Loncon, The 72nd World Science Fiction Convention, Thurs 14th - Mon 18th August 2014

I'll be presenting a paper at Loncon as part of a panel organised by Amy Butt, who is Associate Director at bpr architects. The panel is called "Inhabiting Imagined Londons", and the four papers being presented here consider the individual's relationship to the city of London, with my contribution looking forward from the cities of today, and London in particular, to future cities on other planets. Other speakers are Lisa Robertson, Jarrad Keyes and Amy Butt herself. My paper is:

Terraforming and the City

‘Science had perfected interplanetary travel and had destroyed Earth; science could build artificial environments’ (Henry Kuttner, Fury).

Science fictional depictions of cities have explored a variety of utopian and dystopian modes of habitation and control that have fed into popular imagination regarding the future shape of societies. The intersection between terraforming, the adaptation of planetary landscapes, and the interfaces for these interventions into multiple environments (the city) have accrued new resonances in the contemporary context of climate change. This paper surveys the image of the city in narratives of terraforming from H.G. Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come (1933), through the American pulp sf of the 1950s, the ecological sf of the 1970s-1980s and the terraforming stories of the 1990s, up to and beyond Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars (1992-1996). Exploring how the image of the (domed) city appears in these narratives, it raises questions about how these interfaces with nature explore possible modes of habitation. What does this mean for a burgeoning sense of place that has begun to consider how such imagined habitations become spaces that are embedded in nature and thus reflect new conceptions of the human?