Cities of Hope

Regents Professor Lisa Yaszek | School of Literature, Media, and Communication

This year I want to recommend a series of science fiction stories about cities as sites of hopeful technological and social innovation. It’s no surprise that science fiction authors have always been interested in cities — after all, they’re bound up with modernity and modern life: In 1800, fewer than 15% of people lived in urban spaces. Today, more than 85% of us are born in urban areas. Unfortunately, many notable movies, from 1927’s Metropolis to Blade Runner 2049, released in 2017, have encouraged us to see cities as grimdark “vertical dystopias” where corporate greed trumps political legislation, nature and the middle class are destroyed, and the oppressed working masses live huddled at the bottom of massive skyscraper complexes. But, as I’ve been discovering this year, there is an equally long tradition of print science fiction stories created by women of color worldwide that treat the city as the site of new and better futures for all. These stories link new ideas about who counts as a citizen of the future with equally new ideas about the necessary coincidence between infrastructure, nature, and art in urban spaces.

This hopeful tradition or urban-based storytelling begins in the early 1900s with African-American author Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood,  published in 1902 and 1903, and Bengali author Rokheya Sakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream, from 1905. Both of these stories depict cities as utopian spaces where elite squads of female scientists, politicians, and warriors invent and deploy various solar technologies — including that most classic of all science fictional weapons, the heat ray — to create lush, post-scarcity garden cities based on renewable resources. In many ways, both these stories anticipate the currently popular story form known as “solarpunk,” in which artists envision what the future might look like if we can solve contemporary environmental problems.

Little wonder, then, that both of these stories still resonate with us today. The Wakanda of African-American director Ryan Coogler’s 2017 film Black Panther is very much an homage to the high-tech, female-managed hidden Black city at the center of Hopkins’ novel, while Indian-American Chitra Ganesh’s 2017 linocut series “Sultana’s Dream” (background image) brings Hossain’s fantastic garden city life for contemporary audiences.

The tradition of Black feminist urban futures initiated by Hopkins continues today with award-winning stories such as Caribbean-Canadian Nalo Hopkinson’s 1998 novel Brown Girl in the Ring and African-American N.K. Jeminsin’s 2020 novel, The City We Became. In both cases, the so-called “tragedy” of white flight from North American urban centers is revealed to be more properly a blessing in disguise, as it clears the way for young, poor, and queer people of color to claim their cultural, scientific, and artistic heritage and to become the literal midwives to and mothers of new and more just futures for all. You can watch the trailer for Sharon Lewis’s award-winning adaptation of Hopkinson’s novel and read the short story upon which Jemisin’s novel is based.

Hossain’s interest in renewable energy sources and the coincidence nature and infrastructure echoes throughout contemporary science fiction by women of Asian descent, including Indian author and poet Priya Sarukkai Chabria, Vietnamese-American Kate V. Bui, and Chinese-Singaporean Joyce Chng. Whether they are working in prose or verse, long or short form, all these artists imagine futures where people are engaged in sustained efforts to reverse Western traditions of exploiting and abandoning urban spaces. Their characters use a wide range of conventional and alternate energy sources in tandem with a wide range of Western and indigenous technoscientific practices to reclaim cities as spaces that can be productively inhabited by humans, animals, and artificial beings alike. Readers can find short stories by Chabria, Bui, and Chng, and others in Christoph Rupprecht et al.’s marvelous 2021 anthology, Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures.

'Miracle City Koza'

Assistant Professor Ida Yoshinaga | School of Literature, Media, and Communication

Miracle City Koza is a time-travel dramedy by indigenous Uchinanchu (Okinawan) director Taira Kazuhiro. In this 2022 film, Xennial rapper Shota lives life aimlessly in Koza City, in Okinawa.

One day, his grandfather Haru gets killed accidentally by a car. Haru’s ghost soon haunts Shota, requesting that granddad and grandson switch bodies so that Haru can settle his affairs in the present.

To his initial dismay, Shota is transported back to 1970s Koza, when Uchinanchu rock bands entertained U.S. troops headed to Vietnam, near the close of America’s postwar occupation of Okinawa.

Eventually, Shota-as-Haru sings in Haru’s band Impact, stands up to yakuza Himoto who was exploiting the musicians, and learns about his people’s history of surviving military colonialism in this era of civil-rights riots by indigenous Uchinanchu.

In this funny but wrenching film, Shota winds up appreciating his grandparents and his hometown of Koza, moving forward to find his musical voice.

'Children of Time'

Professor Aaron Santesso | School of Literature, Media, and Communication

This novel by Adrian Tchaikovsky begins with a terraforming mission in the distant future. Monkeys are sent down to the surface of a remote planet and then infected with an evolution-accelerating virus. Things go horribly wrong, and a different, much less cuddly species is infected with the virus instead. It seems like the set-up for a horror story. Still, Tchaikovsky takes us in a different, unexpected direction: the evolved creatures may look like monsters, but as we follow them over the centuries, they develop into intelligent beings attempting to defend a decent, just society. The novel's ending, especially, is truly moving: a startling and powerful moment of optimism and empathy. It was, obviously, another tough year for all of us, and I found myself feeling real gratitude for this little fictional flash of hope.

The Georgia Tech library has the second book in this series available to borrow:

Silkpunk

Assistant Professor Amanda Weiss | School of Modern Languages

The emergence of new voices and literary movements is the most exciting and invigorating trend in science fiction today. One particularly hopeful subgenre is that of "silkpunk." This is a term coined by author and translator Ken Liu to describe a new literary aesthetic that combines technologies of East Asia — such as bamboo, paper, and biomimetics, diverse literary trends including Western epics and Chinese poetry, and the resistance/rebellion implied by the suffix "punk." Some of the great authors working in this literary aesthetic include Ken Liu himself, as well as Neon Yang, R.F. Kuang, Yoon Ha Lee, and Fonda Lee. Another exciting aspect of silkpunk is the diversity of its authors. Trans people, women, and nonbinary authors are central voices in silkpunk.

As in steampunk, technology is a defining feature of these imagined societies and thus impacts how the characters wage war, build cities, fight power, etc. There is also a different cultural world underpinning this use of technology, so the significance of silkpunk is not only about the materials and technologies used but also the philosophy itself. As Ken Liu writes, many of these inventors are seen as "poet-engineers," or cultured artists and scientists, an East Asian antiquity-inspired way to view the role of a scientist within society.

To get started with silkpunk, I recommend The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu, The Black Tides of Heaven by Neon Yang, The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang, Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee, and Jade City by Fonda Lee.

Liu is the founder of silkpunk and a soulful writer whose Dandelion Dynasty series is a touching and remarkable blend of literary inspirations. Kuang's book — written when she was 19 — is an exhilarating page-turner which grabs you from the earliest scenes. Lee's Locus-winning Ninefox Gambit is mind-bending space opera mixed with mathematics. He also is a visionary and innovative writer who has certainly advanced the SF genre. And last but not least, Yang's novella is a gorgeous exploration of gender and fantastic world-building.