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.