Fantastic Cities

Contributions by Carl Abbott Jacob Babb Marleen S. Barr Michael Fuchs John Glover Stephen Joyce Sarah Lahm James McAdams Cynthia J. Miller Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns Chris Pak María Isabel Pérez Ramos Stefan Rabitsch J. Jesse Ramírez A. Bowdoin Van Riper Andrew Wasserman Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock and Robert Yeates <p/> Metropolis Gotham City Mega-City One Panem's Capitol the Sprawl Caprica City--American (and Americanized) urban environments have always been a part of the fantastic imagination. <i>Fantastic Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction Fantasy and Horror</i> focuses on the American city as a fantastic geography constrained neither by media nor rigid genre boundaries. <i>Fantastic Cities</i> builds on a mix of theoretical and methodological tools that are drawn from criticism of the fantastic media studies cultural studies American studies and urban studies. <p/> Contributors explore cultural media across many platforms such as Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy the Arkham Asylum video games the 1935 movie serial <i>The Phantom Empire</i> Kim Stanley Robinson's fiction Colson Whitehead's novel <i>Zone One</i> the vampire films <i>Only Lovers Left Alive</i> and <i>A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night</i> Paolo Bacigalupi's novel <i>The Water Knife</i> some of Kenny Scharf's videos and Samuel Delany's classic <i>Dhalgren</i>. Together the contributions in <i>Fantastic Cities</i> demonstrate that the fantastic is able to real-ize that which is normally confined to the abstract metaphorical and/or subjective. Consequently both utopian aspirations for and dystopian anxieties about the American city become literalized in the fantastic city.