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]

Q: For the Hainish Cycle of books you invented over 80 different inhabited worlds, each with its own cultures and physics...

A: No, no, thank you for saying so, Steve, but if I really had, I would admire myself tremendously. I would be in awe of my own staggeringly great mind. What I did was give the illusion of there being all those different worlds. That’s called art, or fiction, or something. The rule is, you only invent what you have to. And that’s pretty much what’s right in front of the reader. Let’s say it’s an ansible. I do not, in fact, invent the ansible. I do not explain how it works. I cannot, but shhh. I simply present the device as working, and as coming from a society which is far in advance of ours in science and technology, having spaceships that can travel nearly as fast as light, et cetera. And this background or context creates expectation and softens up the readers’ credulity so that they’re willing to “believe in” the ansible—inside the covers of the book. After the ansible had been around for a while, I invented the man who invented it, Shevek, in The Dispossessed. And he and I played around with some pretty neat speculations about time and interval and stuff, which lent more plausibility to the gimmick itself. But all I really invented was a) the idea of an instantaneous transmitter and b) a name for it. The reader does the rest. If you give them enough background/context, they can fill in the gaps. It isn’t just smoke and mirrors. There has to be a coherent vision of how things hang together in that society/culture/world. All the details have to fit together and be thought through as to their implications. But, well... it’s mostly smoke and mirrors. What else is any fiction?

[Vice Magazine, thanks to Justin Rocket Silverman]

Talking to George R.R. Martin and Ursula K. Le Guin, NPR program To The Best Of Our Knowledge turned a discussion of genre boundaries. On the one hand, LeGuin talked about why science fiction and fantasy don't get the same respect as literary fiction:

To be labeled a genre writer, in the eyes of about 90 percent of readers, is to be labeled [as] second-rate. Face it. So obviously a lot of people bristle and say "Well, all right, I'm a scifi writer and I'm proud of it." I just wish they'd forget the darn labels. A lot of my books, they don't classify easily as scifi, or god help us, science fiction. They may be fantasy, but that may not be the important thing about them. These genre labels are marketing labels. They make it easy for readers who are addicted to a certain type of fiction to find it, in the library or the bookstore. They make it real, real easy for the publisher to sell it. Otherwise, they are useless. And they can be very useless, when you get writers like me, or like Michael Chabon.

People who say they don't like science fiction often haven't read it, adds Le Guin.

Martin, meanwhile, quoted Faulkner as saying the only stories worth telling are ones about a human heart in conflict with itself. But he was less concerned with tearing down the divide between science fiction and literary fiction than with merging SF and fantasy. He says SF, fantasy and horror all fit under an umbrella of "weird stuff," and really it's just the furniture that's different:

I'm 60 years old, and I come from a time where, at least, science fiction, fantasy and horror writers did move easily from one [subgenre] to another. That's not so true for new writers breaking in. When I was young, when I was just breaking into the field in the 1970s, science fiction was much more popular than fantasy. Today, the reverse is true. And there are some science fiction writers who seem threatened by this, and [they react by] drawing these hard distinctions between science fiction and fantasy, and saying that they're two totally opposite things. I don't think they are totally opposite things, and that's where my "furniture rule" comes in. I think they're basically the same thing, and what varies is the furniture. You have an elf in one and an alien in the other, and both of them perform the same literary function as a trope of the respective genres.

So maybe if we stop trying to draw such stark distinctions between fantasy and science fiction, the next step will be tearing down the distinctions between speculative fiction and "literature"? In any case, Martin feels sad when he sees a section in a bookstore labeled "literature" instead of just "fiction."

And why has science fiction been losing ground to fantasy? Martin says it's because we're no longer optimistic:

The social changes of the last 50 years [have] made the future someplace that we no longer want to visit the way we did when I was a kid. I mean, back in the Fifties and Sixties, when science fiction was perhaps as popular as it's ever been, we really had a lot of belief in the future. I mean, we couldn't wait to get to the future. The future was going to be much better than anything in the present. We were going to have robots and flying cars and all these labor-saving devices... Now, most people think their children are not going to have better lives than they do. They think their children are going to have worse lives.

[To The Best Of Our Knowledge]

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.