Crystal Spires And Togas - Television Tropes & Idioms

Hi, and welcome to the future. San Dimas, California, 2688. And I'm telling you, everything is great. The air is clean. The water is clean. Even the dirt... is clean. Bowling averages are way up. Mini-golf scores are way down. And we have more excellent waterslides than any other planet we communicate with. I'm telling you, this place is great.
-Rufus, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure

After passing the "big, shiny and sciencey!" period, a highly developed civilization can enter a stage where technology continues to advance, but becomes a lot sleeker and subtler. At the same time, society gets epic. Jumpsuits will start being replaced by togas, robes and such garments, bustling mega-cities by brilliant arcologies. There will be crystals. Lots and lots of crystals. This world of tomorrow may end up looking much like Ancient Greece while still enjoying ultratech comforts. It's kinda like crossing the Bishonen Line, but with entire civilizations instead of single characters.

Any human society with Crystal Spires And Togas holds a high chance of being a utopia; alien races are typically Enlightened. (This is occasionally subverted, with the upper-class in Crystal Spires And Togas, and the plebs having to settle for a Used Future, or even Dystopia). Occasionally they occur in the past, A Long Time Ago In A Galaxy Far Far Away, since decimated by some catastrophe. Sufficiently Advanced Aliens are not the same thing, but as beings who can do anything with no apparent devices, they could be a logical outcome. Thematically it may play opposite number to a society in Medieval Stasis.

The same sense of style permeates other facets of society, not just clothing and architecture. Instead of a president or an assembly, the Minbari are ruled by the Grey Council, the Nibblonians from the Hall of Forever (which also hosts the Feast of a Thousand Hams).

While there's a definite trend towards giant and architecturally impressive glass towers in the modern era, the trope hasn't quite made it to the status of Truth In Television yet — aside from a conspicuous lack of togas, robes, or unisuits, these shiny new buildings aren't part of the sort of sweeping social movement this Trope describes but individual corporations jockeying to display their wealth. Utopian cities they are not; very real slums crowd their feet.

Examples

Anime

Sailor Moon had the Silver Millennium in the distant past and Crystal Tokyo in the distant future.
The space civilizations in the Galaxy Angel games; the first is actually called EDEN.
Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS proposes another stepping stone on the societal evolutionary path. After the Information Age comes...the Magical Age. Midchilda's use of Magic From Technology led to their society phasing out conventional arms (and their nuclear arsenal) and upgrading the entire technology base to magical-tech hybrid systems about 150 years before the series starts.
- According to Fate, who delivers the above backstory via an As You Know to her charges, the Time-Space Administration Bureau also acts as a WMD Oversight Organization for the worlds they monitor (be they nuclear or of the magical Lost Technology sort) as part of their enlightened perspective. They've got the giant spire for a local HQ; the only difference is that they wear trendy uniforms instead of togas.
- Another spooky extension was that during this history lession, we see what are either interplanetary or worse, interdimensional ballistic missiles being launched.
The aliens in Fantastic Children.
Dragon Ball Z, to some degree, has four cities that look like shiny, futuristic metropolises. The upcoming live action film will have these cities set in Santa Fe, Mexico City◊, which looks something like that if and only if the shots are carefully framed, though apparently takes place in the past or an Alternate History (given that there are dinosaurs and such).
The world of gods in Ah My Goddess is this. While at first glance it resembles a stereotypical Olympian heaven, it turns out that it actually relies on massive amounts of Applied Phlebotinum, its inhabitants hold regular jobs and there are even shopping malls (plus plenty of politicking and the occasional doomsday device)
In the anime adaptation of Bokurano, it is implied that one of these is responsible for the robot combats that are destroying universes, gathering the energy gained from them or something-the anime isn't exactly as deep as the manga...

Comic Books

Many depictions of Superman's homeworld of Krypton fit this trope, although unfortunately their usual depictions show they never bothered to develop large scale space travel along with their other technologies...
- Subverted in the 1978 Superman movie and its sequels, and in the Post Crisis DCU: Krypton is all crystals and drapey clothes, but also something of a dystopia. When Superman: Birthright retconned Krypton's society back to the Pre Crisis version, the togas changed back to Space Clothes.
- In the Silver Age, one reason for the lack of space travel was that Krypton's nascent space program was permanently grounded by Krypton's government after criminal scientist Jax-Ur blew up an inhabited moon of Krypton, and was subsequently sentenced to the Phantom Zone.
The story "The Reformers" in Weird Science, 1953, had a perfect utopian place with ultratech elements but several flowing robes and stone arches. Also, it turned out to be Heaven.
ElfQuest pretty much starts out this way, and much of the main storyline involves getting back to the Time Machine (which has a similar atmosphere). Notably, the spires and togas are a present day invention by an advanced alien race, but become the future when everyone is sent back 10,000 years in time halfway through the opening narration.
When Skynet is erased from history at the end of Robocop Vs Terminator, the new future heavily resembles this trope.
In the first color Zot story arc, the future utopian version of Sirius seen through the Door at the Edge of the Universe includes togas and hi-tech faux-classical architecture.
The milespires of Magnus Robot Fighter are arguably a deconstruction of this trope. The upper class at the top of the spires are enlightened psychics in togas who have become decadent and slothful, protected by a Master Computer, while the radicals on the lower levels live in a Used Future.

Film

Bill And Teds Excellent Adventure, with totally excellent music to boot.
Subverted in Logans Run; while the post-apocalyptic society of the film is at first glance a utopia, its prosperity is maintained by a fascist government that ritually executes all citizens on their 30th birthday in order to conserve resources. Those who manage to escape this fate and flee the city are invariably captured by a deranged robot who freeze-dries them in the belief that they are seafood.
- And in the book, the age is 21. Adaptation Decay.
  - Or perhaps because 21 is ridiculously low?
  - Indeed, but the book is a hysterical (in both senses of the word) ephibophobic Author Tract about the supposed evils of the 1960s (drugs, free love, uppity baby-boom youngsters etc.).
  - They changed it to 30 for the film because they felt it would be too hard too cast if no one could look over 21. And a few characters ages are questionable at best. Particularily Peter Ustinov.
In 1973's Godzilla vs. Megalon, the inhabitants of Seatopia are an advanced undersea civilization (who are rather P.O.'d at the testing of nukes near them and send out their monster for revenge) where the toga seems the most commonly worn clothing.
Star Wars of course. The Jedi dress in long, hooded robes, and are fashioned after monks. The senators, politicians, and rich people in general wear long robes that are ornate and colorful. Everyday guys typically wear strange fashions as well, for example Han Solo dresses similar to a wild west gunslinger. Fighter pilots wore jumpsuits for practical reasons though. Most cities have the Cyrstal Spire part, especially Coruscant, but Naboo has it as well.
- That's just the upper levels of society, though. The middle class lives in a Used Future, and the lower class (including the poor, and, in The Empire, the non-humans) has dystopia. This is much more apparent in the Star Wars Expanded Universe than in the movies, but hints can be seen on Tatooine.
At the tram station in Star Trek The Motion Picture, most of the civilians in the background are wearing togas.
The HG Wells-written film Things to Come fits this trope to a T. The future technocrats literally live in crystal spires and wear togas.
Subverted in the Soviet film Kin-Dza-Dza, where the toga people specialize in turning less-developed aliens into cacti.
- Only those that invade their space and "less-developed" in this case means, for the most part, greedy, completely immoral and genocidal. Oh, and the toga people are actually preventing said "less-developed aliens" from invading Earth. So, once you cut the liberalistic crap, that's double subversion to me.

Literature

Probably a shipload of ancient pulp scifi that we can't name. Heck, the good aliens wore togas in the 1930s Lensman series that started Space Opera!
- Note that all of the clothing that the good aliens (the Arisians) wore, in fact the bodies and cities and everything else about the Arisians, was a mental projection which was intended to fit whatever made the visitor to Arisia most comfortable. This point was made explicitly in chapter 3 of "First Lensman", where all of the people saw different things: aliens in togas, male humans in uniform, professors at large universities, 7 foot tall women, disembodied intelligences, etc. There are references to it in the rest of the books when the fellow aliens (Tregonsee, Worsel, Nadreck, etc) briefly discuss their experience on Arisia. They even use the mental projection trick to fool Kim Kinnison into "seeing" one of the forms of the bad aliens, so when he beats one of them (Gharlane of Eddore) he thinks it was a rogue Arisian. The children of the Lens do realize that the Arisians have no physical form at all.
You can go back a generation or two from space opera if you include, say, Swedenborgianism, which was officially a religion... philosophy? anthroposophy? Anyway, an international movement with a lot of purple prose about how the higher spirits live/have lived/will live among Crystals and Spires, literally, and how they want us to live there too.
William Gibson's short story "The Gernsback Continuum" is about a photographer who, while on commission to shoot some old Fifties-art-deco buildings (all magnificent examples of Zeerust), suddenly begins to see glimpses of an alternate reality that contains all the weird architecture, drapery clothing, and amazing technical advances predicted by the pulp-SF writers of the 1920s-1950s. Gibson actually specifies that the alternate-Earth dress code includes a toga. Gibson states in various places that it is meant as a deconstruction of this trope.
Many of Arthur C Clarke's short stories imagined this as the ideal civilisation. One of his earliest (Rescue Party) supposed that the replacement of the car with the personal helicopter would eliminate the need for cities and "decentralise" civilisation.
- The "helicopters decentralise civilization" idea popped up in several Clarke stories during that period. Clarke didn't foresee that flying a helicopter would be harder and more expensive than driving a car, to the point where not everyone can do it.
  - Come to that, not everyone can drive a car... The "civilisation decentralised" idea also crops up in Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination / Tyger, Tyger, where "jaunting" (teleporting without a teleporter, pretty much) means you can live anywhere on earth and still be able to get to work perfectly conveniently. It's not exactly an utopian future, though.
  - Cars or helicopters, there are still logistics considerations. As Larry Niven wrote about in Flash Crowd, the Final Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Club, and another short(murder mystery) the title of which I can't recall, the most straightforward way to achieve societal decentralization is teleportation tech.
- In "Against the Fall of Night"/The City and the Stars, the city of Diaspar is a classic example of this trope.
- Arthur C. Clarke's "How We Went to Mars" (1938) plays this trope for humour.
The Martians in Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles. Most of the elements seem like a fantastic version of Egypt, with books written in hieroglyphs that sing when you touch them, houses built of crystal pillars and traveling using flocks of birds, all in the middle of a great desert.
Doubly subverted in arguably the most chilling scene of James Blish's very dark The Day After Judgement (a.k.a. the second half of The Devil's Day). The End Of The World As We Know It has taken place. God, it turns out, really did die. Satan (who is not so bad shows a viewpoint character the Crystal Spires And Togas future which would have come about had he not destroyed everything and then reveals that compared to such a soul-less living death, the Apocalypse would seem preferable.
The homeworld of the Piersons' Puppeteers in Larry Niven's Known Space setting.
The Vampire Hunter D novels mention a rare example of a post-Crystal Spires and Togas Used Future: the capital city, built out of crystal by the Vampires and then fallen into disrepair once they were driven out.
- Indeed, they were Crystal Spires And Togas with a goth twist. All the major vampire buildings resemble gigantic gothic cathedrals and gloomy castles straight out of Victorian horror novels, while the vampires themselves prefer to dress in elaborate evening suits and long flowing capes, which they enjoy twisting into bat's wings.
In Animorphs, the Pemalites and Iskoort are both examples of this trope, with their playful societies and fanciful architecture. The Andalites, too, have given up the habit of living in cities in favor of a natural lifestyle on the open plains, without losing any of their great technological skill.
- It should be noted that the Pemalites were designed by God, aka The Ellimist, to be that way. The Iskoort have architecture that's more like legos and they have spires because the ground is generally too marshy to build on. The Andalites had cities, but because they're basically herd animals, they hated them.
A Tale Of Time City by Diana Wynne Jones. Statues, glass domes, technology which looks like 'a pipe organ' and the caskets (which are actually some kind of advanced time-battery-thing), amongst others. The people wear jumpsuits most of the time, but robes are donned for official functions.
The interex in Warhammer 40000: Horus Rising.
DJ Mac Hale's The Pendragon Adventure has the "closer to nature" future version of Earth, Third Earth. But of course it gets completely and utterly screwed over by our resident Magnificent Bastard and becomes a Crapsack World.
Subverted in H. G. Wells' The Time Machine in which the Eloi seem to live in this kind of future but are actually little more than sentient (barely) cattle for their underground dwelling Morlock masters.

Live Action TV

The Minbari in Babylon 5.
- The Utopian and Enlightened bit of this trope gets subverted hard in the 4th season, when they fall into Civil War.
The MST 3 K experiment Warrior of the Lost World featured a Dystopian world in which lived a group of toga-wearing "enlightened ones". They had healing powers and lived in a pocket dimension from which they battled an oppressive totalitarian government that had taken over the world.
The Time Lords represented a civilization of this type; the trope was subverted in a couple of ways. Even their first appearance, which shows them highly advanced and almost utopian, establishes their civilization as so boring and pompous that the Doctor couldn't wait to run away from them. Later appearances often, though not always, revealed them as corrupt, petty and hypocritical. So it's probably not so bad that they had a cosmic bridge dropped on them in the new series.
Subverted in the 2007 Flash Gordon series, where Mongo's capital, Nascent City, is all crystal spires and togas, while the rest of the planet is a post-environmental-catastrophe Scavenger World.
- This is a possible rip-off of The Cloud Minders from the third season of Star Trek The Original Series, where the Startoses had artists and scholars living in a shiny clean floating city in the clouds, while the Troglytes did all the hard labor in the mines below.
- This in turn is a nod to the Eloi and Morlocks in H.G. Wells' Time Machine (1895). Only in this case, the bestial Morlocks hunted and ate the childlike and pastoral Eloi, and the Morlocks had all the technology and weapons while the Eloi had degenerated into barely intelligent humanoids who knew no technology at all.
The Beings of Light and their Ships of Lights in Battlestar Galactica have this feel to them.
The Ancient race in the Stargate television series, especially Stargate: Atlantis, are an example of a crystal spires and togas race which has "ascended" to a higher plane, leaving their crystal city (actually a spaceship the size of Manhattan) deserted.
- They are not the only one. Almost everyone, the Goa'uld (And the Tok'ra), the Tollans, the Asgard, later even the humans use crystal-based technology.
The inner Alliance worlds of Firefly are Crystal Spires and Costume Straight From The British Regency for the rich, and a very Used Future below.
In an episode of Red Dwarf where the lads got split up into a good and an evil part, the good version was portrayed like this.
In the Blackadder special Back And Forth, Blackadder visits a future world that matches this trope.
The Australian kids' TV show The Girl From Tomorrow featured a future like this.

Tabletop Games

Crops up in Warhammer 40000 in the form of the Tau and Eldar. The more "enlightened" humans tend towards Crystal Spires And Power Armour. Also, in the Imperial Hive Cities, the aristocracy lives in total luxury and comfort - while everyone else gets the mind-crushing dystopia.
As usual, Atlantis in {{Mage: The Awakening}} is often shown as a crystal spire city. They even swear its name means "The Dragon Spire".
- This is a well-established Aesthetic known as 'Crystal Future' in Genius The Transgression, for Geniuses who work towards this vision of the future. However, a lot of this use it ironically these days, and it has a somewhat sinister reputation as it was popular with the Secret Masters of Lemuria before their demise.

Video Games

Neo Arcadia in Mega Man Zero, complete with Doric columns. Actually a False Eden, while the inevitable resistance is on a Used Future level.
Galactic Civilizations 2, in the past. Only one character is shown, but he has a white robe and a staff.
Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri. Space elevators, matter transmitters and the like are built in a standard scifi fashion, but telepathy is eventually done in shrines and ascension to posthumanity apparently by monks.
The Aeon Illuminate of Supreme Commander was founded by a group of human colonists who landed on a planet already inhabited by an alien race that embraced this trope. The aliens were annihilated by nuclear and biological warfare on the party of humanity, but the remaining colonists adopted the aliens' religion and technology as their own. The Aeon universally wear robes, are lead by a Princess, use all manner of advanced and esoteric weapons (ranging from sonic weapons on low-end units to massive 'oblivion cannons', death rays mounted on flying aircraft carriers, and giant robots with death rays for heads and tractor beams for arms), and have a universal design philosophy of sleek, shiny, and silver with their vehicles and buildings.
Atlantis in the Ecco The Dolphin: Defender of the Future fits this trope (especially the crystal part), existing in a civilization around the year 3500 in which humans and dolphins coexist in harmony.
The nation of Esthar in Final Fantasy VIII, which is actually a gigantic (and initially invisible) city, is all crystal and glass tubes and antigravity technology. Even the people (save its president) wear ankle-length robes.
While the entire nation of the D'ni in the Myst series was - probably - bereft of togas, their technology and archaeology almost definitely falls into this situation. Plus, they sowed the seeds of their own destruction, and whatnot.
Subverted in Eve Online. The Crystal Boulevard on Gallente Prime is a street where every building, and even the street, is made out of crystal. Its actual purpose? A nigh-invulnerable command bunker for the government and military in case of planetary bombardment.)
Lemuria in Golden Sun II: The Lost Age. Togas, Greek Temples, and the whole thing, all powered by magic...er...Psynergy. This lost civilization even discovered immortality, only to realize that life got really, really boring after a few hundred years.
This is somewhat present in the elven architecture in Worldof Warcraft.
- Night Elves have a lot of greek style columns and spires and their racial leader changed from a Stripperific warrior getup in War Craft III to a toga-ish dress.
- Meanwhile, Blood Elves have even taller spires and crystals everywhere (although the crystals tend to have creepy looking evil eyes staring out from them) with magical doodads all over the place.
Chrono Trigger has the Kingdom of Zeal, which is located on a Floating Continent to boot. All its awesome crystalness and toganess is due to extracting energy from an otherworldly world-devourer.
The Metroid universe has the Chozo, an advanced race of terrestial birds who eventually became so intelligent they developed telepathic abilities. After their technology reached its peak most of them chose to become space hippies, living in harmony with nature where they could seek greater spiritual enlightenment. Most of the ruins they left behind are made stone and what little advanced technology there is seems to be designed to blend in with the surroundings.
- Or in the case of Elysia, a very pretty retro Steampunk design.

Web Comics

In A Miracle Of Science, the enlightened Martian civilization fits this trope to the T, making it stand out a lot from Earth's Twenty Minutes Into The Future state, and the Used Future of terraformed Venus.
According to Dresden Codak, this happened in Maralinga, in 1956
Quellar in Starslip.
This seems to be the case in Las Lindas, due to the efficiency of nanotechnology.

Western Animation

The Nibblonians in Futurama did use jumpsuits and conventional tech, but their leaders had impressive robes and monoliths.
New Olympus in Gargoyles has elements of this.

Real Life

Puerta de Hierro◊, a neighborhood in northwestern Guadalajara, Mexico, is a place full of sleek, shiny, brand-new residential high rises, some of them still under construction as of 2008; unlike Santa Fe in Mexico City, though, Urban Segregation makes careful framing unnecessary, as Puerta de Hierro lies in the middle of an area packed with ridiculous amounts of rich, posh neighborhoods.
Another real world example: Vancouver, Canada.◊
- Being from Vancouver, this troper was more than a little surprised to find it included on this page. We're all a bit odd out there, but togas have not featured prominently in daily life, at least so far. The Crystal Spires (sorta) I'll grant you.
- Don't forget Hong Kong. Not many togas outside of certain clubs, but do a Google of "Hong Kong" and an Image search, and you'll find the futuristic Crystal Spires all over the bleedin' place. Especially this one◊.
- Don't forget New York City.
  - Being from the city, this troper would argue that New York is actually a complete aversion of the trope. Yes there are a few crystal spires, but the city's architecture is haphazard at best, with plenty of rundown and abandoned warehouses (mostly in the outer boroughs). The city itself is dirty and rats are common sights on the subway. Of course where you do see crystal spires, it's inhabited almost-entirely by the upper class and some of the low income housing projects border on Dystopia
This image of a future Qatar by Bladerunner concept artist Syd Mead.
This troper once passed through Baltimore on a road trip, and there was a freakin' road...in the sky! I've been told the rest of Baltimore sucks, though.
- This native Baltimorean is surprised that the 895 overpasses got a mention, but to hammer how bad it is, he first thought of the 70/695 ramps, which are a lot smaller but are basically for on/off ramps stacked one on top of the other. To give his fellow tropers and idea, the 895 ramps can get high enough to be almost level with Raven's Stadium's upper sections. The National Aquarium are three big glass buildings in large pyramid shapes and may also count. Sadly, the city does suck.
- Though, to go with the crime-ridden murderhole there are a number of colleges to provide drunken toga-wearing frat boys. See? Got it all.
One Word: Dubai◊.
Jacksonville, Florida, if one sees it entirely from I-95.
They're solitaires in a much less impressive skyline, but both the Ryugyong Hotel and the Tower of Juche Idea in Pyongyang should qualify.
- Especially now, as Ryogyong Hotel is finally being completed after 16-years freeze. It's still unknown, though, whether it would be ever used as hotel, as its structure was reportedly pretty shoddy even before the funds ran out, allegedly due to substandard materials, and 17 years of standing open to elements did little good to exposed concrete. So the whole thing is a pretty brutal Deconstruction.
Behold the Petronas Towers◊ in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (The World's tallest building between 1998 and 2004) and the traditional clothing styles of the inhabitants. Troperiffic.