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Additional Reporting by Caitlin Petrakovitz.

What's your city got?

Additional reporting by Julia Carusillo.

Local architects Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello hit upon this idea after considering what was about to happen to the Bay Bridge. Here is an aerial view, showing the abandoned side of the bridge on the right. This span of the bridge is still very sturdy, and could easily bear quite a bit of weight. Why dismantle and waste it when you could turn it into a unique neighborhood?

In a detailed proposal for what they call The Bay Line, the architects suggest the bridge could be a series of public parks with neighborhoods hanging beneath the bridge. This is a more suburban version of what happens in William Gibson's novel Virtual Light, where squatters take up residence on the bridge after it is partly destroyed.

Rael and San Fratello also point out that other cities have successfully built bridge neighborhoods, including Florence, Italy's Ponte Vecchio (pictured below) and the London Bridge in London. Over at BLDG BLOG, Geoff Manaugh meditates on this possible bridge community, and writes:

While, on one level, this simply side-steps the immense financial implications associated with structurally maintaining these bridges . . . it does also kick-start a conversation about what we might be able to do with the massive pieces of civic infrastructure that dot the U.S. and are currently scheduled for replacement and demolition.

Read Rael and San Fratello's full proposal for the Bay Line [PDF], via BLDG BLOG

Top image via Constant's New Babylon.

Magnolia Pictures is running a free screening of Timecrimes at the Embarcadero Center Cinema next Tuesday, Dec. 16, at 7:30. You can RSVP by writing to timecrimessf@gmail.com, and we hope to see you there!

Last year, as the "living roof" to the museum was being built, journalists were allowed to visit and take pictures. Here is what the roof you see above looked like just as it was being planted in 2007.

Below, visitors to the museum opening look upward at the flooded rainforest exhibit.

And here, you can see upward yourself and find out what they are gaping at. Those blobs of light you see are the skylights that dot the living roof. So you are actually looking upward through two biosystems: a flooded forest, and a grassy California plain on the roof.

The museum has retained its old shape in front, and many of the beloved exhibits are still there. The albino alligator (and indeed, several other alligators and cute penguins) hang out in an open-air habitat that visitors can peer into delightedly. Or fearfully, if the alligator happens to move.

Museum member Christopher Hsiang noted that there are a few things he misses about the old museum:

They sacrifice content (books/exhibit space) for architectural splendor. Yes, very airy and spacious, [but] where are the anthropology displays and award-winning dioramas? Guess all that went the way of rows of stuffy specimen cases. These days it's more about interactive displays thinly disguised as video games and touch screens.

Still, he says the museum still has a lovely but small library open to the public, filled with reference stacks and taxidermy cases for the nineteenth-century-minded. And, he adds, "The Phillipine coral reef and Northern California coast tanks are big time show-stoppers."

If you're in San Francisco, be sure to check out the new California Academy of Sciences. It's right next to the newly-revamped DeYoung Museum, which looks like something out of a Mad Max movie — all rusting steel towers. So the green Science museum makes quite a contrast with it. Definitely makes a day in Golden Gate Park feel like a battle between two futures.

California Academy of Sciences [official site]

Photo of 2007 living roof under construction by David Paul Morris/Getty Images. All other images by Paul Sakuma/AP.

The ceiling looks just as bizarre as you might guess. Below, you can see something even stranger. The oddly-shaped shiny cube is actually a kind of appendage to the rest of the museum, which looks like an ordinary nineteenth-century-ish rectangular, red brick building.

You can see the cube just peeking around the left-hand side and a little bit on top.

Telstar Logistics Photostream [via Laughing Squid]

As you can see above, the city of Los Angeles would look a lot less ugly and disheartening if you could just wipe this traffic jam (photographed by The Infamous Gdub) out of existence and bring the city's formerly glorious cable car system back to life. If you ever want to see the LA cable car system of yore, it makes many exciting appearances in Harold Lloyd's 1923 comedy Safety Last!.

Right now, the city of Baltimore is considering upgrading its mass transit to include aerial gondolas, a system of elevated trams on cables with a tiny carbon footprint. They would initially service mostly the convention center and waterfront areas, but could branch out all over the city. Apparently gondola-makers have recently seen a spike in requests for mass transit systems, and even New York City is considering an aerial gondola to take commuters from Manhattan to Governor's Island and on to Brooklyn. Here is what the proposed gondolas might look like on a typical Baltimore city street (original photo from Zaloudek.net).

Seattle has a long and tragic history with monorails, once believed to be the public transit of the future. Just recently, the city voted to expand its tiny, largely-decorative monorail system, built for the World's Fair back in the 1960s. But urban planners have been trying to make Seattle a monorail city since 1910, when a Seattle monorail was first proposed (and shelved). We have yet to see whether the city will act on this latest vote for the monorail, but this is what you might see in downtown Seattle (original photo by GiSuser) if the system started ferrying commuters.

Although Melbourne has one of the most extensive electronic tram systems in the world, it might have been much bigger if early-twentieth century plans to expand it hadn't been derailed. If you look at images of late-nineteenth century Melbourne, you'll see a peaceful city full of trams and horses, but no traffic jams. Here's what Melbourne might look like today if the automobile had never taken over, and the city had become a haven for trams.

If you've ever visited San Francisco, you know that the downtown area is dominated by a wide street called Market (original photo by Hyku). What you probably don't know is that Market is actually a gushing river that early city planners decided to bury underground just to make everything nicer for carriages — and, later, cars. If we'd built San Francisco to cooperate with the region's actual geography, downtown San Francisco might have a system of canals like the ones in Venice (original photo by Minnaert). People could boat to work instead of burning gas in their cars.

Photoshoppage on all images by Stephanie Fox.

The San Francisco Bay Area. Let's face it: Californians love living dangerously. San Francisco was nearly wiped out in 1906 by a big shaker that registered 7.9 on the Richter scale. Fires swept through the city and pictures from afterwards resemble Hiroshima circa September, 1945. The city was rocked again in 1989 by the Loma Prieta quake. Stress is constantly building all along the San Andreas fault, so Southern California's also at risk. But the presence of the Hayward fault in Berkeley, just across the bay from San Francisco makes the place a time bomb waiting to go off: a 2002 study by the USGS said there's a 62% chance of a magnitude 6.7 or greater quake in the region between 2003 and 2032.

The Cascadia subduction zone, better known as coastal Oregon, Washington State, and Vancouver Island. Cascadia makes the San Andreas look like a pair of maracas. Recent work from seismologist Chris Goldfinger and company at Oregon State University shows that Cascadia has unleashed hell to the tune of 15 quakes of magnitude 8.0 or greater over the last 3000 years. Eight of those probably exceeded 9.0, making them among the most powerful known. The average time between earthquakes is around 220 years, but the last time the fault slipped was 1700, when a 9.0 quake sent a 5-meter high tsunami rippling onto the shores of Japan. In short, look out Pacific Rim: you're overdue.

Mentawai Islands, Indonesia. Everyone knows Indonesia is a tough place to live when it comes to earthquakes and tsunamis (at left you can see Banda Aceh before and after the recent tsunami), but unless you're watching the ticker it's hard to fathom just how bad things are. Back in December, earthquake expert Danny Natawidjaja of the Indonesian Institute of Sciences dropped some knowledge on the rest of the geo-community at the annual Fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Not only had there been addition an 8.4 quake in September of 2007, but a major section of the fault was still locked, and had the potential to shake the Earth even harder than the 2004 monster that caused the Indian Ocean tsunami.

He had no idea how right he was. Between February 25 and March 3 of this year (that's one week, for those keep score at home) there were five earthquakes greater than magnitude 6.5. The section of fault Natawidjaja was talking about in December still hasn't popped.

Note: If you want to participate in Quake Catcher, but don't have a laptop with an accelerometer built in: For desktops, QCN has built a USB key with the appropriate hardware, and Ars Technica is teasing us with the possibility of Wii and iPhone-based detection.

Source: University of California, Riverside

Photos: Water Encyclopedia (San Andreas), National Archives (1906 image), Telegraph.co.uk (Banda Aceh)

In Charles Cumming's story, inspired by John Buchan's old novel The 39 Steps, we follow a man, watching from above, in an omniscient satellite view.

Someone is tracking his movements through London, as well as his trips south and north across the country. At one point, for instance, our narrator wakes up on a beach, unsure of where he is or what the date might even be.

A loose piece of newspaper came cartwheeling along the sand and wrapped itself around my legs. I picked it up and looked at the date. Two days had passed since I had arrived in Edinburgh.
The newspaper was the Evening News. So I was still in Scotland.

But what are the possibilities for science fiction?

What seems immediately obvious, of course, is that the majority of the genre would be unmappable, so to speak, for no other reason than setting — the locations are all off-world or ship-bound or on the surface of some other moon, dimension, or planet. But that's exactly where part of the challenge would be.

For the moment, let's take San Francisco. You and your friends live in San Francisco and you write a whole new sequence of stories set somewhere in that peninsular city. There are trips through Chinatown and out to old, moldy houses in Outer Sunset; there are visits to gene labs and venture capital firms across the Bay; you go into empty skyscrapers at night and you find strange basements, where black machines and banks of over-heating hard drives whir quietly into the night... doing something — and that's the problem. Nobody knows, and you have to figure it out.

But then you map all this. You put your story into Google Maps, and it's like cartographically footnoting the story line.

It's not like this has never been done before, of course — but soon enough you've got a new map of your city. It's not marked by tourist sites or sites of historical importance.

It's a city re-mapped according to the science fiction that takes place within it.

Eventually, as a reader, you could even pick only those stories set along your morning bus route and read those, and only those, for two weeks; then move on to a different neighborhood; then add your own. You could have interactive urban texts, like something designed by area/code, growing and changing, like an urban sci-fi wiki made from aerial maps.

You move between chapters, between books - as if choosing the geography of your favorite stories might be, in and of itself, an act of publishing.

And then you notice the blind spots in the city, those spaces that, from a literary standpoint, have nothing occurring in them yet. So you write, and you add them to the map, or to any map - or you make a new map — or whatever. What's important is that this sub-genre of urban sci-fi maps continues to grow.

It extends far beyond San Francisco, then, to become a working database of every city and landscape on earth. You can spin around the planet and choose your sci-fi by geography. Going to Warsaw next month? Well, the following stories include a scene set in your hotel... Indeed, in your very hotel room. And you can add to them.

Even the poles of the planet are included, with their mysterious government research labs and their fissures of ice and their weird, conspiratorial plot lines waiting to happen. You can go into the cold with Dan Simmons, say, and track that ship's passage by satellite.

Or maybe all of that is a bit cheesy. Maybe that sounds too much like the origins of D&D, replayed all over again in an era of satellite mapping. Or it sounds like some bad dot-com fantasy, where handheld devices will give us access to things we've never experience before, an ability to navigate the city anew and... thus do something or other to raise a company's stock prices.

So let's pull back a bit, quickly, and restart the idea - and say: well, then, instead, let's develop a new overlay for Google Maps and populate it entirely with events from science fiction. Books, films, song lyrics.

For instance, the "unstable" streets that appear and disappear in China Miéville's short story "Reports of Certain Events in London" are suddenly available for mapping; you can follow their speculative routes, and even plan day trips around them, hiking through the nonexistent side streets of the city.

Or you go to Google Maps one day, because you're planning a trip to Japan or to San Francisco, and you click on "Satellite" view - and then on "William Gibson," a new visualization option. It's brought to you by a partnership between Putnam and Google Maps. So you click on "William Gibson" and a whole informational layer of Gibsonian detail appears. Gibson mentioned this street, and this bridge, and this hotel room - and here it is on a map for you to follow.

Within six months, you can click on "Alfred Hitchcock," "Ray Bradbury," and "H.P. Lovecraft" to see how their films and stories map out. It's the becoming-literary of Google Maps.

After all, you could do the same thing for TV and film - we're not limited to books.

This, you learn, is where the UFO was excavated in Quatermass and the Pit, or where the rage virus broke out in 28 Days Later, or where Dracula's tomb was supposedly found in the absurd film Blade: Trinity.

The Google Maps Guide to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The Google Maps Guide to the Fiction of J.G. Ballard.

In fact, I'm reminded of those awesome world maps from Judge Dredd.

Now, though, the idea is that we'd key all that stuff into Google Maps, or into Google Earth, or into whatever, and we'd add some more details - and, soon enough, you could find, say, the offshore prison from John Woo's Face/Off, perfectly located right there on the map. Or you can zoom in and follow the future four-part division of England in Rupert Thomson's under-appreciated novel Divided Kingdom. Or, for that matter, you could even map out the house and it surrounding landscape from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

It doesn't matter what you map, in other words; what matters is simply that we explore, even just casually, the literary/sci-fi potential of online mapping. Why? Because it sounds fun. And if you don't think it sounds fun, don't do it.

But everyone loves maps. How else could they get away with publishing things like The Maps of Tolkien's Middle Earth or even The Atlas of Middle Earth? Because people like maps.

Or how about dashboard navigation systems in cars? Here, Tor Books could team up with Cadillac to give you a brand new driving experience: you're in New York, driving a Cadillac, and so you hit the "Urban Sci-Fi" navigational option on the dashboard screen - and you immediately find yourself driving through the futuristic literature of New York, with key sites mapped or flagged. It's science fiction as a new template for urban tourism. You're following the action of I Am Legend, or tracing out the flood line and tidal wave from The Day After Tomorrow.

In other words, let's do for science fiction what those maps do for J.R.R. Tolkien.

Let's develop Google Maps of Sci-Fi.

In the original game you're play Sgt. Nathan Hale who has been tasked with keeping an alien invasion out of Britain, but the sequel shifts things to the United States. Maybe he did such a good job that the aliens decided to say "screw it" and cross the pond — somehow they managed to cross the Pacific pond, though. We wonder if they'll be trashing any historical or religious landmarks like they did with the Manchester Cathedral in the first game, which actually became the center of controversy. Maybe the aliens could invade George W. Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas? We're just saying.

Resistance 2 will be out sometime in the next couple of years, but in the meantime you can ogle the gorgeous artwork. Until someone releases Concept Art: The Game, it's about all you can do.

Resistance 2: Get your concept art here [Computer And Video Games]

Here are some of the proposal's highlights:

• An underground network of tunnels for hydrogen-powered hovercrafts.
• Highrises built on lowland buried by rising sea levels.
• A symbiotic, multi-scalar infrastructure for distributing and collecting basic needs like water, electricity, gas and consumer products, using aquifers and geothermal energy from the earth below San Francisco.
• Carbon nanotube walls built by drilling bots.
• A designated aquaculture zone with algae ponds, which doubles as raw material for hydrogen fuel production for distribution through those carbon nanotube walls.

Borderlands is a spacious store in an old Victorian, packed with handmade wooden bookshelves on wheels that can be moved out of the way during readings. As you enter, you move between shelves of shiny new books, a few DVDs, and staff picks of the best recent scifi, fantasy and horror. Borderlands prides itself on stocking lots of small press books, so you're likely to find stuff here you'd never find anywhere else. In the back, there are high bookshelves full to the brim with used paperbacks, and you can read quietly on a sofa under a window that looks out on a playground. The bookstore cat looks scary and hairless, but is in fact quite friendly and will purr at the slightest provocation.

Owner Alan Beatts calls his bookstore style "Minimalist Victorian." He and the rest of the staff are geek-friendly as well as normal-friendly, which is a rare combination. One of them, Jeremy, runs a small press called Night Shade Books. And of course Borderlands has tons of readings where you can meet other SF readers and touring authors (I met Jacqueline Carey there!). Rumor has it that Alan has taken over the empty storefront next door and is slowly turning it into a coffee shop. If that happens, you will see Charlie Jane and I in there every day, hiding behind our laptops and blogging in a caffeinated frenzy.

If you want to recommend your local beloved scifi bookstore or comic book store, send a good description and photo to tips@io9.com with the subject line "beloved local."

Exterior shot by False Positives. Interior and Ripley courtesy of Borderlands.