mahiwaga

Odd that parts of The Octopus by Frank Norris (sighted on makeweight) makes me think immediately of The Iron Council by China Miéville, although I suppose this is not surprising considering Miéville’s political sympathies and literary background.

Interesting that the train is such an omnipresent object, both concretely and abstractly, inhabiting all sorts of spheres of thought. My mind strays to the prominence it has in various works of anime such as Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away” (and again, the railroad crossing tracks that are flooded seem to be a recurrent symbol that I’ve run across multiple times in my life—this particular manifestation is echoed in the Japanese-flavored cRPG Final Fantasy VIII where one of the opening scenes involves taking a train that crosses over wide expanses of water. The other thing it makes me think of is Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle—or maybe it was The Hammer of God by Arthur C. Clarke—I get my asteroids/comets-crashing-into-Earth stories mixed up a lot. Anyway, there is a scene where the entire Central Valley of California (the San Joaquin Valley) is completely flooded, and the only way to really traverse it is to follow the railroad tracks that are still above water. Bizarrely, when I was in elementary school, long before I read either of these books, I had a dream mimicking this exact scene, where I had to get up to the Bay Area following flooded railroad tracks. Even more bizarrely, the dream had a soundtrack to it: “Moonlight Dancing” by Julio Iglesias. Yes I was a warped child. And things like this make me think we really live in a static four-dimensional world that is made dynamic and three-dimensional by an illusion fomented by the mind. It is only in dreams that we can somehow escape the linearity of it all, remembering things that haven’t happened yet. Anyway.)

Then, of course, there is Disneyland itself, literally encircled by two very different types of train: one firmly ensconced in the imagery of the by-gone era of Industrial Revolution, wrought by iron and steam, the train that encircles Disneyland and takes you to the different realms of abstraction: Main Street, Tomorrowland, Fantasyland, Frontierland, Adventureland. The other is the retro-futuristic monorail, which used to be something you rode on because you were tired of waiting in line for everything else, unless you happened to stay at the Disneyland Hotel, which tends to be almost never if you happen to live in Southern California. (And now I have the Monorail song from “The Simpsons” in my head.)

Sadly, Miéville has beaten me soundly to the punch with regards to publishing a book based on a steam-punk fantasy world. I had been initially inspired in 1997 by both Final Fantasy VII and my second trip to New York City. Final Fantasy VII features the techno-dystopian city of Midgar controlled by a ruthless evil corporation armed with ultra-futuristic weaponry trying to maintain oppressive control over a countryside that is riddled with fantastic creatures and infused with magic. The very first scene involves an old-school looking train arriving at the faux-Victorian (or perhaps, neo-Victorian) station in Midgar. And the following scenes involve travelling on a more grungy, more contemporary looking subway and elevated train.

In retrospect, I’m not so sure that Final Fantasy VII really fits the term steam-punk, at least if you use the older, stricter definition (fiction set in the Victorian era, except that technological advances arrived much earlier, and something akin to a Turing/von Neumann style computer would already be in existence.) FF7 does fit the subgenre definition of fantasy steampunk, with its juxtaposition of advanced technology existing alongside magic. (Final Fantasy VI also does this, but I guess my mind wasn’t developed enough and attuned to appreciate this sensibility at the time I played it.)

But what really captured my imagination was my trip to NYC that summer. Since that trip, I have come to reify NYC as the American equivalent of Rome—all roads lead to it. In many ways, it really is the cultural capital of our nation. It becomes an exemplar simply because it is the largest city in our nation—all cities become based on and compared to NYC somehow. And even though I grew up in (at least what is now) the second largest city in the nation (to continue the Roman paradigm, I think of L.A. as the American equivalent of Byzantium/Constantinople, which is fitting. Just as Byzantium was originally a Greek city until the Greeks became assimilated into the Roman Empire, L.A. was a Spanish and then a Mexican city until California became part of the U.S.), L.A. is such an alien place when compared to NYC, other cities on the Eastern Seaboard, and Chicago (which is still fittingly thought of as the Second City. Again to continue the Roman paradigm, Chicago is the American equivalent of Ravenna, which became the second Western Roman capital late in the Empire.)

Here, the Roman paradigm comes in handy for me. (Although I suppose it is worthless and confusing if you aren’t familiar with the history of the Roman Empire.) Whereas Byzantium is sort of (or at least has the reputation of being) an alien city, Ravenna is prototyped on Rome itself. In the same way, L.A. is quite alien when compared to NYC, but Chicago seems quite obviously patterned after NYC itself. (Still, analogies always tend to break down. It becomes apparent that just as Chicago inherits a lot from NYC, L.A. nevertheless inherits much from Chicago, namely suburban sprawl and de facto geographic segregation, something that seems implausible in the absurd density of NYC, at least in Manhattan.)

Anyway, I have come to think of NYC as the exemplar of the American city (nevermind that most of the newer cities are in fact patterned more after L.A. than NYC—just have a look at all those sunbelt cities. I swear they are more L.A. than L.A. itself, with their nauseatingly sprawled out, out-of-control tract housing and big box commercial regions and their thousands of miles of disgustingly congested freeways.) L.A., despite having existed since 1781 (and much, much earlier than that as the Tongvan village of Yangna, prophetically known as the Place of Smoke), always has this veneer of being no more than 20-30 years old, something that is facilitated in a sustained fashion by Hollywood, which tries to peddle this illusion of agelessness. However, the movie studios have also been aided and abetted by downtown building owners and developers who are hell-bent on perpetually bulldozing the city to build and rebuild. One of the most tragic of these is probably the destruction of the lively neighborhood of Bunker Hill to create the somewhat sterile and notably depopulated Central Business District. Another that comes to mind is the destruction of the community of Chavez Ravine to make way for Dodger Stadium. And then there are all those communities that have been vivisected and mutilated by the freeways. But this constant reinvention was something that I definitely grew up with and these build-tear down-rebuild cycles would occur in real-time. First they bulldozed sites to create strip malls, and now they are razing buildings to build condos and arcology-like residential/commercial complexes (see, for example, the Paseo Colorado in Pasadena.) And while this is probably not unfamiliar to most city dwellers, and seems to be the normal pattern of gentrification, I can’t but help feel that the pace is accelerated in L.A. There are no old buildings here, because even the old buildings get remade from time to time (witness the remodeling of City Hall and Union Station, for example.) L.A. feels like a city that is desperate to forget its history.

In contrast, despite the waves of gentrification, NYC holds tightly to its history. Never mind just the architecture, graced by titanic buildings built in the Gilded Age of the 1920’s and in the wake of Carnegie’s (and Bessemer’s) Steel Revolution. It seems that most of American History can be viewed through the lens of New York, starting with its pivotal role in the American War for Independence, and continuing onward to the Civil War, the World Wars, the social unrest and revolution of the 1960’s, the era of greed embodied in Wall Street in the 1980’s, winding all the way through September 11, 2001, horrifically underscoring the fact that NYC is in many ways not only a symbol, but the supreme representation, of our nation, something understood very well by our enemies. Each of these eras have left their own specific mark on the city, and at times I felt like all these eras existed simultaneously in the same place.

Tying together T.S. Eliot’s evocation of Unreal City in “The Wasteland,” with NYC and Midgar seemed to naturally evolve into a steam-punkish city which in retrospect is very similar to Miéville’s New Crobuzon. What sort of cemented this imagery was my trip in 1999 to Manila. Now I had been to Manila in 1995 and 1997 as well, but it wasn’t until I could compare and contrast Manila with NYC in my mind that I came to a deeper, but more abstract, understanding of what a city is. A city is an organism, a self-contained ecosystem, the basis of modern nations. It is no accident that the etymology of the word “civilization” leads one quickly to the word “city.” Without cities, there is no civilization, almost by definition.

What I have been enamoured with the most, however, are a city’s circulatory system: roads and rails. I have always been obsessed with roads and its polymorphisms: freeways, highways, boulevards, avenues, streets, parkways, drives, courts, places, and even caminos, avenidas, and calles. You can ask my parents the insane degree to which I have been obsessed with them, even as a small child. If I had known such a profession existed, I probably would’ve become a transportation engineer. Truth be told, it really wasn’t until I visited NYC that rails captured my imagination. Sure, I was a big fan of BART when I lived in the Bay Area, but it certainly didn’t have the 24 hour dependability that the NYC subway does. (OK, 24 hour dependability is perhaps absurd hyperbole, but the fact of the matter is that I once got stranded in Oakland at 10 pm on a Friday night because I didn’t make it to the BART station in time. In contrast, while it did take me 3 hours to get from Brooklyn to Queens, I was nevertheless able to at least attempt such a ridiculous journey at 3:30 am.) Once I got a taste of the ultra-mobility afforded by the NYC subway system, I was hooked. Here was a system that was more efficient than driving (and maybe you have to be an Angeleno to understand the profundity of this statement. Just let it be said that most Angelenos consider their car more as an extension of their body, like an exoskeleton, rather than as a mere conveyance.) I’ve foolishly braved the light-rail transit in Manila, have depended greatly on the CTA in Chicago (more colloquially known as “the El”), and have even traversed the anemic (but hopeful) railways of L.A. And one of my favorite pleasures is the train ride from Union Station in L.A. to San Diego, which is a thousand times more enjoyable than driving down the morass known as Interstate 5.

So the imaginary cities of Mieris Amiras and Cantral Araban were born, both of them sporting subway and elevated railways amidst a ruined medieval-style city and a bustling imperial Roman-style city, respectively.

Another concept that definitely informed my conception of the imaginary city of Cantral Araban is the metropole-province axis, which is basically the dialectic between the central city of a region and the surrounding countryside. This dialectic is especially characteristic of ex-colonies. I learned about this paradigm from Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson, which was one of the required texts in the Southeast Asian Studies survey class I took as an undergrad, and analyzing Manila through this particular lens was very enlightening.

Both my parents are provincianos, my mom from Ilocos Norte in the north of the Philippines, and my dad from Leyte in the southeast of the Philippines, and the paradigm of the metropole vs the province gave me added insight to their stories of alienation during their respective times in Manila. (They actually didn’t meet each other until they were both in the U.S., though.)

Multiple trips to Ilocos Norte, and indeed, trips to more remote regions like Romblon illustrated to me the dichotomy inherent in this paradigm. Manila shares a culture that is characteristic of any major cosmopolitan city, and in my mind Manila has more in common with NYC than it does with other parts of the Philippines. There is, along with this culture, a sense of superiority in the metropole that sort of poisons its relationship with the rest of the country (and I think that maybe Redstaters can understand this in their own perceptions of NYC.)

But the thing that is most striking about a metropole in a developing nation like the Philippines is the technological dichotomy between the metropole and the provinces. In some provinces, running water and paved roads are unheard of luxuries. In contrast, in Manila, it is quite possible to live entirely almost as if you were still in the United States.

I remember in Final Fantasy VII, one of the things that I found kind of haunting was the fact that Midgar had all the accoutrements of a modern (if not futuristic) city, including superhighways and railways. However, none of these amenities really existed outside of the city. One of the scenes that intrigued me was when the main characters escaped the city by taking one of the superhighways to the city edge. However, the highway didn’t actually leave the city, and actually remained unconstructed outside of the bounds of Midgar itself, so the characters were forced to jump off the unfinished highway into the void beyond. Having lived in the U.S. all my life, this was hard to comprehend as realistic, since the entire nation is crisscrossed with railways, and the interstate highway system ties together every city in the lower 48. But then I think about Manila and how the only freeways (at least in 1999) were the ones that led north of the city and south of the city, and how both terminated only a few miles outside the city limits. The northern highway narrowed to a two lane (and sometimes narrower) road that wound itself passed the lahar-strewn fields of Pampanga, north to the Gulf of Lingayen and then along the western coast of Luzon, through rugged terrain, utilizing switchbacks and sometimes unreliable bridges. The southern highway ends in a final half-cloverleaf junction practically at the foot of the mythical Mt. Makiling, leaving you on a narrow road that leads to the hometown of the national hero Jose Rizal.

The provinces are palpably different from the city. While Manila is indeed another world (as all cities, as I’ve said, are their own microcosms), the surrounding countryside is another world yet even more removed from my developed world sensibilities. It is easy to wax poetic about this and romanticize the experience, but I will spare you such naivete.

So the highways of Cantral Araban likewise end before the city limits, turning into simple paved roads that go off into the wild in all directions, leading into lost feudal kingdoms, elven forests, dwarven mines, and wizard’s towers (and all that Tolkienesque drek.)

I definitely don’t have quite as radical an agenda as Miéville does in terms of redefining fantasy. I am still quite enamored with Tolkien’s world-building and language-building proclivities and am loathe to discard such well-worn bricolage. Whereas Miéville achieves an entirely unique sensibility in his Torque-stricken world of Bas-lag, what I really wanted to see was the Fourth or maybe Fifth Age of Middle Earth, like, what happens when Adam Smith comes to Gondor and corporations come into existence. What happens when the steam engine gets invented and someone decides to build a railroad from Minas Tirith to Annúminas? What happens when some humans decide that it isn’t right to kill Orcs because they are sentient beings too? Or when someone comes up with the Dúnedain equivalent of the Magna Carta. What happens when the Gondorian John Locke or the Rohirric Jean Rousseau comes to town? What happens when someone decides that representative government is much better than a hereditary monarchy? (And I find it interesting that fantasies are never written with representative governments or quasi-representative governments like Miéville’s mayorship and parliament, despite the fact that in the real world, Athenian democracy and the Roman Republic long predated the feudal monarchies on which most fantasy worlds are based on.)

So maybe it depends on what exactly you mean by radical.

The other thing I want to explore is the fact that there practically no people of color in the fantasy genre. Why is this important, you ask? Well, better minds than mine have answered this question, and I think it is something worth pursuing. I am not one of those people who think fantasy is only for escape. Speculative fiction—the collective domain inhabited by science fiction, fantasy, and weird fiction (of which Miéville is only one example out of many)—is an interesting metaspace where we can view real world situations without attaching too much cultural baggage. Or, as more often than not, where we end up attaching different kinds of cultural baggage to otherwise real world-like situations. It is by mixing and matching pieces of culture, by atomizing assumptions that we thought were axiomatic, that we can possibly come up with workable protocols by which to approach the problems of race, religion, and class that so plague our modern society, and speculative fiction certainly facilitates this kind of gedanken experiment.