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Strangest cities

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PacalII Since: Jan, 2013
#1: Jan 15th 2013 at 1:31:31 PM

So I wonder what where the strangest ideas for cities you ever read about. I'm talking here more about the architecture and setting. So it could have been a city on the back of a giant whale or inside humongous mushrooms and so on.

Hilhog0 Since: Jan, 2011
#2: Jan 15th 2013 at 1:34:27 PM

I'd say Besźel and Ul Qoma from The City And The City

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Yuanchosaan antic disposition from Australia Since: Jan, 2010
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#3: Jan 15th 2013 at 2:00:58 PM

All of Invisible Cities.

"Doctor Who means never having to say you're kidding." - Bocaj
TamH70 Since: Nov, 2011 Relationship Status: Faithful to 2D
#4: Jan 15th 2013 at 6:40:41 PM

All the cities in Komarr, from the Vorkosigan Saga. All those domes...

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#5: Jan 16th 2013 at 5:56:23 AM

Anything in the New Weird story collection Leviathan 3: Cities. A personal favourite of mine is the city in Stepan Chapman's "The Revenge of the Calico Cat", which is, quite simply, the place where stuffed animals go when they die.

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Zendervai Since: Oct, 2009
#6: Jan 16th 2013 at 9:40:39 AM

I'd have to say the Kalpa from City at the End of Time by Greg Bear. It's a city from a trillion years in the future that is slowly falling to utter chaos and it warps and twists through the book. I don't recommend the book though. Greg Bear spends most of it trying to describe total and complete chaos and failing.

MrShine Since: Jun, 2011 Relationship Status: Hoping Senpai notices me
#7: Jan 16th 2013 at 11:36:23 AM

The city of Ambergris from Jeff Vandermeer's books is pretty damn weird. The main industry is hunting giant squid and a race of mysterious mushroom men live below the city, possibly plotting its destruction. Its not the most outright fantastical city ever, but a lot of elements combine to make it a deeply unsettling place.

Honourable mention to Armada from The Scar. A floating city of stuck-together boats pulled by a giant seabeast from another dimension, part of which is ruled by a vampire mayor. I think it counts.

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#8: Jan 17th 2013 at 12:29:16 PM

The dream city from Neil Gaiman's Sandman. It's the dream archtype of all modern cities, and it's dreaming of people.

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#9: Jan 20th 2013 at 8:03:48 AM

Laputa from Gullivers Travels, the Ur-Trope of flying cities.

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#10: Feb 11th 2013 at 12:32:14 PM

I don't see anything particularly unusual about the Domed cities on Komarr; that's a stock SF element that goes back nearly a century, if not more.

The city of Bellona in Dhalgren is pretty darn weird, though it may not stand out in the overall weirdness of that book.

The city in Farscape that was built in the body of a dead Space Whale was cool-yet-disturbing.

I think we need an honorable mention for the traveling hobo cities that used to be actual Earth cities in Cities in Flight.

There's also the original City Planet, Trantor, from the Foundation series. (If not the ur-example, it is at least the Trope Maker.)

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#11: Jun 29th 2013 at 12:40:03 PM

For one that hasn't been mentioned yet, Ararat in Thunderer is pretty strange. The topography of the city is constantly shifting under the influence of mindless-yet-divine forces of nature. And within the city walls there are actually an infinite number of distinct Ararats which nonetheless blend with each other fluidly - all it takes to transition from one to another is to find the right streets, and most people live in multiple iterations of Ararat at once without realising it. But in some of the stranger versions, the sun is held in the sky by an enormous chain-mailed fist, or is replaced by a great bird whose wings beat out day and night.

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Hodor Cleric of Banjo from Westeros Since: Dec, 1969
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#12: Jun 29th 2013 at 12:46:04 PM

I was going to say New Corbizon, but given the above, it might just be better to say "any City in anything written by China Miéville".

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edgewalker22 Lawful neutral Since: Mar, 2013 Relationship Status: Gay for Big Boss
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#13: Jun 29th 2013 at 6:37:25 PM

Not strictly literature, but Malfeas is pretty dang weird. The city itself is the largest manifestation of a maimed elder god, and is constantly changing and redesigning itself. It exists in multiple layers yet it has a sun (another manifestation of said god-king) and a sky (the stars are demons holding forbidden knowledge slowly burning to death) that are visible from all layers. Then there's the ecosystems, which are other mutilated gods and have personalities of their own.

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#14: Jun 29th 2013 at 9:37:29 PM

''In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city's life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationdhip of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain. From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia's refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing.
They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still farther away.
Thus, when traveling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.''

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MrShine Since: Jun, 2011 Relationship Status: Hoping Senpai notices me
#15: Jun 30th 2013 at 8:50:24 PM

[up]That kind of writing is sort of an example of what i don't like about magical realism. It's shouting so hard "This is deep and meaningful and represents something about the human condition, dammit!" that we're supposed to ignore that it, even as far as fantasy writing goes, is not very interesting or believable.

Zendervai Since: Oct, 2009
#16: Jun 30th 2013 at 9:28:52 PM

That's pretty much the entire chapter. It's an excerpt from Invisible Cities which is pretty much nothing but descriptions of bizarre cities interspersed with odd discussions between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. I've never read anything else like it, and it is well worth the read.

edited 30th Jun '13 9:29:38 PM by Zendervai

Yuanchosaan antic disposition from Australia Since: Jan, 2010
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#17: Jul 1st 2013 at 6:13:06 AM

I would not call Invisible Cities magical realism. I don't know what I would call it, honestly.

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#18: Jul 1st 2013 at 6:24:57 AM

[up] That.

But it's definitely not magical realism, since there's basically no level on which the descriptions of the cities are in any way realistic. Except maybe for the level of the experience of being in the city. Sometimes. And still taken to surreal metaphorical lengths.

One of the cities exists entirely in the relationships its inhabitants imagine developing from chance encounters with strangers but never do. Believability is not really the point.

edited 1st Jul '13 6:32:57 AM by Noaqiyeum

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funden u wot m8 from the maintenance tunnels Since: Oct, 2011 Relationship Status: It's complicated
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#19: Jul 1st 2013 at 8:17:57 AM

I agree with Hodor. Anything Mielville writes is pretty dang weird.

Jhimmibhob Since: Dec, 2010
Zendervai Since: Oct, 2009
#21: Jul 1st 2013 at 9:27:44 AM

China Mieville's Un Lun Dun is extremely odd, but in a um...much more lighthearted way than most of his stories.

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#22: Jul 1st 2013 at 9:48:49 AM

[up][up] I was going to mention that. Yeah...that book was...yeah.

Noaqiyeum we must dissent (it/they) from across the gulf of space (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: Arm chopping is not a love language!
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#23: Jul 1st 2013 at 2:37:15 PM

[up][up][up] I keep forgetting to read that. It sounds like an amazing setting.

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Jhimmibhob Since: Dec, 2010
#24: Jul 5th 2013 at 7:41:48 AM

[up]The books are a fascinating read, and I highly recommend them. Be warned, though: Peake's prose is so ornate that his sentences virtually have gargoyles perching on them. That's exactly my cup of tea, but it's not everybody's.

Also, be prepared for some oddball tonal shifts and weird asides in the third novel (Titus Alone)—the story veers unexpectedly into a kind of proto-steampunk! But Peake was also in the early stages of dementia, and parts of Titus Alone seem to reflect it. Still a good read, but an uneven one.

Peake's Gormenghast books are also one of the all-time great examples of Misaimed Fandom: Peake meant to depict Gormenghast as an unrelieved hellhole and expected readers to sympathize with Titus' itch to escape it. His plan, had he lived longer, ws to write a half-dozen or more Titus novels, most of which wouldn't have even featured the place. Readers, however, usually consider the city and its bizarrely ritualistic mores to be Peake's most fascinating and weirdly appealing creation, and almost wouldn't mind setting up shop there.

edited 5th Jul '13 7:41:56 AM by Jhimmibhob

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#25: Jul 7th 2013 at 8:50:18 PM

The two that jumped to my mind have already been mentioned: the main city in the novel The Thunderer, and the setting of Perdido Street Station. I suppose I'm probably discrediting myself by saying this, but I could not finish either of these books.

Also of note, I think, is the Wolf Tower series. I remember there being lots of cool locales in each of the four books. Does Abarat qualify as well?


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