Be glad that when you were a teenager, you didn't have an aunt like the person who wrote to the Journal's "Book Lover" column to ask this question:

My 13-year-old nephew is a voracious reader, but he tends to limit his reading to science fiction. He recently read "Brave New World," because he thought it was sci-fi. Any suggestions on how to expand his horizons to include other genres?

Anyone with half a lick of sense will know that a 13-year-old who's voluntarily reading Huxley is doing just fine and does not require an intervention. But the WSJ's book columnist, Cynthia Crossen, is a nicer person than I am, since she refrains from telling the aunt what an idiot she was being.

Instead, Crossen gives auntie a smart (if slightly muddled) lecture on the wrongness of misplaced snobbery, and admits that not all SF is equally great. Then she recommends that instead of stopping the allegedly trash-loving nephew from reading SF, the aunt should steer him towards the good stuff:

So Aunt B.'s mission is to gradually nudge the boy along the spectrum from Godzilla and 50-foot women to H. G. Wells, Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein and Douglas Adams.

Then he'll be ready for some great contemporary science-fiction writers: William Gibson, China Miéville, Neal Stephenson, Connie Willis, David Mitchell, Kazuo Ishiguro and Richard Powers.

Remembering an early encounter with science fiction, George Orwell wrote: "Back in the 1900s, it was a wonderful experience for a boy to discover H.G. Wells. There you were, in a world of pedants, clergymen and golfers…and here was this wonderful man who could tell you about the inhabitants of the sea, and who knew that the future was not going to be what respectable people imagined." That's a gift indeed.

Many of our favorite fantasy books of the past year or so feature a self-consciously noir tinge. Perhaps the most buzzed-about of these is The Steel Remains by Altered Carbon author Richard K. Morgan — it's gotten an amazing reputation since it came out last January, but if anything the hype understated this book's greatness. Profane, riotous and utterly captivating, The Steel Remains follows three thick-skinned veterans of a terrible war against lizard people, as they investigate the rise of a new supernatural power that threatens to obliterate everything they fought for.

Other recent books in the "noir fantasy" niche include Richard Kadrey's Hollywood revenge saga Sandman Slim (which we reviewed here), China Miéville's weird detective story The City And The City (reviewed here), Elizabeth Bear's supernatural alternate history detective stories collected as New Amsterdam, John Shirley's psychic bounty hunter saga Bleak History, Mike Carey's Felix Castor novels, and io9 contributor Jeff VanderMeer's hardboiled detective novel Finch, plus several others.

Fantasy detective stories are nothing new, of course, and neither are morally grey protagonists or dark storylines. The "vampire detective" and "urban ghost-hunter" genres are decades old at this point. But this new crop of books seems uniquely "noir" by virtue of its extreme nastiness. They're coarse and often overtly sexual, they often feature extreme graphic violence, and they seldom offer you a clear-cut right and wrong. Their protagonists are has-beens, losers, or not-quite-epic champions, with tarnished armor.

And just as classic hardboiled detective fiction often features assholes who are untouchable because they're rich, these novels often feature people, or things, who are too powerful to mess with — except that, instead of just having lots of money, these fiends tend to have mystical power or ultra-powerful friends.

These novels take place in cities and towns already crushed under the weight of history before the story even begins — Finch, for example, is VanderMeer's third book about Ambergris, his fictional city, and it takes place 100 years after Shriek: An Afterword, when the mushroom-like Grey Caps have retaken the city and are systematically oppressing the humans. And in Shirley's taut Bleak History, we come in in the middle of a struggle by a shadowy government organization to control psychics like Gabriel Bleak, who can see ghosts and communicate with The Hidden, a supernatural realm beyond our own. Bleak works as a bounty hunter, using his supernatural gifts to track down bail-jumpers. The government stooges remind each other that under the new rules, they don't need evidence to run them in.

Bleak History also features some appropriately lurid descriptions of New York as a hot, humid cesspit full of crooks, ghosts and thugs. Including this lovely Spillane-esque passage:

A few hours later, the sun was just down; the buildings of Manhattan, across the river, were wearing the last glimmers of sunset like Day-Glo caps on their rooftops. Bleak stood in the screen of trees, in Hoboken, and tried to make up his mind.

You know you're reading a noir-ish book when a simple description of an urban sunset turns garish, menacing and disturbing. As I mentioned in my review, the descriptions of the menacing decay of Los Angeles in Kadrey's Sandman Slim also stay with you. Like this bit:

Sometime while I was gone, Hollywood Boulevard had a nervous breakdwon. Vacant storefronts. Trash dissolving in the street. Nothing but ghosts here — shadows of runaways and dealers huddled in padlocked doorways. I remember the Boulevard full of wild kids, drag queens, manic Dylan wannabes, and tourists looking for more than their next fix. Now the place looks like a whipped dog.

Another thing that sometimes sets apart the protagonists of this new noir writing is their outlawed sexuality — two of the three protagonists in Morgan's The Steel Remains are queer, and we're never allowed to forget how much people despise them for it. The warrior Ringil Angeleyes is the gay swordsman you didn't know you've been waiting for, who'll sleep with anyone, including the mythical fairy-like creatures that are hell-bent on crushing the human race. (And then Ringgil will turn around and dismiss his sleeping-with-the-enemy stunt as a meaningless fuck.) At every turn, Ringgil is called a faggot by people who want to drum him out of decent society — but they can't, because he's a war hero and still the only hope they have of surviving. Another protagonist, Archeth, is a lesbian and the last representative of the mythic race of the Kiriath, aka the Black Folk, and both aspects of her identity are deeply offensive to the new wave of religious zealots who are taking over the Empire. Meanwhile, Bear's story collection New Amsterdam features a gay vampire detective, Sebastian.

Most of all, these books tend to feature tarnished heroes, who are facing people (and creatures) who are much more powerful than they are, and who think that they can rule over the festering sewer that is the city, and trample anyone who gets in their way. Whether it's ancient demons, rich assholes with magic, evil fairies, or government spooks, there's always somebody wanting to rule over the dungheap — and usually the only person standing in the way is an outsider who's past his or her prime. You also often sense that the world is heading the wrong way — in The Steel Remains, slavery has become legal and is fast becoming the Empire's main industry, while religious bigots are working to crush every last shred of culture or sophistication.

And the heroes of noir fantasy aren't just damaged — they're traumatized. In The Steel Remains, all three of the protagonists are carrying around the weight of the mass slaughter in the war against the Scaled Folk and the pointless wars among humans that followed, plus Ringgil is scarred mentally by having watched his lover tortured to death by the Inquisition. In Sandman Slim, we're constantly getting flashbacks to Stark's years of fighting for his life in Hell's arenas.

So why are we seeing an upswing in noir fantasy now? I asked some of these authors, and they pretty much all saw their work as a continuation of noir themes that have always been present in the genre.

John Shirley says:

Think of Mordor — and how Mordor, and also the earthworks of Saruman, were always very industrial. And noir happens in the shadow of industry. So in The Lord of the Rings it was about the intrusion of the darkest side of the urban on the green heart of Middle Earth. Urban fantasy though is a mutt, half fantasy, half urban noir. Our era does seem morally challenged—we're stunned by the immorality of Wall Street. Trying to make sense of it we project it onto supernatural villains. Going back, my novels Cellars and City Come A-Walkin' were early fusions of sf, magical realism, dark pop sensibility and noir fantasy. Bleak History just continues that thread in my writing.

And Kadrey sounds a similar note:

Am I part of a movement? I don't know. Movements are like pandemics. There's always another one coming along to make you bleed out.

Cities have replaced the black woods of medieval Europe as the home of the Black Beast, ghouls and bloodsuckers. You can't hide in the woods anymore. We've clearcut them to make foldaway entertainment centers for Ikea. The only place left to be invisible is in the city. There are the empty industrial zones where no one ever goes and the crowded downtowns where no one ever looks at you. Plus, porn and cable.

I don't think that there's anything special about this era's stupidity and corruption. Every era is the worst one ever. Every century is the end of the world. The fantasy I write isn't dark it's logical. There's a French saying, "Inter urinas et faeces nascimur," which means, "We are born between piss and shit." In a world of shit, my heroes are the people who choose to be just a little less shitty.

Sir Galahad is dead. Good. Fuck him.

Writes Bear:

I'm not an expert on early fantasy, but I'm pretty sure Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser weren't the first noir protagonists in fantasy, and they are considerably older than I am (first appearing in 1939, quoth Wikipedia). So I don't think morally ambiguous protagonists are a modern phenomenon—but I do think that morally complex people are more interesting to write (and more engaging to the reader) than four-color heroes with whom the world conspires, so that there is always a morally unambiguous choice.

So, if it's a movement, it's one that's been going on for a long time. It's definitely a *conversation,* however!

(But then, I'm suspicious of literary movements and subgenres and marketing categories, so my own objective bias must be exposed.)

Adds VanderMeer:

Finch is a lot of things besides noir — a spy story, a surreal fantasy, a commentary on failed or occupied countries, a political statement about the last eight years of American empire, so I don't feel like part of a noir fantasy movement — I thought of Finch back in 1998, just didn't start work on it until 2005. But the appeal, I think is the built-in suspense and structure. You even see it in the Potter books, especially the early ones, which are all mysteries wedded to fantasy. Noir is a dangerous thing to use, though. In the wrong hands it becomes a series of cliches or it lends itself to the status quo. As for the anti-hero idea, while it's somewhat prevalent in noir, Finch isn't really a good example. John Finch is an honest, decent man in a bad spot. The real anti-hero is, in a way, the occupied city in which he lives. And the point of wedding noir to fantasy in Finch isn't to maintain the status quo but to explode it. Why are there several noir fantasies out recently? I don't really know. As an avid mystery reader, they all seem as different from each other as anvils, oranges, and bacon.

Thanks to S.J. Edwards, Elizabeth Bear, DJ Chaotica, Larry-Bob Roberts, Zack Stentz, Daphne Gottlieb, Paul McEnery, James McGirk, Jessy Randall, Kevin Schmidt, Morgan Johnson, Susie Kay, Kat Page and David Fraser for the suggestions!

The Mayor In City Of Ember
He's the textbook example of a corrupt mayor who's only interested in saving his own skin. He knows the underground city of Ember is on its way out, and soon it'll be uninhabitable due to power failures and dwindling supplies. But instead of trying to cope with the problem, the mayor tries to hoard as much stuff for himself as possible, in a secret room — and puts together meaningless commissions to study the problem. Here he is in this video, eating sardines in the grossest possible manner.

Lando Calrissian in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
Okay, so Lando is the kind of scoundrel we love to watch. And he's a perfect counterpart for Han Solo. But would you really want him in charge of your city? His Cloud City of Bespin seems like a pretty corrupt, messed-up place. And then he goes inviting Darth Vader and his crew there, which is not good city planning at all. And then after Vader has demolished half the city in his battle with Luke Skywalker, Lando takes off and leaves his city behind. Call that leadership?

Aunty Entity in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome
She does keep the city of Bartertown humming along — except when she gets stuck into an idiotic power struggle with Master/Blaster, and everything grinds to a halt. Plus she rules with an iron fist, and forces people to fight to the death in a deadly arena. That's not the kind of leadership our post-apocalyptic cities need!

Mayor in RoboCop 2
He makes deals with drug dealers and criminals. And then he mismanages the city's finances and winds up handing the entire city over to the evil OCP. This clip pretty much says it all. And when he's in a tight corner, he just loses his shit.

Mayor Wilkins, in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, season 3
Your average terrible mayor may let the city fall apart, or make deals with drug lords, or bulldoze your house for no reason. But a really awful mayor, like Wilkins, makes cozy arrangements with vampires and tries to kill off the town's only protector. And then tries to turn into a demon so he can eat the high-school graduating class. Now that's bad leadership.

Vilos Cohaagen, in Total Recall.
He's an evil administrator of the Mars settlement, keeping the mutants down and ruling with an iron grip. He uses mind-control and brainwashing to keep his minions in line. And worst of all, he won't give the people air. WTF, Cohaagen?

Mayor Bentham Rudgutter, in Perdido Street Station by China Miéville.
He's always described as sitting "regally on his throne," or sitting "behind his desk with an air of utter command." He rules over New Crobuson, with its corruption and oppression — and he's not averse to making deals with the city's crime syndicates as well as its demons. He systematically rounds up dissidents and has them tortured, and he's not above imposing martial law if the situation gets out of hand.

Father in Equilibrium
Father rules over the city-state of Libria and outlaws all human emotion, even the love of a small puppy. To this end, he keeps the people doped up on a drug called Prozium, and keeps everyone under constant surveillance. (Similar to other figureheads like Big Brother in 1984, or Mustapha Mond in Brave New World — except that Father just rules over one city.) The only good thing "Father" has going for him is his kick-ass gun-centric martial art, gun-kata. Woo hoo!

Judge Cal, In Judge Dredd
This character, closely based on the Roman emperor Caligula, seized power after he had the Chief Judge of Mega-City One assassinated. In Mega-City One, the Chief Judge has absolute authority — an arrangement that's caused some problems on several occasions. So Judge Cal goes completely nuts, making it a crime to criticize him and appointing a goldfish as his deputy. He even shoots Judge Dredd! Dude!

Mayor Prentiss in The Knife Of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness.
Prentisstown is not a nice place to begin with — there are no women, and the males can all hear each other's thoughts all the time, whether they want to or not. But Mayor Prentiss makes matters worse, by figuring out a way to control men's minds. He declares himself President and invades the neighboring settlement of Haven, where there are some women. And that's just the beginning of his reign of terror. Runner up: The mayors in Truancy by Isamu Fukui.

The SharedWorlds project sends teens on a two-week camp focusing on science fiction and fantasy, at Wofford College in South Carolina. Assistant director and instructor (and io9 contributor) Jeff VanderMeer curated the discussion, asking the authors, "What's your pick for the top real-life fantasy or science fiction city?"

Those four authors listed above, plus Elizabeth Hand, weighed in, and the evocative descriptions will make you want to dust off your passport and go traveling. The five chosen cities couldn't be more different from each other — some (like London) are shiny and high-tech, others (like Venice) are ancient and crabby.

In the process, you learn a lot about what each author considers fascinating about cities. Le Guin and Moorcock both seem to find the weight of history, settling onto a city or driving it into the ground, compelling and fecund with storytelling possibilities. Miéville seems to find London's lack of planning, its crazed ad-hoc development, exciting. Nalo Hopkinson finds Kingstown's mix of high and low technology, cobbled together, to be futuristic in a William Gibson-esque way. And then there's Hand's forceful argument that Reykyavik is like an outpost on an alien world.

Most fascinating of all? No cities in the United States — and none in Asia, either. I would have expected somebody to reach for Shanghai or Mumbai, which are being touted as the most "futuristic" cities by many observers. My personal pick? Hong Kong. I lived there for many years, and its crazily shifting landscape (buildings constantly being torn down, put up, torn down again, and tons of bizarre business schemes blossoming all over) felt like a future megacity at times.

The full list, with each author's comments, is well worth checking out. [Shared Worlds]

Link and Grant's STEAMPUNK!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories comes out in the fall of 2011 from Candlewick Press, one of the the fastest-growing children's publishers. Contributors, so far, include Link herself, plus China Mieville, Cassandra Clare, Holly Black, M.T. Anderson, Elizabeth Knox, Dylan Horrocks, Delia Sherman, and Ysabeau Wilce. Horrocks is best known as a comics writer, for his work on titles like Hicksville and Books Of Magic, but he's writing a short story for this book. Also, Grant says Wilce's Flora Segunda series is "un-put-downable."

So why a young-adult steampunk book? Grant explains:

We wanted to do this book because we realized that steampunk had completely overtaken the young adult field (Cassandra Clare, Scott Westerfeld, Jenny Davidson, Kenneth Oppel, etc., etc.) so maybe we could corral them into the same place and put together a fabulous book. (We may not be able to corral quite all of them!) Kelly really got me back into reading YA fiction a while ago and I'm a big fan and as we watched Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci put together their Geektastic anthology it just looked like so much fun that we wanted to try it. Especially the way they (in Geektastic) and Deborah Noyes (in Creepshow — she's also our editor!), brought in comics. Basically if we could get Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill to write us a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen story, we'd be over the moon.

We've edited LCRW together since 1996 and did 5 years as the fantasy editors of The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, so we know we can work together on it OK.

And why are we so fascinated with steampunk in the first place? Is it just nostalgia, or something else? Says Grant:

I have no idea why steampunk has the zeitgeist by the jabot but I love that it [does]. I love the modded-present day stuff and the hearkening back to the chunky, shiny designs of 100+ years ago. I think part of it has to be the pride of work well done. In steampunk you know that Captain Nemo's submarine isn't going to have a faulty starter: it will be a handmade, beautifully tooled piece of equipment. Maybe in our shoddy-mass-marketed-world of ever-lower-prices leading to ever-lower-quality there's an attraction to handmade materials? So, maybe it is just about the crazy machines? Or, maybe it's about secret histories? Science fiction is so prevalent in pop culture that maybe alternate history is a breath of fresh air? Who knows? Sure is fun, though.

Amazing Steampunk art by the mega-talented Suzanne Forbes.

In his seminal Perdido Street Station, Miéville introduced us to the bizarre metropolis of New Crobuzon, a rich tapestry alive with chimeric monsters, clockwork robots, warped magical science, and shadowy politics. These days, the New Weird Atlas is crowded with entries from dozens of authors, but few can match Miéville's gift at making even the most surreal cities appear lifelike. Now he again defies our expectations changing not just setting but his very writing style. The City & The City is a classic police procedural set in a world almost exactly like our own. The modern city-states of Besźel and Ul Qoma might seem familiar to a traveler in Eastern Europe or Turkey, but they're just as weird as any old marching band of steam-driven gorilla crabs.

The streets of Besźel have seen better days. The old-fashioned architecture left quaint decades ago and now sits squarely in shabby — attractive only compared to the brutal concrete housing projects. The alleys are stalked by packs of actual wolves, scrawny critters fighting over trash. There are few jobs and less hope. The Besź citizens might describe themselves as saturnine or defeatist, but would probably settle for a corner of the mouth "feh".

An unidentified woman has been found brutally murdered at a skateboard park. Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad has been called in to investigate. Borlú has been around and around the block more times than he cares to remember. More reserved and a bit less corrupt than some of his policzai colleagues, he's a world-weary cop cut from the same cloth as Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander or perhaps Georges Simenon's Commissaire Maigret. We follow the investigation through Borlú's eyes, seeing the clues and his city as he does. The characters show only what moods and motivations they choose to reveal. Miéville totally nails the stripped-down voice of a great police procedural – "Just the facts, ma'am." – a far cry from the abundantly verdant prose of the Bas-Lag novels or King Rat. When the victim's identity is discovered, Borlú must continue his hunt for the girl's murderer in foreign Ul Qoma, Besźel's ancient rival and uneasy partner.

Okay, from here on out I get way SPOILERY about the two very odd cities but not the actual plot. If you hate it when the weird twist in worldbuilding is spoiled, just click away and buy the book, because it really is quite good.

Are all the babies gone? All right, let's proceed.

Where Besźel has sooty crumbling stonework, Ul Qoma boasts glittering skycrapers. This city has adapted handsomely to the modern world, attracting foreign investors and high-tech industry. This would be a surprise considering Ul Quoma's dalliance with Soviet-style communism in the last century. Before that, they backed the losing side in WWII. Once a devout kingdom worshiping something like Islam, they are now a secular Westernized state on the cutting edge of global society. That giant grumbling sound? It's from their neighbors in Besźel. Once he gets through the red tape, Inspector Borlú won't have far to travel – the two cities occupy the exact same geographical space.

This isn't like Budapest or Minneapolis/St. Paul, nor are they divided cities like Cold War Berlin or Jerusalem. Through some unexplained quirk of topology you can be in either Ul Qoma or Besźel and never notice the other except for overlapping areas called "crosshatching". Citizens of both cities are raised from birth to ignore or unsee elements from the alternate side. To travel through these crosshatched zones, or even acknowledge a person or shop sign, is strictly forbidden. Any transgressions are swiftly acted upon by a mysterious force or agency known only as Breach. The punishments cannot be appealed, and Breach does not bother to share its guidelines or agenda. To avoid trouble, certain colors, fashions, even gestures are accepted in one city but illegal in the other. Tourists must complete classes in recognizing crosshatches and un-seeing the other city. Driving in busy traffic must be a nightmarish test of self control.

This is an absurdist extension of what many of us city-dwellers already do. We daily ignore the more unpleasant truths on our streets and often unsee lots of cool stuff: "Feh, that's for the tourists" Yah, I can be a jaded schmuck sometimes. Miéville doesn't lean on this point and I may just reading something he never meant, into the novel. He can get very soapboxy (ahem, The Iron Council) . Not surprising considering his strong convictions. But The City & The City is fairly free of politics, and instead concentrates on the story.

As the murder investigation unfolds, Borlú runs afoul of different political fringe groups who desire to either destroy or unite with the opposite city. The ever present bureaucracy adds to the tangle of conspiracies and shoals of red herrings. The case also involves controversial research into the distant past when the two cities may have been one. The Besź and Ul Qomans have great difficulty with subjects like these. It's hard to have a conversation about things you are not allowed to think about. But Borlú forges ahead: a woman is dead and someone must pay. Everybody does what they must, or gets destroyed by a faceless system that answers to no one. Orwell and Kafka would love this.

Oh wow, that sounded pretty bleak, huh? The plot is grim, but I was charmed by the wealth of details of daily life and characters in the The City & The City. The pacing is deliberate but with a spare writing style, and at just over 300 pages this is a very brisk read. The crime novel feel is tone perfect, although Miéville might have focused on this aspect too much, sacrificing the fantastical elements. After all the imagination he used making Besźel; Ul Quoma, and Breach so different, he never attempts to explain how it all works. Personally I didn't mind this — trying too hard to describe the numinous can ruin credulity (see The Iron Council- time golems, really?). A writer without Miéville's considerable intelligence and talent would have made this a confusing mess.

Readers should shed their preconceptions and treat themselves to a highly original and gripping experience.The City & The City is still Urban Fantasy, yes, but don't look for elves on motorcycles or spell-casting cops. China Miéville has done something very different, new, and — oh yeah — weird.

The City & The City is available now from Amazon,
or from your local independent bookseller.

Commenter Grey_Area is known to the old worker-priests as Christopher Hsiang. His passport to Besźel was revoked after that incident on the Street of Crocodiles.

Conjunctions #52, out now, has a theme of "Betwixt The Between: Impossible Realism," and here's the description:

Postfantasy fictions that begin with the premise that the unfamiliar or liminal really constitutes a solid ground on which to walk.

No, I don't know what that means either. I guess it's something to do with the idea that the standard fantasy trope - the dreamlike realm, in which the protagonist learns that everything is weirder and brighter than he/she realized - is actually more "solid" than reality. Or something. In any case, who really cares, when we're getting literary "postfantasy" from Joyce Carol Oates, io9 contributor Jeff Vandermeer, and Elizabeth Hand... plus a selection from China Miéville's new novel The City And The City? Can't wait to get my hands on this. [Conjunctions, Thanks Michelle!]

As the video above explains, Miéville's The City And The City takes place in two fictional Eastern European cities, one modern and gleaming, the other run-down. And it sounds as though, in attempting to master the tricky police-procedural form, Miéville didn't neglect the fantastic world-building and social commentary he's known for. Over at Suvudu, the Random House blog, his editor Chris Schluep explains how the novel came about:

When China Miéville delivered the manuscript to his newest novel, entitled The City & The City, I was much more than a little surprised. In fact, I was flabbergasted. First of all, I had no idea that he had been writing it. And secondly, he had just delivered a different manuscript-the one I had been expecting-the day before.

His reasons for doing so were simple, and they had nothing to do with proving that he was superhuman. China's mother, who was terminally ill at the time, had always loved police procedurals-so China set out to write one as a kind of gift to her. But knowing that his reputation is as a fantasy writer, he wasn't sure what his publishers or his audience would make of his attempt. He studied up by reading as much as he could in the mystery and thriller genre, and then he wrote the book during breaks from writing the fantasy that I was expecting from him. It's an amazing feat by anyone's standards.

Gotham City cannot be saved — or gentrified

The biggest movie of the year, The Dark Knight, is about the impossibility of saving cities. Heath Ledger's Joker aims to prove that all of the upright well-behaved citizens of Gotham are maniacs waiting to happen. As he says at one point, they'll eat each other the moment the chips are down. But really, they're only a ready-made mob because they're in such close quarters. When they're not jammed into trains, hospitals, crumbling buildings and public squares, they're crammed into barges trying to evacuate. So much for sustainable development.

Before The Dark Knight came out, Warner Bros. issued a direct-to-DVD animated prequel called Gotham Knight, which included one story about a man who wants to clean up the slummiest slum in Gotham, the East End, and he starts by putting in a golf course. You can see the crumbling tenements in the background as Bruce and the other rich dudes play golf. But we learn that this would-be "urban renewer" has a shady reputation, and he's involved in organized crime.

Batman is almost always ambivalent about gentrification in the comics. Gotham City is always getting destroyed and reduced to Dresden-esque rubble, and Bruce Wayne rebuilds it again and again, just as miserable as before. (Most notably in 2000's massive "No Man's Land" storyline.) In "Watchtower," a future-Gotham story by regular Bat-writer Chuck Dixon (and drawn by Judge Dredd artist Mike McMahon) a corporation turns a whole section of Gotham into its own super-safe gated community, complete with private cops in super-armor, and Batman ends up deciding the whole thing is corrupt and bringing it down.

In the miniseries "Run Riddler Run" by Gerard Jones and Mark Badger, someone wants to tear down the slums and put up fancy condos. Bruce Wayne almost invests in this scheme, because he's in favor of anything that makes Gotham safer. But as Batman he sympathizes with the downtrodden. He's torn, but never actually has to make a choice, because the people behind the real estate deal turn out to be bad guys and he has to break them into little pieces, dooming their real estate venture in the process. I asked Jones why Batman would be anti-gentrification, and he says:

Mark Badger and I always saw Batman as not just an opponent of street crime but also as sympathetic to the little people who are exploited by the big people. Like poor people being displaced by rich people. I never liked the one-note obsessive take on Batman's personality, wanting to see him as a real human being who had a fierce preoccupation with street crime but could consider other issues too... Most writers at the time were interested in nuancing Batman terms of personal psychology, but I was getting really bored with that. His mission to fight criminals was a political and communal act too — So who is this Bruce/Batman as a social being?

In Peter Milligan's story "Dark Knight, Dark City," we actually learn that Gotham itself is built on the site of a demonic ritual by apostate Puritans. As a result, the city's very foundations are cursed, and no matter what you do, Gotham will always be horrendous. The city is a character in many Batman stories, but it's not a friendly one — it's more like a member of Batman's rogue's gallery.

Living in a world Frank Miller made.

You can't really talk about the vision of Gotham City as a brutal, cursed monster without paying tribute to Frank Miller's role in reshaping Batman's surroundings in Year One and The Dark Knight Returns, much as he made Daredevil's Hell's Kitchen slum much more hellish. Those superhero works were training wheels compared to Sin City, where everybody's corrupt and violence really is the answer to every situation (except for those rare occasions where the answer is sex instead.) There aren't good guys and bad guys, there are just assholes and monsters. Miller has justly earned a reputation as the master of ultraviolent comic-booky noir.

Even though The Spirit is based on a Will Eisner comic that doesn't feature an especially scary cityscape, it looks as though Miller's film will be just as pulpy and noir as Sin City, with a bit more of a science fiction twist, judging from the first trailer and other early publicity. As the first teaser says, the city screams, and she's female. She's the Spirit's mother and his lover, but that incestuous double-bind probably is not the real reason she's screaming. I'm guessing it has more to do with the Octopus, Samuel L. Jackson's fur coat-wearing supervillain, and various other scumbags.

In the world of noir, buildings are old and crumbling, and close together. Noir cities are full of alleyways and dark corners, crumbling docks and destroyed warehouses.

Every other genre that fetishizes the smelly hopelessness of cities comes from noir, including cyberpunk and to a lesser extent steampunk. You have only to look at Syd Mead's bleak vision of future L.A. in Blade Runner, or read some of the atmospheric city descriptions in William Gibson's Neuromancer. Or look at some of the loving depictions of the decay of New Crobuzon in China Mieville's steam-punky Perdido Street Station.) And then there's the noirish world of Judge Dredd's Mega-City One, where whole city blocks go to war against each other and everyone's a criminal scumbag. (I won't even go into the vogue of post-apocalyptic New York movies like I Am Legend and Cloverfield, which we've discussed at great length elsewhere.)

Miller's noir imagery has become so much a part of the fabric of genre entertainment that people reach for it as a shorthand when they want to seem edgy or dark. A new web series called Dead End City is using Sin City-esque visuals (via greenscreen) to try and lend some credibility to a silly storyline about zombies. And Sin City's Rosario Dawson is starring in a new NBC.com webseries, Gemini Division, which takes place in a Blade Runner-inspired dark future city where a conspiracy is creating genetically engineered terrorists. Even the usually cheery Star Wars is gearing up to go noir. We've seen a few ugly urban areas in the prequel trilogy, including the underbelly of the Jedi city of Coruscant. Apparently the new live-action Wars show way more of the seedy, dirty world in that faraway galaxy from our distant past.

Noir is the enemy of urban planners.

So what does it mean that we're being bombarded with visions of screaming cities on the verge of an election pitting an African American from Chicago against a Caucasian from Arizona?

It would be tempting to say the persistence of noir imagery benefits conservatives, who tend to identify themselves more with rural areas and suburbs and paint the cities as the source of social decay, welfare spending and crime. But the truth is more complicated than that. After all, the noir city is a place of blatant social inequality, where the strong prey on the weak, and the rich exploit the poor. It's not just full of criminals, it's jam-packed with victims as well. In fact, the old-school noir storyline has much to offer both progressives and conservatives.

The real downside to the vision of the monster city is that as oil becomes more expensive, exurban sprawl gets less and less sustainable. With the huge numbers of people living in greater urban areas in the U.S. now, it makes more sense to build more densely. But the persistence of Miller-esque dystopias makes more tightly packed city living seem a less attractive proposition. Move into a mixed-use retail/residential zone, with pedestrian access and electric trolleys, and you'll be gutted by a scar-faced maniac who smells like baby poo. It doesn't quite work as a brochure.

And meanwhile, the reality is that crime in the U.S., including urban crime, has declined steadily over the past decade and a half. The inspiration for Gotham City, New York, has had such a sharp decline in its crime rate that New York Magazine ran a package in January called "Post-Crime New York." (The magazine concluded we're not quite there yet.)

It would take a whole separate blog post to discuss the reasons for the declining urban crime rate, but let's just say cleaner, safer, more affluent cities make for less interesting backdrops for super-violent crime and monster stories. (Shockingly.) At their root, these are escapist stories, after all, and it's more fun to identify with a hero who jumps off a dark rooftop into an ocean of blight than one who roams a happy well-lit sidewalk.

What would a narrative about superheroes look like if it took place in a relatively safe, friendly urban environment? Or bounced between a safe urban environment and various suburban and rural areas?

One word: Heroes. With the possible exception of a few sequences in New Orleans, the NBC super-mutant show has never shown cities as dangerous or gritty places. We spend lots of time in New York in the first two seasons of the show, and it's always a perfectly nice place to hang out, no more dangerous or disturbing than Odessa, Texas or the other small towns we spend time in. The threats, in Heroes, come from shadowy conspiracies. And the danger is that the city will be destroyed, not that it will destroy anyone.

But it's hard to imagine the Heroes version of urban heroism becoming as influential as Miller's. Even though it's definitely a major escapist thrill to imagine living in lofts and townhouses as nice as most of the Heroes cast seem to inhabit.

Jeff VanderMeer, author of City of Saints and Madmen (and, with Ann VanderMeer, a columnist for io9):

The main difference is that science exists and magic doesn't. Even though everything in a novel is made up in a sense, this still matters—it creates different responsibilities. If, for example, the physical laws of a fantastical or SF world are different than our world, there has to be some explanation, no matter how off-the-cuff. And if that world contains magic, I think the writer has to be even more rigorous in thinking out how magical systems work, no matter how much of that appears in the text. This is because we are used to constraint. We are worlds of blood-and-water existing within a larger but finite network of people and settings, and all of that is constrained by the egg-yolk that is the Earth. If even something as arbitrary and recent as a sonnet suffers from constraint, then magic can be no different.

Of course, if you're a surrealist or absurdist, you often don't care about the difference between science and magic because the boundary between the two is going to be trampled and gleefully pissed on anyway. As well it should. Nothing is more annoying than allowing a little reality ruin your fun. If you have the imagination to get away with it.

Or, if you're Jack Vance, you just set your stories far enough in the future that the science seems like magic and you sit back in your golden throne, fold your arms, and cackle like either a mad scientist or a crazy sorcerer—take your pick.

One reason I have no magic in most of my fiction is that I cannot believe in it and thus cannot write about it in any convincing way. This is the same reason you do not find unicorns in my fiction. Or Smurfs. Or Republicans. I can and do, however, believe in huge intelligent squid ponderously pulling themselves through the alleys of a weird city, protecting themselves with helmets full of water. I can also believe in nefarious mushroom-based intelligent life forms living in bizarre underground caverns. However, since this is merely an audacious application of current theory on biology and biological systems it amounts to perfectly good science.

Elizabeth Bear, author of New Amsterdam and Dust:

That's a really interesting question, especially since for both SF and fantasy, I tend to lift my "rules"—whether that means the laws of physics or the laws of magic—from outside sources. Basically, in terms of writing—science fiction or fantasy—science and magic both serve (for me) to form a framework upon which I can hang the rest of the story. They're a structural element. So I try to find the coolest bits of either than I can.

Stephen Hunt, author of Court of the Air:

A fantasy author creates a monster by having a character in robes of any colour mumbling a spell, whereas the rules clearly state a science fiction writer has to put the character in white robes only, and have them mumbling something about genetic engineering and how at termination of protein synthesis, type I release factors promote hydrolysis of the peptidyl-transfer RNA connection in reaction to recognition of a stop codon. For the average reader, though, these both seem equally magic.

Ted Chiang, author of Stories of Your Life and Others:

Roughly speaking, if you can mass-produce it, it's science, and if you can't, it's magic. As an example, suppose someone says she can transform lead into gold. If we can use her technique to build factories that turn lead into gold by the ton, then she's made an incredible scientific discovery. If on the other hand it's something that only she can do, and only under special conditions, then she's a magician. And I don't mean that she's a charlatan; she might actually be able to transform lead into gold. But scientific phenomena are reproducible by other investigators; they aren't dependent on a specific person.

Electricity might have seemed magical at one time in history, but it works for everyone; you don't need to have an innate talent or be descended from someone special for a light bulb to turn on which you flip a switch. It took the work of very smart people to get us to the point that we can all use electricity, but none of them were magicians, precisely because they were able to make their discovery work for everyone.

To go on at slightly greater length, the reason magic can't be mass-produced is that it usually relies on some subjective quality of the practitioner: her intense concentration, her spiritual purity, something that can't be substituted with another person or with a machine. Magic is, in a sense, evidence that the universe knows you're a person. When people say that the scientific worldview implies a cold, impersonal universe, this is what they're talking about. Magic is when the universe responds to you in a personal way.

China Miéville, author of Perdido Street Station and Un Lun Dun:

What is the difference between science and magic? In real life, loads. In SF, I think the question's misleading, because I think that whatever SF may think and claim, and however much individual books may justly pride themselves on scientific accuracy, fundamentally the genre is not predicated on 'real' science at all. It's about apparently authoritative use of supposed scientific language, or, to put it another way, bullshitting. And that is not (necessarily) a dis.

There you have it, dear readers. What do you think?

1) Earthquake Towers

In 2005, scientists discovered that a new skyscraper in Taiwan might be causing earthquakes. Called Taipei 101, it was temporarily the tallest building in the world, before towers like the Al Burj were anything but rumors. "At more than 500 metres," we read back then, "Taipei 101 in Taiwan is the world's tallest building. But now geologists fear that its size and weight may have transformed a stable area into one susceptible to earthquake activity."

The building is so heavy, exerting such "exceptional downward stress" on the earth beneath it, that it might have "reopened" an ancient tectonic fault. If true, this discovery "may have far-reaching implications for the construction of other buildings and man-made megastructures."

At the very least, we should ask: What would happen if we built more of them? Could we build fourteen of these things in San Francisco, in an act of long-term tectonic warfare, and destroy the whole city within a decade?

Conversely, could we build just the right number of these, at just the right spots, throughout the greater Los Angeles basin and thus nail the tectonic plates in place — weighing southern California down and zipping the San Andreas Fault up tight? It'd be seismic acupuncture, a new form of therapy against continental drift. Perhaps one gigantic tower exactly placed in outer Tokyo could make the whole Pacific Rim freeze up. That is, till a rogue group of German terrorists arrives and wreaks havoc... Directed by John McTiernan. It's geology as a military campaign, enacted through architectural design.

2) Tectonic Warfare

In the wildly under-appreciated 1985 James Bond film A View to a Kill, Max Zorin (Christopher Walken) likes to ride boats with Grace Jones and grin a lot. He likes blimps and he has blonde hair. He has a plan. He wants to blow up the San Andreas fault, cause some sort of catastrophic earthquake, and thus flood Silicon Valley. Which is just a bunch of car dealerships and seafood restaurants, in any case. But this flood will make Zorin's own microchip business go through the roof... or something. He'll then rule the planet.

Needless to say, Zorin's plan fails. Bond makes it with a geologist and the world goes back to sleep. But the central idea is worth pursuing: Could we bomb faultlines all over the earth, causing earthquakes? If not, why not? I'm reminded of a TV show I watched last weekend, about Mount St. Helens. Mount St. Helens is supposedly going to erupt any year now — but today it just sits there, sort of steaming. It's bit boring, frankly. So why don't we bomb it? Let's see what that thing is capable of! Unmanned drones from a nearby air base climb to 25,000 feet. It's 3 o'clock in the morning. They open fire. They hack the earth, in other words, applying the landscape theories of Max Zorin. Think of it as Zorinism: tectonic warfare.

3) Igneous Printheads

Inkjet printers require small, spongy reservoirs of liquid ink to operate. But there are alternatives to ink.
There is magma.

A magma chamber is a "reservoir of molten rock material beneath the earth's surface." It "is connected to the earth's surface by a vent." So what if we took control of the vent? What if we could print new landforms, selectively directing and solidifying liquid rock where we want? Could we attach a kind of igneous printhead, guiding magma into new forms? I'm thinking here of the concrete-printing machines of Behrokh Khoshnevis, or even just 3D printing. In other words, could we rapid-prototype experimental mountain forms, attaching igneous printheads to reservoirs of liquid rock and printing landscapes on the earth above?

4) Colored Magma

Could we dye these magmatic streams using metals - injecting huge amounts of copper, or iron, into a domesticated magma well, extruding colored rocks only a few days later? And could we print cathedrals with it, spraying their vaults and buttresses into place with a deep liquid mixture of green and red?

5) Slow Sculpture

In his novel Iron Council, China Miéville proposes something called slow sculpture. Miéville describes an artist who creates literally geological works of art on a time scale that exceeds any individual human life.

Huge sedimentary stones... each carefully prepared: shafts drilled precisely, caustic agents dripped in, for a slight and so-slow dissolution of rock in exact planes, so that over years of weathering, slabs would fall in layers, coming off with the rain, and at very last disclosing their long-planned shapes. Slow-sculptors never disclosed what they had prepared, and their art revealed itself only long after their deaths.

And what long-term geological hacks might have been left for us someday to discover?

[Note: The last two photos were taken by Paraflyer]

5. Sun of Suns, by Karl Schroeder. Rebel, former pirate, and kickass airbike rider Hayden lives in Virga, a giant bag of air floating in space, built by a post-human society. The air is heated by high-tech suns dragged around by city-states that create their own gravity by building on the inside of vast, spinning tubes. Virga is a kind of eighteenth-century world of kings, despots and pirates, and many of the city-states horde sun power — they'll attack out any nation that tries to assert independence by building its own sun. Most people remain dependent on a few big sun-owning nations for their warmth; those who refuse to toe the line live in the cloud-draped sunless reaches of "winter." Hayden, whose mother was killed after she built a pirate sun, is out to change all that, even if it means killing the leader of Slipstream, one of Virga's most powerful nations. The characters may be a little two-dimensional, but you'll keep reading just to visit the vast, globular floating oceans, the strange cities, and bizarre barren outposts in Virga. Plus, pirate battles in zero gee! Sun of Suns is the first in a trilogy, and the second novel just came out in hardback.

4. Ringworld, by Larry Niven. A classic 1960s world-building epic about aliens on a quest to find out more about a vast artificial Dyson ring built around a dying sun. This is the novel that inspired the people who created the game Halo, which also takes place on a ring world. Expect strange weather, bizarre vistas from on and below the massive structure, and alien encounters that feel very Star Trek (but at a time when Star Trek was still the shit).

3. Lilith's Brood, by Octavia Butler. This trilogy of novels by MacArthur winner Octavia Butler is about what happens to humanity after earth is destroyed in some kind of nuclear apocalypse, and all the human survivors are rescued by powerful, mysterious aliens called the Oankali. Three-sexed, the Oankali reproduce via a third sex called the TK, which mixes genetic material inside its own body and creates offspring. All their technology is biological too. Lilith, one of the human survivors that the Oankali enlist to help them deal with the other human survivors, discovers that the Oankali recreate their species every few hundred years by merging their genetic material with other species. And the humans are next on their list of species to merge with. Set aboard vast biological ship-words and a newly geo-engineered Earth, Lilith's Brood traces three generations of humans and Oankali as they have children together — children who grow more alien to both species with each generation. Yes, it's a very complicated and subtle allegory about colonialism. And yes, it's an amazing tale of the unknown. Enjoy it for either, or for both.

2. Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville. It's a world where bureaucrats raise demons with steam-driven machines, and "thaumaturgists" remold human bodies with their hands. A strange kind of species-transforming weather called The Torque occasionally rips through, converting humans into half-insects, half-birds, half-seamonsters. It's been years since a Torque came through, and all the different post-Torque human groups live separated into nineteenth-century style ghettos in a city whose polyglot heart is in a train station called Perdido Street. Everything is steaming along normally in the city — anarchists print subversive pamphlets, artists date across species lines, and scientists study winged creatures from around the globe. But trouble comes to town in the form of dream-eating moths who suck people's minds out, and the only creatures who can stop them are a mad scientist, his half-insect lover, a sentient garbage dump, and a trans-dimensional spider.

5. The Dispossessed, by Ursula LeGuin. A classic novel by one of the supreme world-builders in SF, The Dispossessed is a tale of two planets: one is a lush, economic powerhouse ruled by greed, consumerism, and a rich elite; the other a desert planet full of the descendants of rebels who fled the first planet two centuries before. It has scant resources but is governed by a feminist-anarchist belief system that preaches collective ownership, gender equality, and sexual liberation. Shavek, a physicist from the anarchist planet, is one of the first to visit the home planet in many generations, and his experiences traveling between worlds reveal chinks in the Utopia he's left behind — and unexpected benefits on the corrupt home world, where scientific innovation flourishes in an atmosphere of capitalist competition. What's stunning about this novel is that LeGuin avoids simplistic judgments, and shows in honest detail how even the most progressive culture can be corrupt. And even the most corrupt culture can foster creative brilliance.