brilliant nonfiction in the form of essays, reviews, and commentary.

"Old maps of Europe always showed Jerusalem as the centre of the world and symbolically, of course, this is understandable; but for me Marrakesh is the centre, where so many of the old trade routes met and where, still, Mercedes limousines, camels, donkeys and overloaded Peugeot trucks struggle to enter the narrow gates of a walled city which, rather more often than Casablanca, was where world leaders came to argue over the fates of millions. Marrakesh was where the balance of power between France and Morocco was held. It's where the Taureq, swathed in indigo and riding white camels, come in their haughty magnificence to trade with the Rif and the Bedouin, where privileged tourists lounge beside the pool at the Mamounia hotel, hardly aware of the long and bloody history which everywhere surrounds them. Here are the Menara gardens, tranquil as only desert peoples know how to create. The rosey walls of the old city are surrounded by great green palmeries, the snowy peaks of the Atlas from which the Al Glaoui pashas, their power based on a single Krupps cannon, maintained their ruthless power until, with the retreat of the French, their enemies at last attacked. A friend of mine, a mercenary flyer in the pay of the pasha, remembers drinking a cup of mint tea in a cafe in Djaama el Fnaa, the vast Square of the Dead, while Al Glaoui's harried forces raked the city with machine gun fire as the Sultan's men swept in. You can still see the bullet marks in the walls of the old palace but the Glaoui have been all but forgotten, particularly by the tourists who watch the fantasias where Berber tribesmen –the oldest indigenous people who resisted the Arab conquest and practise their own, tolerant form of Islam –put on glorious shows, riding their wonderful stallions in displays of extraordinary horsemanship and firing the long rifles which once made them feared from the Sahara to the sea. For years, Marrakesh was the centre of my world, at least, and I still have friends there amongst the old families of the Medina, who can trace their ancestors back to times when, in England , the Conqueror built his Tower. Here, too, is another famous tower, the Katoubia mosque –the mosque of the booksellers where you can still find stalls selling everything from beautiful editions of the Q'oran to battered Olympia Press copies of The Naked Lunch. If you ever go to the Magreb, you will find little trace of old Morocco in industrial Casablanca, but in Marrakesh you will discover all the romance you ever yearned for."

***

Rekyavik, Kingston, Venice, London, Marrakesh.

Do you agree or disagree? What real city or cities would you choose as most fantastical or SFnal? I know Prague would be high on my list, along with places like Dubai.

Post a blog entry on this topic and we'll do a follow-up piece after the camp with links to some of the best answers we find on the Internet. Just remember to link back to this article so we can find you on the Internet. And, in the meantime, we'll let our students know about your entries, as support for their world-building.

Also visit SF Signal, a big supporter of Shared Worlds, for more great responses to this question, as part of their current MindMeld –and please consider making a donation to Shared Worlds. This is a unique opportunity for teens. Thank you for your support.