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Author
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Comment
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Van45us
Registered User
(9/7/02 10:27:39 pm)
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Burroughs...
Convenient plot devices like Carson flying over the surface of Venus and thinking "that's the last place I would want to have to land" as his flying vessle suddenly heads into a crash dive. LOL! Still, I love Burroughs, especially the Pellucidar books (lost worlds at the Earth's core!), and I think the first Tarzan book still holds up and is an important work that has created it's own mythic reality and has survived in many forms for almost a century now. I remember Phillip Jose Farmer in "Mother Was A Lovely Beast" mentioning that there was a real "Tarzan" discovered in Africa in the late 1800's and no doubt Burroughs derived the character from him. Unfortunately Farmer doesn't say much about him, other than he came to live in London for a while only to return to the jungle, after, I suspect, a major dissappointment with modern civilization. He was the talk of the town until the massacre at Khartoum eclipsed everyting. Sure would like to learn more about the actual case, but it is probably buried in the London Times vaults somewhere. In later, more pulp-oriented Tarzan novels, Burroughs had him discover lost cities like "Opar." Similar to H. Rider Hagard's lost African civilizations.
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Chris K
Unregistered User
(9/8/02 1:55:57 pm)
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cities
Speaking of cities that become as important as the characters...I loved Santuary from the "Theives World" series, but I wouldn't want to live there! Lyn Abby mentioned they might be reviving this series. Does anyone know more?
Also a good reference guide for this topic is: The Dictionary of Imaginary Places by Manguel and Guadalupi.
Chris Klingbiel
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JaNell
Registered User
(9/11/02 7:53:45 am)
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cities
De Lint's Newford.
I'd move there, I think.
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Meurglys
Registered User
(9/11/02 8:27:02 am)
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Re: Sanctuary
Chris, I'm sure Lynn Abbey had a new hardback from Tor Books out this summer called Sanctuary.
Now back to the shadows...
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Jess
Unregistered User
(9/11/02 1:18:33 pm)
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Burroughs
A little "Burroughs" background. Burroughs was the "third son" of Oak Park, Illinois, where I used to live. The first and second were Frank Lloyd Wright and Ernest Hemmingway, respectively. Anyway, while I lived there the community paper ran an interesting article about Burroughs. He had a rather undistinguished early adulthood. He was at one point a storekeeper or druggist and was unable to make a go at the business, going bankrupt. I believe he also failed at an apprenticeship of some kind. He eventually moved back into his boyhood home bringing his wife (and children?) to live with his parents. It was during this low point of his career that he noticed some poorly written comic-like fiction that was popular at the time. The paper reported that Burroughs response was "I can do better than that!" and Tarzan was soon born out of his efforts. Burroughs, it seems, never intended Tarzan to have the impact that it did, nor did he set out to make a philosophical comment on civilization. Moreover, he remained stunned at the success of the book (and series).
I have to confess, I personally enjoy Burroughs much more than Hemingway. But then again, I haven't read much of his (Burroughs) work since I was a kid.
Jess
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Judith
Berman
Registered User
(9/12/02 6:16:05 am)
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more cities
A few other imaginary cities that come to mind are the world-spanning city in Walter Jon Williams' METROPOLITAN and CITY ON FIRE, where the buildings themselves generate the mystic energy called "plasm," the underground London of Mieville's KING RAT and New Crobuzon of his PERDIDO STREET STATION. Mary Gentle's RATS AND GARGOYLES (I think that's the title) was also set in a rat-ruled city where the center was a temple inhabiting an odd space mapped out on five cardinal directions, north, south, east, west and aust.
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Marsha
Sisolak
Registered User
(9/12/02 11:15:44 am)
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Re: more cities
I'm going to second the vote for Mieville's New Crobuzon in
Perdido Street Station. I've had that city stuck in my head
ever since this topic came up. I don't know I'd want to actually
live or visit there, but it's certainly been one of the strongest
fictional cities I've come across. Same with Gaiman's underground
London in Neverwhere.
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dorisi
Registered User
(9/12/02 12:59:03 pm)
ezSupporter
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Re: more cities
One of the cities that has stuck in my mind is in Hyperion, Dan Simmon's novel of the far future. Technology has perfected portals (doors) through which you are transported instantly between spaces. The really, really rich have taken advantage of this architecturally-speaking: If a planet has a really nice ocean, for example, you arrange for the door opening out from your living room to be a portal to that planet - great views and easy ocean-side bathing. For a planet with exotic and wonderful cuisine, simply have your kitchen door be a portal to it. In other words, the mega-rich build their houses so that each room is effectively in a different planet and walking between them is as simple as walking through a door. The book itself is absolutely marvellous - it's a retelling of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, set in the distant future. It deservedly waltzed off with a number of awards when it was published. Being in Australia of course, the idea of anything that eliminates long tedious journeys in a flying sardine-can has instant appeal.
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Kristin
Registered User
(9/13/02 3:24:38 pm)
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Re: more cities
I also loved Mieville's New Crobuzon. It reminded me a little of Tim Power's _Anubis Gates_. Both of their cities are gritty and real. I loved Power's underground city and lower levels of society. I remember having along discussion about whether it fit under the category of a Wainscot (sp?) world, a term I think we found in one of the Fantasy encyclopedias.
Kristin
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prittykitty
Unregistered User
(9/19/02 6:03:24 pm)
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Mythic cities
Mythic cities are a sort of precious-heartache to me. Micheal Ende's Neverending Story had the most over-arching affect on my imagination, opening it to Atlantis, Avalon, Middle Earth, and fanciful creations of my own.
The premise of Neverending Story is that the creations of our imaginations are every bit as real as our physical world by their very nature - imaginations are real so their creations must be also.
Part of the heartache of mythic cities is that I'll never be there physically. To believe they are real despite not being able to feel them around me is half a consolation and half a heartache.
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fherman1
Unregistered User
(9/22/02 7:04:49 pm)
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Urban in the Head
Interzone, from William Burroughs' _Naked Lunch_, has always stuck in my head, complete lack of any attempt at fantastic (or narrative) verisimilitude notwithstanding. Wouldn't want to live there, in its random, arbitrary griminess, but part of what point there is to the book is that we *do* live there; with its mutually exclusive overlapping political factions, the utter disconnect between--simultaneously!--its arbitrarily tyrannical ruling structures (iirc) and the maniacal anarchy of its populace, it's pretty much a sort of dream-model of the paranoid's view of city life. Also, the putty-like walls between rooms are cool.
Likewise Bellona, from Samuel Delany's _Dhalgren_, though much of it is very recognizably an emptied New York, for all that the text establishes it as a different city. No putty walls, and a somewhat more semi-utopian picture of anarchy; just about everyone comes to Bellona from somewhere else, and the few remaining citizens from before the mysterious "event" that isolated it from the rest of the country clearly hold on desperately to an imaginary sense of order that no longer exists. Neat bits include time passing differently for every individual, and holographic disguises used by many gang members (so, say, a wandering punk will instead be seen as a giant scorpion scuttling by). And again, it's a city defined in part by how much of it is never discovered by either the protagonist or us; there's hints that many of the inhabitants periodically wear artificial glowing red eye lenses, and no explanation for this is ever given.
And there's the unnamed city in one chapter of Salman Rushdie's _The Satanic Verses_, which was also published separately in Harper's or somewhere as "The Untime of the Imam." Not an actual city, it's rather what an unnamed expatriate religious revolutionary, living in exile in London, imagines of what he's going to create when he goes back home. The clocks will all stop, and the city as it must become, with no change or variation, will stand forever. It's all very clearly Khomeini and his vision for Tehran, and I've always suspected it was really this passage, rather than the whole "Mahmoud" thing, that led to the fatwa against Rushdie.
And I survived a hellish 7th grade by reading the first couple of pages of _The Hobbit_--just the description of Bilbo's hobbit-hole--over and over and over again. So much for urbanism, I guess.
Fred H.
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recovering16
Unregistered User
(10/25/02 12:05:50 pm)
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Mythic cities
Great topic. I'm doing research for a book on Las Vegas history, and I very much feel the sense of "mythic city" in this very modern, yet ancient "meadows" (Las Vegas in Spanish).
Other mythic cities that come to mind, besides the ones you mentioned, are: Xanadu and Shangri-La.
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fherman1
Unregistered User
(10/25/02 7:24:43 pm)
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Xanadu?
A city? I thought Xanadu was just a stately pleasure dome.
Fred
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Lizzi
Unregistered User
(10/26/02 6:10:00 am)
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Portmeirion and The Prisoner
One of you mentioned the cult television series The Prisoner. However, you got the order wrong on which came first - the village of Portmeirion was built long before the series was filmed there by an eccentric man by the name of Clough Williams-Ellis. I've been there a number of times starting from about the age of 2 or 3 years of age.
www.portmeirion.wales.com/
The above is a link for any of you who wish to have a further look.
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Meurglys
Registered User
(10/26/02 7:52:11 am)
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Viriconium
The city M.John Harrison has set two novels and various stories in. Currently there's a single volume Fantasy Masterwork (#7) in the UK which collects them all. It's a wonderfully strange and baroque setting.
Also worth mentioning, maybe, is the city in Brian Aldiss's Malacia Tapestry - an alternate Byzantium, maybe, in a world where dinosaurs evolved alongside humans... it's too long since I read it...
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catja1
Registered User
(10/26/02 10:13:40 am)
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L.A. and Carnival Hide
Like others, I loved Avalon, Narnia, Middle Earth and Prydain, and the more realistic, but no less magical, Avonlea. More recently I've come to love Hogwarts, derivative though it may be.
I'm not a city girl, but Francesca Lia Block's magical-realist version of Los Angeles is someplace I would like to visit.
Margaret Mahy's _The Tricksters_ describes a beautiful vacation homestead in New Zealand, Carnival's Hide, that is haunted by former inhabitants and by Trickster myths the world over. It's a strange and wonderful place, but also quite terrifying.
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