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Author
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Comment
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Carrie
Unregistered User
(8/12/02 10:42:30 pm)
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mythic cities
In the course of studying the social and cultural significance of cities and the modern mindset, I've decided to take a closer look to fictional cityscapes and I'm curious as to what the board members here have to say about such. My current research focuses on Tolkien's cities, the Goblin city in Labryinth, the Emerald City of Oz, Batman's Gotham, the lost city of Atlantis and the city planet Corusant in Star Wars. I'm curious as to what your favorite fictional cities might be and what it is about them that struck a chord with you. Even though such places never existed, they still struck a chord with their readers. What makes such scenery memorable? Is it the ideals of the utopian/disutopian vision that makes an imaginary city vibrate with more life than a modern megalopolis existing in our highly idealized worldview? Comments?
Carrie
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Jane Yolen
Unregistered User
(8/12/02 11:00:10 pm)
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OZ
Having just recently read Wonderful Wizard of Oz aloud with my seven year old granddaughter, I was struck with how bare-boned Baum's prose was. There is little to no description of Emerald City, at least in the first book. The most striking things in it are the wall around the city, and the fact that visitors (and inhabitants) have to wear green glsses which turn everything in the city an emerald color.
I had loved the Oz books as a child and this was a major disappointment.
Jane
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Jess
Unregistered User
(8/13/02 4:49:25 pm)
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Oz
Jane,
I noticed the same thing when I re-read Oz about a year back. I had devoured the Oz books as a child, but actually recalled very little. Perhaps you recalled the vivid descriptions Baum used in his later books, or could you have been influenced by the movies and plays? A third possibility, and the one I like to think is most likely, did you fill in the details with your own wonderful imagination? Sometimes the most "real" fantasy worlds are those we conjour up with only slight aid of the author, like a picture with only a window showing what the world beyond looks like. Then our imagination fills in the world behind the wall. In some ways I prefer this to a detail description. Of course, it always leads to disappointment when I see a movie of the book.
Carrie,
I think some where (Touch Magic, maybe), I read that the best fantasy worlds while being magic/fantastic, have an internal consistency with which the characters must act. Perhaps you could comment on that. I rather enjoy the worlds created by Jules Verne perhaps because of this characteristic. What makes his worlds interesting (often) is that a character of a different "world" is thrown into the fantasy one with interesting consequences.
Jess
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lalunesafir
Registered User
(8/13/02 6:40:35 pm)
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City of Is
I wish the description of this underwater city was more fleshed out but this was the best I could find:
www.smasheasy.com/legends.html
Also, there was a book when I was young called "The Dictionary of Imagionary Places" and although it was illustrated it was in fact the size of a dictionary. The only descriptions listed that I recall reading were excerpeted from Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels".
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swood
Unregistered User
(8/14/02 6:31:59 am)
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Mythic Cities
I'm rather enamored of mythical cities that escaped their origins to become influences in the real world. Schlieman's Troy is an amazing example of literature becoming concrete.
The search for El Dorado is heartbreaking.
And who can overlook Voltaire's fabulous satire in Candide where the "best of all possible worlds" would be a disappointment to anyone but the most ignorant optimist.
What a great topic for discussion!
Thanks,
Sarah
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Midori
Unregistered User
(8/14/02 6:56:02 am)
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Macondo
Certainly for me the most politically powerful of the mythical cities is Marquez's city of "Macondo" in 100 Years of Solitude. Even it's origins--built in the middle of the jungle where the traveling pilgrims dicsover the bones of a Spanish ship, miles from the ocean. It is a crossroad for the real and the fantastic--where the experience of Western economic imperialism (Marquez's condemnation of United Fruit) collides with the powerful influences of the mythic past--which is slowly, though defiantly, losing ground and influence. Marquez visited Cuba, and when introduced to the cane workers in a small town they all smiled at him and said "Macondo, this is Macondo." The town in that novel is almost more memorable than the waterfall of names in the long lineage of the Buendia's last hundred years.
Also Calvino's wonderfully strange "Invisible Cities"... the imagined journeys of Marco Polo to places that never existed and are circumscribed by strange mathematical problems that link them together in the language of math.
When we were constructing the town of Bordertown for the Bordertown Anthologies I remember discussing the city a lot. We had to make practical decisions, street decisions, logical decisions about what could work, what wouldn't--but we were also constructing neighborhoods, even as we were constructing characters that needed to live in those neighborhoods. I remember saying that for me, Bordertown was a character...a place as full of ambiguity and transition as were our adolescent characters and that any thing that was constructed physically had to metaphorically at least suggest that tension. It couldn't be a "safe" place or even a neutral place--it had to be difficult, full of possiblities and dangers and change. In some ways I suppose, it was the urban answer to the fantastic woods...but even there "the fantastic" is less a set geography, but a transforming space, liminal and transmutable--even as the characters within its boundaries are transforming. So for me, the most interesting of the fantastic places are those that assert themselves as characters--either as parallel or counternarratives to what is happening in the foreground of the plot. (Film does this too...Look at Ridley Scott's "Bladerunner"--the visual counternarrative behind the actors is more arresting than the spoken drama in the foreground--in fact the lovely disturbing anxiety that film causes has a lot to do with the tension between the visual and the dramatic narrative).
And I'll admit it, as a child I soooo wanted to go to Narnia. All those hours I spent knocking on the back of closet walls...sigh.
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Charles Vess
Unregistered User
(8/14/02 7:03:43 am)
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Jane's dissapointment...
As a young kid and teenager I devoured the books of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, David Inniss were all close and personal friends during those years. The cities, landscapes and creatures in those books were as vivid and as real to me as my family and the home we lived in.
When I returned to these books sometime after college I was surprised/devastated that all that amazing description simply wasn't there.
Burroughs (and Baum as well as many other authors) was in some ways a "perfect" author for a young person possessed with a vivid imagination. His strength as a story teller (not necessarily his strength as a wordsmith) pulled me directly into his narratives and actively engaged my perceptions. I became a part of their story, which is a great compliment to his talent.
However If I pick up a Burroughs novel today, with all my adult perceptions, I'm immediately thrown back out of the narrative because of his implausible logic and incredible reliance on coincidence to move his narratives along to say nothing of his rudimentary word skills.
So I rely on the memories of that intense pleasure I experienced while reading him as a kid and don't try to "go home again" in the actual reading of a Tarzan novel.
It becomes interesting to set childhood pleasures against more adult ones and to always remember what affect those early reading habits had upon my growth as a person and as an artist...
Charles
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Laura
McCaffrey
Registered User
(8/14/02 10:10:26 am)
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smaller than a city
I was always fascinated by the Shire. The cities didn't resonante quite as strongly, perhaps because until I lived in NYC for a few years, I had only lived in very small rural towns. Real cities in fiction seemed just as make-believe as immaginary cities. The Shire, however, was strange enough to captivate, but familiar enough for me to understand its workings. All those loves and jealousies, petty quarrels and small heroisms - they were things I saw in the small towns where I grew up. And I loved the hobbit holes. They were underground, but seemed bigger than my house. And because they were so hidden, I felt as though I might be passing one every day when I was roaming outside, and that I might see one if I looked closely enough. In the Shire, too, there was always the possibility that Gandalf might appear with his fabulous fireworks and a call to adventure.
Laura MC
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Richard
Parks
Registered User
(8/14/02 10:18:54 am)
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Cities
For me it was Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar, with its double deity sets, the Gods OF Lankhmar and the Gods IN Lankhmar.
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Kerrie
Registered User
(8/14/02 1:44:51 pm)
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Old posts...
Here are a few old posts that might help:
www.surlalunefairytales.c...grams.html
www.surlalunefairytales.c...laces.html
More to come!
Dandelion wishes,
Kerrie
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Angelyn
Unregistered User
(8/14/02 2:50:36 pm)
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Ferris wheel, fairies wheel
Once upon a time, someone somewhere told me (or I dreamed) that the ferris wheel was originally a fairy's (or fairies) wheel. That it was made of ??? and set afire and let roll down a hill to symbolize fate and also to symbolize (perhaps) the passing of the seasons and the return of the sun, I guess. Well, I looked on Grandfather Google and found that, indeed and disappointingly, a man named George Ferris built the first ferris wheel in Chicago. Does this mean it was never a fairies wheel. Does anyone know any stories about the fairies wheel? Thanks so much, Angelyn
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Victoria
Elisabeth
Registered User
(8/14/02 6:09:36 pm)
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Cities
A few literary faves that come to mind:
The City in Paul LaFarge's _Artist of the Missing_.
Ambergris in the works of Jeff VanderMeer.
Prague, as envisioned by Peter Sis in _The Three Gold Keys_
Drohobycz, in Bruno Schultz's _Street of Crocodiles_ and _The Sanatorium Under The Sign of the Hourglass_.
Chicago and Hoboken, through the eyes of Daniel Pinkwater.
If you can find it, I'd also recommend checking out a book by Robert Sheckley called _Futuropolis_. It's about science fictional visions of future cities, and it's filled with marvelous art. Also, I remember being consumed as a young teenager by the city in Lin Carter's _Found Wanting,_ but I haven't looked at it in a a decade and a half, and I don't know if it holds up. A few years later, I was gobbling down books from Tanith Lee's series, The Secret Books of Paradys, but I have to give the same caveat.
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janeyolenaolcom
Unregistered User
(8/14/02 11:24:28 pm)
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Fairies Wheel
I think the burning fairies' wheel is actually a reference to the old custom of making a wheel of fire and rolling it down the hills as part of the Beltane fires, Midsummer's Eve celebrations. Done in England and probably elsewhere in Europe.
Jane
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ZMethos
Registered User
(8/15/02 6:43:19 am)
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Re: mythic cities
Neil Gaiman's alternate London in "Neverwhere." I read the book before my first visit to London, which made that city seem much stranger than even it is.
~M. Pepper
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tlchang37
Registered User
(8/15/02 9:45:00 am)
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Re: Mythic cities
I've been thinking about Midori's post re: 'place' being as much a character as the characters in a literary work. I realized that THAT aspect of many of the books I've lost myself in has had as much, if not more appeal than the more obvious characters and storyline.
As a kid I yearned to live in Narnia, Middle Earth, Camelot, or Prydain. As well as some less defined places like the British Isles of Susan Cooper's "The Dark is Rising" series, or the Mushroom Planet from Eleanor Cameron's series of that name. The moors of "Wuthering Heights". Even the family homestead of the Murry's from Madeleine L'Engle's "Wrinkle in Time" series - with it's old farmhouse, converted lab, fields, garden and star watching rock - which, despite the sometimes scary adventures, felt utterly comfortable, safe and homey. Charles de Lint's Newford, with is enjoyable to visit again and again with different stories and characters.
Hmmm. I hadn't quite thought of it this way before - as much as I love the stories, I return for the places....
Tara
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Maatera
Registered User
(8/15/02 12:03:40 pm)
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Re: Mythic Cities
Wow, so many of my favorite books/movies have been mentioned here. I think maybe I have an obsession that I didn't know about. I certainly notice the setting and mood in art quite a bit. Sometimes it is the weird little glimpses that effect me most. I just love the scene in Terry Gilliam's "Baron Munchausen" where the balloon is floating through this "city" on the moon. The strange canned street noises and cheering. Of course it ends up that it's all a flat facade.
Another good one is the glimpse we get of the upper city in Fritz Lang's "Metropolis". It's this Art Deco city of the future with bi-planes flying around. Very odd.
For those of you who want to visit these places, if you're a fan of the old tv show "The Prisoner" you can. It is a resort on the coast of Wales. Some eccentric guy brought all these buildings in from different parts of the world and set them up like they are in the show. I have a feeling he would enjoy this conversation immensely.
Connie
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Helen
Registered User
(8/15/02 8:08:12 pm)
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Raery Board of Travel and Tourism ...
Just had a sudden mental image of the Border Guards to Faery inspecting bags for contraband ... demanding tarrifs on all seven-league boots, cloaks of invisibility, and rings of power, unless purchased in the duty-free zone ... asking whether you were willing to take full responsibility for whatever the satchel of plenty might produce ... advertising campaigns for the Goblin Market ... reduced rates if you fly by magic carpet, like something out of an Avram Davis story ... could make for some interesting reprecussions.
Being a city girl myself, I find myself leaning towards places like Newford, Riverside, and the Border (so glad that you brought that up, by the way, Midori; I've always loved those books, and always been intensely curious on how places like the Dancing Ferret and SoHo evolved so cohesively across the different stories; I remember thinking that it must be some advanced form of the collective unconscious, where you all had such a close image of the ideal city that you just mapped out pieces as you went along, and mapped out the expanding sections along the way ... shows what I know about the writing process!). I love the world in _The Spellkey Trilogy_ (I still can't believe the people who you run across on this board in passing! I love this place ...), especially the city of Moorsedge. Any of Patricia McKillip's worlds, and especially the one in _Ombria in Shadow_. Moving away from the urban ...
Narnia will always hold a special place in my heart; so, too, the Otherworld in a Charles de Lint story that I cannot, for the life of me, remember the name of (which is, by the way, intensely frustrating - it was the first story of his that I'd read, and it sucked me into urban fantasy full-force ... concerned an angst-filled young woman, an enchanted charm bracelet, and Grandmother Toad. Sound familiar to anyone?); likewise, the magic forest in a book called _The Silver Horse_ (in this case, I can't remember the author's name ... in my own defense, I read it when I was seven); Wall is a place that I'd love to visit (I alway picture it as being vaguely like Devon, for some reason). And, while it's not exactly urban or rural, Blackstock College in Pamela Dean's _Tam Lin_ is the place that I wanted to go to college, and the place where I someday hope to get tenure (distinctions between fantasy and reality ... bah ...).
Also, the *real* cities that get such wonderful twists from individual writers that you'll always see them through their eyes ... Midori's vision of Venice in _Innamorati_, Nicholas Christopher's New York in _Veronica_, ditto on Neil Gaiman's London, and, after _American Gods_, much of America ... Just writing about this gives me wanderlust ...
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Laura
McCaffrey
Registered User
(8/16/02 3:56:04 am)
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Re: Mythic cities
Reading Tara's and some of the others' posts, I was struck by the way these worlds were both tantalizingly near and far. I too wanted to live on the Murray's farmstead (and be Meg Murray as well, but that's a side point). I too would go into closets - the closest thing I had to a wardrobe - and knock on the back, just to be sure. The cities, countrysides, worlds - were so close, so real, their existence seemed truly possible. Even if that logical part of me knew I couldn't get there, a whispering voice inside was telling me to keep eyes peeled, that I might someday step into that world without even meaning to.
Laura Mc
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unicornchld
Unregistered User
(9/6/02 5:45:44 am)
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mythic cities
if you ask me the land of luster in bruce covilles book into the land of unicorns is a facinating place. set up pretty much like earth except for the inhabitants it is a world a large forests a dragon realm human characters rivers lakes and of course plenty of unicorns.
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oaken
mondream
Registered User
(9/6/02 12:38:22 pm)
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Re: mythic cities
Terri Windling's Bordertown is my favorite mythical city. In a lot of ways it is the opposite of the place I grew up, a small town where everyone knows you name and you always have a safety net to fall back upon. The Border is strange and wonderful and big. It's full of diversity with its different neighborhoods and groups, instead of the monotone that is my little town. Bordertown just seems to resonate inside of me, and even now I still wish the I could wander around its streets and go clubbing on SoHo (which is probably why a lot of my writing from middle and early high school was set in Bordertown).
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deathcookie
Registered User
(9/7/02 6:24:16 pm)
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speaking of mythic cities...
Neil Shusterman's underground city in the sewers in "Downsiders" was a thrill for me. Extremely detailed and mapped out, with a tantalizing bit of real history of sewer people.
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